Israel-Palestine: War or Genocide?—The conflict between Israel and Palestine is still burning. The attack by Hamas on Israel on 7 October last year prompted Israel to take even more brutal action against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The death toll, cited in Time 29/10/2023, reaches over 8000 people with women and minors dominating the number. This number is still increasing as the attack continues. The Israeli tanks and soldiers arrive in Gaza over the weekend as the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announces the “second stage” of the war.
What really happened between Palestine and Israel? Is this really a war? Or is it just a genocide masquerading as a war?
Let us begin by going back to the history of how the Palestine-Israel conflict began. The roots of the conflict between Israel and Palestine go back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the idea put forward by Theodor Herzl in his book The Jewish State was realised by Lord Rothschild, leading up to the first Zionist conference in 1897 to create a state for the Jews. Their aim was to make Palestine, the territory of the Ottoman Empire, their state.
Palestine, which at the time was inhabited by a majority of Arabs, became tense as Jewish immigration to Palestine increased. The aggravation of conditions in Palestine culminated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, issued by the British government during the First World War, in which it expressed its agreement and support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Since then, tensions between the indigenous Palestinian people and the Jewish people have escalated. The turning point in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict began when the United Nations decided in 1947 to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. In 1948, the state of Israel was officially established and around one million Palestinian Arabs were expelled in a mass exodus. This event is known as the Nakba (catastrophe) and is a painful memory for Palestinians. The conflict does not stop with mass evictions. There were several wars between Arabs and Israelis such as the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973 which resulted in the situation of the Palestinian territories changing. This was exacerbated by Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. During this period, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Hamas emerged.
Are these cases then just a case of war or an act of genocide?
According to the casualty figures recorded since 7 October since the Hamas attack, more than 8,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority of them women and children. According to data published by Haaretz, the total number of Israelis killed as of 23 October was 683. Of these, 331 were identified as soldiers and police officers, many of them women. Another 13 were members of the emergency services and the remaining 339 were deemed to be civilians. Although this data is not comprehensive and only roughly covers half of the deaths reported by the Israeli side, almost half of the casualties killed in melee were clearly identified as Israeli combatants.
The data also shows no infants under the age of 0-3 killed, as the Israeli narrative is that many infants are targeted by Palestinian resistance fighters.
This proportion is certainly very different from the data on Palestinian casualties in Israeli attacks over the past two weeks. At least over 8000 people have been killed, including 2,360 children, 1,292 women and more than 18,000 injured. The pictures below shows how much, as 26th October, Palestinian people being the victim of the assault. PRS.
