Middle East:
Netanyahu’s Logic of Death

Jan 6, 2025

This article is translated from the January 3 issue, #2944 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

For nearly fifteen months, the Israeli government has been spreading death across the Middle East. The deadly Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, was the prelude to a deluge of bombs on dozens of towns and villages, tens of thousands of homes, infrastructures and collective buildings in Gaza.

A veritable invasion of soldiers and tanks is taking place in several areas of the region, where the Israeli state wants to assert itself as the primary policeman.

After destroying numerous military bases in Syria, Israeli bombing raids have targeted Houthi-held sites in Yemen since December 26. However, attacks on the population of Gaza have not ceased. They have claimed the lives of over 45,000 men, women and children in Gaza alone, and left hundreds of thousands wounded and homeless. Netanyahu and the Israeli General Staff continue what they call “a siege within a siege”, driving out all Palestinian life in the north of the territory, turning it into a no-man’s-land under their control.

The latest ignominy was the outright destruction, on December 27, of the Kamal-Adwan hospital in the Beit Lahiya area, a few kilometers from Gaza’s northern border. Dozens of seriously injured people had to be evacuated as best they could after the army dropped warning leaflets. According to the WHO, sixty staff and twenty-five patients are in critical condition. A number of medical staff have been arrested—as has the doctor in charge of the hospital, Dr. Hossam Abou Safiya—accused of being “Hamas terrorists” operating from a “command center.” All that remains of the so-called “center” are ruins, having been burnt down by Netanyahu’s troops.

On two previous occasions, in November 2023 and October 2024, the Al-Shifa hospital, once the largest in the territory, was completely destroyed by the Israeli army. The Indonesian hospital, the only one still standing in the north, no longer has sufficient equipment to treat the wounded. Through this systematic destruction of the health system, the Israeli government has decreed a death sentence for the people of Gaza, while the survivors try to resist despite the famine, lack of water, care and shelter deliberately provoked by state terrorism and the obstruction of humanitarian aid.

An entire people is being systematically massacred in this way, with the complete support of U.S. imperialism which sponsors Netanyahu’s regime.