As Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza accelerates, its lies fall away and the West’s so-called humanitarian values are revealed as meaningless.

Lord of the Flies – by Mr. Fish.
This is the last chapter of the genocide.
It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza.
No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity.
Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.
The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies.
The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas.
The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially bobby trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops.
The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties.
The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material.
The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.”
The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.
Mass Starvation
Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes.
What comes now is mass starvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets.
Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.
Israel’s message is unequivocal: Gaza will be uninhabitable. Leave or die.
Since Tuesday, when Israel broke the ceasefire with heavy bombing, to Sunday, over 700 Palestinians were killed, including 200 children. In one 24-hour period 400 Palestinians were slaughtered. This is only the start.
No Western power, including the United States, which provides the weapons for the genocide, intends to stop it. The images from Gaza during the nearly sixteen months of incessant attacks were awful. But what is coming now will be worse.
It will rival the most atrocious war crimes of the twentieth century, including the mass starvation, wholesale slaughter and leveling of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 by the Nazis.
Oct. 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.
What we are witnessing is the historical equivalent of the moment triggered by the annihilation of some 200 soldiers led by George Armstrong Custer in June 1876 at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
After that humiliating defeat, Native Americans were slated to be killed with the remnants forced into prisoner of war camps, later named reservations, where thousands died of disease, lived under the merciless gaze of their armed occupiers and fell into a life of immiseration and despair.
Expect the same for the Palestinians in Gaza, dumped, I suspect, in one of the world’s hellholes and forgotten.
“Gaza residents, this is your final warning,” Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz threatened:
“The first Sinwar destroyed Gaza and the second Sinwar will completely destroy it. The Air Force strikes against Hamas terrorists were just the first step. It will become much more difficult and you will pay the full price. The evacuation of the population from the combat zones will soon begin again… Return the hostages and remove Hamas and other options will open for you, including leaving for other places in the world for those who want to. The alternative is absolute destruction.”
The ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was designed to be implemented in three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, would see an end to hostilities. Hamas would release 33 Israeli hostages who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023 — including women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses — in exchange for upwards of 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children imprisoned by Israel (around 1,900 Palestinian captives have been released by Israel as of March 18).
Hamas has released a total of 147 hostages, of whom eight were dead. Israel says there are 59 Israelis still being held by Hamas, 35 of whom Israel believes are deceased.
The Israeli army would pull back from populated areas of Gaza on the first day of the ceasefire. On the seventh day, displaced Palestinians would be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel would allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.
The second phase, which was expected to be negotiated on the 16th day of the ceasefire, would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel would complete its withdrawal from Gaza maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt. It would surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.
The third phase would see negotiations for a permanent end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza.
Israel habitually signs agreements, including the Camp David Accords and the Oslo Peace Agreement, with timetables and phases. It gets what it wants — in this case the release of the hostages — in the first phase and then violates subsequent phases. This pattern has never been broken.
Israel refused to honor the second phase of the deal. It blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza two weeks ago, violating the agreement. It also killed at least 137 Palestinians during the first phase of the ceasefire, including nine people, — three of them journalists — when Israeli drones attacked a relief team on March 15 in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza

Displaced Palestinians in Gaza on Jan. 29. (Jaber Jehad Badwan, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Israel’s heavy bombing and shelling of Gaza resumed March 18 while most Palestinians were asleep or preparing their suhoor, the meal eaten before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan. Israel will not stop its attacks now, even if the remaining hostages are freed — Israel’s supposed reason for the resumption of the bombing and siege of Gaza.
The Trump White House is cheering on the slaughter. They attack critics of the genocide as “anti-Semites” who should be silenced, criminalized or deported while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel.
Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the inevitable denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal.
Israel’s worst excesses occurred during the wars of 1948 and 1967 when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized, thousands of Palestinians killed and hundreds of thousands were ethnically cleansed. Between these wars, the slow-motion theft of land, murderous assaults and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, continued.
That calibrated dance is over. This is the end. What we are witnessing dwarfs all the historical assaults on Palestinians. Israel’s demented genocidal dream — a Palestinian nightmare — is about to be achieved.
It will forever shatter the myth that we, or any Western nation, respect the rule of law or are the protectors of human rights, democracy and the so-called “virtues” of Western civilization. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
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Views expressed in this interview may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
this:
hxxps://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/03/south-korea-israel-opt-hd-hyundai-machinery-used-in-west-bank-demolitions/
For the average Common Man, history offers grave lessons in hubris and warnings of the self-destruction of a foresight-deficient predatory species allowing itself to predate unabated.
For others, specifically those who have handed down ruling power to ‘family’ for countless generations, history offers only a playbook; a modus operandi for the procurement of grotesque levels of exploited wealth and power simply because they see the Common Man no differently than the Common Man sees the tiny plastic pieces on a board game.
This is not hyperbole. The Common Man has been and is always being deliberately moulded into the literal equivilant to a tiny voiceless plastic piece on a (global) game board, where atrocity is routine because consequence gets placed upon readied, unwitting scapegoats, if at all.
Rocks, sticks, spears, bows, knives, swords, cannons, guns, bombs, missiles, nukes, now AI…this same game has been playing a very long time and we don’t appear to be learning much from the eons of hindsight, except how to more effectively prey.
I know we’re bound to an entropic existence, but it would be nice if we weren’t always trying to speed the process up with such incessant indulgence in our base animal nature.
May Palestine and its people be spared from this despicable holocaust and may sanity and evolved minds prevail.
Chris Hedges’ politics are the politics of despair. If the Palestinian people thought like Hedges does, they would no longer exist. But they DO exist. They will continue to exist.
Israel will go down in history as the bastard child of the Third Reich’s Holocaust. It is beyond redemption of any kind whatsoever. Beyond even human comprehension. And if the Zionist government of Israel tells U.S. citizens that they will be treated as criminals for exposing these crimes, that will not hide them. They will never, ever, be able to hide.
I am torn between thinking this commentary is so impressive I should say something about it and realizing that it is so devastatingly conclusive that there is nothing more to say.
It is an old idea; long realized because it is true: what we allow, we invite. A new term is creeping into the language “surplus population”; Palestinians are surplus population. There are surplus populations in Africa and the far east…and, you can count on it, there are surplus populations in the US and Europe. To ‘Palestine’ a place and a people could become a coined term.
Netanyahu is certainly performing the “danse macabre” by Camille Saint-Saëns.
Mr. Fish’s “Lord of the Flies” depicts the end of the “dance of death”.