On Wednesday, 17th July 2024, I gave the plenary address at a summer school in Exeter College, University of Oxford, on the war in Gaza and future prospects for the Arab-Israeli conflict. To demonstrate the scale of destruction in Gaza by Israeli forces and the difference between the past and the present, I showed several photos from Palestine and particularly Gaza, which illustrate the point.
The State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948. Many of these photos show life in Gaza and other parts of Palestine, from where most inhabitants of the Gaza Strip were ethnically cleansed and sent to the virtual concentration camp in Gaza, before the displacement of the Palestinians during the Nakba or Catastrophe.
The Israeli invasion of Gaza, following HAMAS militants’ terrorist attack on Israel on 7th October, has been the most destructive and deadly onslaught for the Palestinians since the establishment of the State of Israel and the Nakba or Catastrophe that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of two-thirds of the Palestinian population. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, by 19th June 2024, as a result of Israeli forces’ indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza, 37,396 people had been killed and over 87,000 had been wounded, not counting the estimated 10,000 people under the rubble and more than 20,000 unaccounted children.
According to The Lancet, the world’s oldest and most reputable medical journal, “Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population’s inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.”
The report continues: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip.” The relative figures would be over five million people killed in the United Kingdom and over 25 million killed in the United States.
Western governments, mainly the Biden administration, have provided military, economic and diplomatic support for Israel, enabling it to carry out its latest genocide in Gaza. In addition to at least $3.8b of annual military aid to Israel, since the attack by Hamas militants on Israel and Israel’s disproportionate response in Gaza, Israel has received billions of dollars worth of more US weapons.
The Biden administration has sent more than 14,000 bombs weighing 2,000 pounds each to Israel, which have turned most of Gaza into rubble. The total tonnage of bombs that have been dropped on Palestinian civilian infrastructure has been equivalent to more than the destructive power of the two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In a recent article, Annelle Sheline, who resigned from her high-profile post in the State Department in protest against the US’s support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, rang the alarm bell about the scale of destruction in Gaza and what is yet to come.
Initially, she felt relief after her resignation, hoping that her personal self-sacrifice would stop or reduce the scale of US support for genocidal Netanyahu, “But the initial relief of resigning publicly was quickly replaced with despair: Nothing seemed capable of changing unconditional U.S. support for Israel.”
She details the extent of Israeli atrocities in Gaza and warns about greater horrors that await the region: “Coverage of Gaza has described Israel’s genocidal actions as unprecedented: Israel has dropped more tons of explosives than fell on Hamburg, Dresden, and London, combined, in World War II; Israeli attacks have caused the fastest death rate in a twenty-first-century conflict; Israel blocking aid has caused the fastest rate of starvation ever recorded. And yet the Biden administration has made clear that there is nothing that Israel could do that would undermine U.S. support.”
During the past nine months, the Israelis have destroyed practically all hospitals, all schools, all universities, all mosques, all churches and more than 80 per cent of residential units in Gaza, as well as killing the largest number of doctors, nurses, aid workers, teachers, university professors and journalists in any war since the Second World War. Israeli forces have largely destroyed Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including its water, sewage and electricity plants. Israel is also using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, where about 90 per cent of the population has been displaced, many of them repeatedly.
Some photos of Palestine, including Gaza, provide views of Gaza and Palestine before the establishment of Israel, and after the destruction wrought by Israeli forces following the genocide in Gaza. Contrary to the Zionist claim that Palestine was a “land without people for a people without land”, Palestine had existed as a thriving part of the Middle East before the Zionist invasion. At the beginning of the last century, the Jews constituted only about 5% of Palestine’s population, the remaining population being made up mainly of Muslims and Christians who had lived there for centuries.
A French poster in 1898 promoting tourism in Palestine
Palestinian family from Jaffa 1826
A girl from Ramallah, Palestine, 1828
A Palestinian girl collecting olives from Ramallah, 1917
A Palestinian family from Yatta, Hebron District, 1921
A Palestinian girl in traditional dress from Ramallah, 1920s
Palestinian woman with her baby in Ramallah in a traditional embroidered dress, 1920s
A Park in Akka, 1925
A Square in Tal Al-Rabi, Palestine, 1928 (renamed Tel Aviv in 1948)
Lod Airport built by the British near Tel Aviv, 1934 (renamed Ben Gurion Airport)
Jamal Pasha Square, Jaffa, 1935
Haifa train station, Palestine, 1937
View of the Great Mosque of Gaza, the oldest mosque in Gaza dating to the 7th century CE, which was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes
Gaza Beach, Summer 1944
Schoolgirls in Gaza City lining up for class, 2009
Gaza City in 2007
Gaza City Skyline, 2007
A view of Gaza in January 2009
Gaza City in 2018
Aerial view of the Al-Rimal neighbourhood in the centre of the Gaza Strip
University College of Applied Sciences, the largest college in Gaza, destroyed by Israeli bombing
Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital and the Faculty of Medicine
Scenes of destruction, ethnic cleansing and genocide by Israeli forces
Unbelievably, the tonnage of bombs that Israeli forces have dropped on the defenceless, besieged people in the narrow Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, far exceeds the tonnage of bombs dropped on London during the Second World War and is over five times larger than the nuclear bomb that levelled Hiroshima.
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