Weekly Briefing: Looking back at a year of Israeli genocide

I’ve been thinking about last year. I woke up on October 7 to constant phone alerts as our staff posted updates to our internal communication service about what was happening around Gaza. Bleary-eyed, I turned on Al Jazeera and, like many of you reading this, I suspect, couldn’t believe what I was watching unfold. Armed Palestinian resistance fighters were launching a large, multi-front attack on Israeli military installations and settlements surrounding Gaza. Our staff was already working on news articles while we tried to sort out what was going on and what this meant.

It was clear to us early on that the details of what occurred during the October 7 attacks were being manipulated by the Israeli government. Israel and its supporters here in the United States were eagerly accusing Palestinians of committing barbaric acts during the attack. Stories like beheaded babies and systematic rape are often deployed as justifications for war. The United States used similar fabricated stories to drum up support for the first invasion of Iraq and to justify brutal campaigns during the second invasion years later. In the days after October 7, some of these stories were repeated at the highest levels of government around the world. We were one of the first news outlets to publish articles questioning these accounts, many of which turned out to be invented out of thin air. Our reporting played a critical role in the efforts to debunk these lies.

As bad as the Israeli occupation and apartheid are, the truth is I never imagined we would see Israel launch a full genocide like the one being carried out over the last year. Israel has slaughtered over 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza. That number is the official count published by Gaza’s beleaguered Ministry of Health. Human rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher, possibly over 200,000 people. Entire family lines have been wiped out. Officially, just under 100,000 Gazans have been injured, but the real number there is likely many times higher.

I’m incredibly proud of the work our team did during those first weeks of this war. I’m humbled by the amazing and difficult work my colleagues are continuing to do now, one year later. If you haven’t explored the coverage we put together for the one-year mark of this war, please spend some time with it. We have a series of reflections from prominent Palestinian voices looking back at the last year. We have original new reporting that puts the events of the last twelve months in stark context. In the years to come, we will look back on the reporting Mondoweiss staff and contributors did as an essential resource to understand the beginning of the end of Israel’s colonial project.

– Dave Reed, Publisher

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Must read

The beginning of the end of Israel

Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official. We are thrilled to feature him as a new regular contributing writer. In this piece, Craig writes,

The political capital expended by the U.S. empire and the broader West in defense of the slaughter [in Gaza], as well as their global standing and reputation, will never be recouped.

And, almost certainly, this year of cruelty and lawlessness will mark the beginning of the end for the Zionist project in Palestine and, therefore, of the state of Israel as we know it.

Don’t miss these articles

🇵🇸 Tareq Hajjaj filed a story on the Israeli siege of Jabalia and Beit Lahia in northern Gaza. “Jabalia residents who spoke to Mondoweiss say that they have noticed the resistance regroup in the wake of every Israeli invasion of Jabalia. One resident, Raneem Mousa, told Mondoweiss that people know Hamas is rebuilding itself in Jabalia. “We see their work above ground, and we hear their work below ground as well.”

✊ Qassam Muaddi reports on the resurgent resistance in the West Bank village of Beita. “Following a year of rising settler attacks on the people of Beita and the death of Turkish-American activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, the West Bank village is keeping civil resistance alive in the face of the threat of Israeli colonial land grabs.”

🤝 Mitchell Plitnick looks at developments among Arab nations trying to avert a regional war. “In a welcome, but under-reported, development last week, Arab states from the Gulf Cooperation Council reportedly “sought to reassure Iran of their neutrality” in the brewing conflict between Iran and Israel.”

⛽ Michael Arria speaks to the BDS National Committee’s Olivia Katbi about the movement’s boycott campaign against Chevron. “Chevron has been the main international actor extracting fossil gas claimed by Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean since it acquired Noble Energy in 2020. With its extracting activities, Chevron is implicated in Israel’s policy and practice of depriving the Palestinian people of their right to sovereignty over their natural resources.”

🎙️ In an exclusive interview with Mondoweiss, senior Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk discusses Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’s goals and accomplishments, international Palestine solidarity, and what comes next after a year of Israeli genocide in Gaza.

🇵🇸 Qassam Muaddi looks back at a year of Israeli war on the West Bank. “While the genocidal assault on Gaza has claimed the lives of tens of thousands, and according to some estimates, hundreds of thousands, the onslaught in the West Bank has ramped up in the form of displacement, the unprecedented expansion of settlements, rampant settler violence and pogroms, economic warfare, mass incarceration, and the launching of a military offensive on centers of resistance across the West Bank.”