After the genocide, the genocide

US-based academic Saree Makdisi reflects on the all-too-human agony of Gaza.

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‘THE prayers of millions have finally been answered,’ announced Donald Trump at a recent summit in Egypt, where he’d arrived to sign the paperwork for the ceasefire in Gaza. ‘At long last,’ he added, ‘we have peace in the Middle East.’

But what we have isn’t peace. What we have is a continuing genocide, albeit one that has shifted gears and has – for now – moved into the slow lane. Rather than hundreds at a time, it is killing by twos and threes – an obscenity that has coalesced into a new normal. To quote a searing poem published in early November by Fady Joudah: ‘After the genocide, the genocide.’¹

Israel’s US-imposed ‘ceasefire’ in Lebanon offers the blueprint: for the year since Hizballah ceased its attacks on Israeli forces, Israel has continued to fire, sending drones buzzing over Beirut, bombing randomly all over the country, killing hundreds of people, demolishing villages, burning olive trees. Now, in addition to an ongoing siege that shows no signs of abating, something similar seems to be Gaza’s fate as well. Genocides don’t end with ceasefire agreements: they end only with the termination of the conditions that brought them into being and the punishment of those who oversaw and conducted them. So far there is no evidence of a resolution along either of these lines.

It must be said, too, that a ‘peace plan’ dictated to the Palestinians by Israel via its American proxies, which offers no basis for peace, can hardly be called a peace plan at all. A ‘deal’ determined by one side that runs roughshod over the rights and aspirations of the other is no deal at all. When Macron, Starmer, Meloni and other European leaders showed up onstage in Egypt alongside Trump, their recognition of the non-existent ‘State of Palestine’ attained its full, cynical efflorescence. They had defused popular pressure in support of Palestinian rights at home only to sign on to the Trump plan for Gaza, and now that ‘we have peace’ they hope that the looming threat of actually imposing sanctions on Israel might be deferred indefinitely.

It’s true that the Israeli government has provisionally suspended its large-scale bombardment and demolition of Gaza. But at the same time, Israel has stubbornly maintained its siege and continues to restrict aid deliveries urgently needed for a starving people’s very survival, at times blocking them entirely. According to the BBC, Israel has destroyed more than 1,500 buildings since Trump made his grand declaration. ‘We have peace’, because peace for Israel has always meant and will always mean the destruction of Palestinian homes. And of course, the killing has continued.

Day after day, the Israelis have repeatedly bombed or shelled parts of Gaza and have gunned down civilians via dystopian quadcopter sniper drone (one of the clever, high-tech inventions in which the country takes such pride). Hundreds of people have been killed since this so-called ceasefire went into effect, including men, women and children who venture too close to the arbitrary and invisible line – deep inside Gaza – beyond which the Israelis have temporarily withdrawn their forces. The offence for which those people were ‘neutralised’, as the Israeli army puts it? Trying to return to the ruins of their homes. They join the uncounted multitude of fellow Palestinians killed by Israel since 1948 for the same crime: a crime so existentially threatening to the very premise of the settler-colonial state that constant killing is its only remedy.

‘Torture camps’

In exchange for the remaining Israeli prisoners held by Hamas, hundreds of Palestinians held hostage by the state have been returned – a negotiated trade that could have taken place two years ago without the intervening agony. The agony of Gaza, however, was the point. The exchange of prisoners was merely a sideshow to the main event of displacement, destruction and death that began long before there were prisoners to exchange. It is a regime that will continue, in one form or another, long after they’ve returned home.

Of those Palestinians recently set free, only a small minority had ever faced a hearing in Israel’s capricious system of military injustice, and most of those were immediately – and illegally – banished into permanent exile from their homeland. Compounding punishment on punishment, their reunion with their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives and children has now been deferred across borders that neither the former prisoners nor their family members can cross without permission – permission that is rarely granted, and even then generally only in one direction.

As the Western media and politicians breathlessly celebrated the return of the final Israeli prisoners, a number of them soldiers captured in combat, Israel began returning hundreds of captives it had snatched from Gaza over the previous two years and held in abominable conditions ever since. Having released some 2,000 people, Israel still holds around 9,000 Palestinian men, women and children in captivity, hostages for a future day. (It feels almost banal to observe that any Palestinian in the West Bank can be kidnapped by Israeli forces at any moment and held indefinitely without ever being charged, let alone tried, so that Israel can effectively replenish its stock of hostages.)

Who are these returned captives? Doctors, nurses, medics, drivers, farmers, pharmacists, healthcare workers, teachers, journalists. They are the men and boys – and a few women – we saw paraded naked and rounded up into trucks by the Israeli army in 2024, driven away to what the Israeli human rights organisation B’tselem has described as the ‘torture camps’ of ‘hell’.

Far too many will never return from those camps; at least 12 captives are known to have been tortured to death there. Most of the bodies released by Israel alongside the surviving captives showed signs of beating and torture. All were bound by shackles on the hands and feet. Almost all had been blindfolded and shot in the head. Some had been run over by Israeli tanks. All were unidentifiable. Each came with a number on a tag attached by the Israelis, but no name. ‘They know the identity of these bodies, but they want the families to suffer even more about these victims,’ one doctor told the Guardian. So far, at least 135 mutilated bodies bearing the marks of torture and close-range execution have been returned.

Adnan al-Bursh, the head of orthopaedic surgery at Shifa Hospital, was captured by Israeli forces in 2023 along with the rest of his medical team after Israeli troops stormed and ransacked Al-Awda Hospital. He was not simply killed in captivity, but because of it: after months of detention and solitary confinement, Israeli guards eventually dumped him, bleeding and naked from the waist down, in the yard of the prison where he was being held. He died soon afterwards. It’s likely that al-Bursh had been ‘raped to death’, as Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, suggested, but since Israel has refused to release his body, this remains unproven. (For years, since long before the Gaza genocide, it has been Israel’s standard practice to hold the bodies of Palestinians it has murdered – including those of children – as bargaining chips, all with the blessing of the high court. Hundreds of bodies remain in its freezers, invariably caked with dried blood and dirt from the streets where they fell.)

What is not unproven, however, are the widespread and authenticated accounts of other cases of torture, sexual abuse and rape coming out of Israel’s prison camps. Abuse is the baseline condition. The circumstances of detention alone are inhuman, including the lack of nutrition or any provision for wounds and injuries – as well as prolonged shackling, blindfolding and immobilisation in vermin-infested cages. Israeli doctors summoned as a last resort to one of the most notorious torture centres – Sde Teiman – reported that amputations were ‘routine’. One doctor amputated the legs of two different prisoners in the span of a single week; the conditions in which they were being held rendered amputation inevitable.

Reports of more active forms of torture have been widespread. Human Rights Watch has documented the case of a Palestinian paramedic who was serially raped by Israeli prison guards using their assault rifles. Israel’s Channel 12 actually broadcast leaked footage on live television showing Israeli guards gang-raping another prisoner with batons, leading to severe rectal and lung injures. The broadcast sparked public outrage in Israel, but not because of the severity of the crime. What provoked riots, and even the storming of an army base, was the leak itself, as well as the arrest of Israel’s ‘best heroes’, as security minister Itamar Ben Gvir called them. The army prosecutor who oversaw an investigation into the soldiers was herself recently arrested over the leak, while the soldiers themselves went free. According to the minister of defence, the distribution of the video constituted a ‘blood libel’. Asked about the outrages, Ben Gvir smirked and gloated that everything published about the abominable conditions of the Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons – for which he is responsible – was true. ‘Everything is legitimate,’ one member of the ruling party bellowed in parliament.

The return of the captives only clarifies how much horror has been occluded over the past two years – how little the assault on Palestinian lives has penetrated mainstream US coverage of the genocide. Shortly after the photojournalist Shadi Abu Sido was freed from Israel’s torture camps, he called his family. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever see them again,’ he told bystanders. While inside, he had been taunted by Israeli prison guards, who told him that his family had been killed. ‘They are all safe, my parents, my family,’ he exulted. But he himself was not safe. ‘From the moment they brought me here,’ he said, ‘I was tortured and tortured. I was hanged by shackles on my wrists. My whole body is broken. All broken. My hands, my bones, everything. They have a machine to break bones, a policy to break. They shattered and broke our bodies. I bled for three weeks from one eye and received no treatment. Because I am a photographer. He [the guard] told me, “I’ll rip out your eye the way I ripped out your camera lens.’”

Such interviews are widely shared in Arabic media; in much of Western media they are effectively non-existent. For months after 7 October, stories about a Hamas-led ‘campaign of mass rape’ dominated headlines in outlets such as The New York Times; even as those stories gradually fell apart due to a lack of evidence, they have never been corrected or retracted. By contrast, the flood of corroborated evidence about the systematic torture and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons – including of children – rarely reaches US readers.

Abu Sido was able to see his family again, but many other captives weren’t so lucky. Upon their return from the long and agonising months of detention, they discovered that their families had been killed, adding punishment to punishment for the original sin of being born Palestinian. One of these was Haitham Salem, a municipal electrical engineer. While in detention, he had managed to weave a little bracelet for his daughter’s upcoming birthday. Just a few weeks before he was released, an Israeli pilot had dropped a bomb on the tent in which Haitham’s wife and children had been sheltering. His daughters were killed instantly; his wife was severely injured and died of her wounds a few days later. His son suffered only relatively minor shrapnel wounds in the attack, but the jagged shards of hot steel carried dirt and bacteria and – because he couldn’t find treatment in Gaza’s shattered healthcare system – he likely died of the resulting infection a few days later as well. Hearing the terrible news, Haitham collapsed in writhing agony, per a report from Middle East Eye. ‘My wife, I can’t find her,’ he cried out. ‘My beloved boy, every night I see you in my dreams.’

Campaign of obliteration

In previous articles, I’ve relied on statistics to try to express the scale of the harm inflicted by the Israeli government over the past two years.² But no statistics can adequately capture the sheer malice of Israel’s conduct.

How to express the human meaning of the destruction Israel has inflicted? Once densely inhabited communities have been reduced to piles of wreckage and rubble. Rafah literally no longer exists as a city – it is a bulldozed field of smashed stone and pulverised concrete. The same is largely true of Beit Hanoun, Jabalya, Deir al Balah and other once-teeming communities, aside from the odd ruin still left standing. ‘Just as we levelled Rafah, we will level all of Gaza,’ exulted Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich last spring. ‘The army’s operation aims to occupy and cleanse areas in Gaza, and every house we destroy is considered a tunnel in our view.’ When the ceasefire (such as it is) took effect, Israel was in the process of levelling Gaza City, one of the oldest cities in the world.

Levelling, pulverisation, obliteration, annihilation and, of course, cleansing – these are the terms in which Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza has been transacted. We have become familiar with the statistics of bomb tonnage the Israelis dropped on Gaza, far exceeding that dropped on London, Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki, leaving devastation on a scale unprecedented in all of modern warfare. But even those statistics miss the point. Rightly or wrongly, all those cities were bombed in order to defeat an enemy. The Israelis weren’t trying to defeat Gaza – they were trying to obliterate it, to erase it from the earth, to expunge its people from their land once and for all.

Israel’s primary tool in this campaign of genocidal violence isn’t the warplane, the tank, the field gun or the bomb. It’s the bulldozer, and specifically the Caterpillar D9 – an armoured beast that weighs 110,000 pounds and has been adapted by Israel for one purpose: to level and crush homes, trees, greenhouses, farms, orchards, and to snuff out people’s lives. No other army fields such a fleet of similar bulldozers. (When the US army needs them, it borrows them from its Israeli counterpart, as it did during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.) The D9 is the diesel-gulping, smoke-belching, track-grinding, asphalt-scraping embodiment of Israel’s obsession with home demolition.

Beyond the bulldozers, there are also decommissioned Vietnam-era M113 armoured personnel carriers packed full of explosives, which Israeli forces sent into areas they didn’t fully control. The M113s were sent wandering at random into cities and towns that were still inhabited and densely built up, and then detonated by remote control. These armoured robot bombs carried far more explosive power than many heavy aerial bombs combined. ‘We had become somewhat accustomed to air and artillery strikes, but these explosions feel like an earthquake every time,’ one Gaza resident said of the robot bombs, according to a report in Euro-Med Monitor. ‘Debris flies hundreds of metres, the smoke and dust are overwhelming, and the destruction is immense.’ Khadija al-Masri, a displaced woman in Tel al-Hawa in northern Gaza, told one human rights organisation’s field team: ‘Every time one of these robots explodes, I feel my soul leave my body. My children scream hysterically, and I try to calm them but often fail because I find myself screaming too.’

In areas where the Israelis were able to gain enough control for enough time, their engineering units rigged up not just single buildings but entire neighbourhoods with explosive demolition charges. Buildings were blown up all at once, captured on video by soldiers revelling with glee as the charges went off. It takes time to rig buildings with demolition charges – it takes effort, coordination, calculation, planning, care. It’s not something one can do in the heat of combat. In Gaza, demolition replaced battle, rather than supplementing it.

Thus has Gaza been obliterated; thus have its people been stripped of homes, schools, libraries, universities, clinics, farms, shops; spaces of work and of leisure; of effort and of rest, of freedom and necessity. Carefully, thoughtfully, meticulously, Israel has destroyed the material basis for the modern social existence of an entire people, reducing them to what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben once called the naked life of the concentration camp: the bare existence ever so grudgingly granted to them by Israeli politicians.

‘A genocidal society’

It should go without saying, however, that support for the genocide has not been limited to Israel’s political class. Over the past two years, numerous Israeli civilians have ventured to a hill in the south of the country overlooking the ruins of Gaza, where a large viewing platform was set up, complete with tap-to-pay viewing binoculars and a drinks dispenser. ‘Even with a naked eye it is possible to see something of the scale of destruction and the constantly rising smoke,’ wrote a correspondent for the Irish Times who visited the site last summer, ‘but through the binoculars the lengthy expanse of toppled buildings and decimated neighbourhoods is staggering.’ The correspondent reported that ‘multiple tours came and went’ just in the hour she was there. The guides reassured the visitors that all this was being done to keep them safe from ‘terror’.

Opinion polls in Israel have found overwhelming popular support for the state’s actions. One Tel Aviv University poll from late 2023 found that 94% of Jewish Israelis believed that the Israeli army was using either appropriate or too little force in what was by then a systematic obliteration of entire neighbourhoods. According to a follow-up poll from 2024, 88% of respondents found the number of casualties among Palestinians justified – at that point the number of casualties had crossed 100,000, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. A separate poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute in early 2024 found that 68% of Jewish Israelis opposed allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza. These outcomes remained consistent into 2025. A poll commissioned by Penn State for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz this past spring found that 82% of Israeli Jews supported the idea of expelling the entire population of Gaza from the territory; around half supported the idea of simply killing everyone outright. Almost 80% of the Israeli respondents to a 2025 Democracy Institute poll reported that they were ‘not so troubled’ or ‘not troubled at all’ by reports of famine and suffering among the population in Gaza.

As the Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide put it, ‘Israel is a genocidal state supported by a genocidal society.’ In this thanatocracy – the only appropriate term – no statement has been too obscene or inhumane to reach mainstream acceptance. On TV and on social media, Israeli politicians have pledged to cut off food, water, medicine; Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly invoked the destruction of the Amalek; journalists and pundits have openly called for the annihilation of Gaza and everyone in it. To invert and refract Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s infamous remarks about Gaza: ‘It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime.’

Nor are there many innocents here in the West. Israel’s supporters in the US, on which Israel depends for its very existence and its continued survival, think that terms like ‘ceasefire’ and ‘peace plan’ possess a kind of totemic power. Repeat them enough times and everything changes. With a ‘ceasefire in place’, Israel can just dust off its hands and walk away from the catastrophic harm it has inflicted on the people of Gaza; it can walk away from the dismantlement of the very foundations of life, from the murder of tens of thousands. Now that there’s a ‘peace plan’, Israel can confine an entire population without any means of subsistence to an utterly desolated wasteland and leave it entirely dependent on a trickle of aid handouts that it can turn on and off at will. With Trump having ‘brought peace to the Middle East’, an entire generation of Palestinian children can be subjected to continuing abuse, constant bombardment, the loss of parents and siblings and limbs – a million children left to fend for themselves while their needs, their cares, their traumas and their rights are deemed unworthy of even passing consideration by anyone in the West with a shred of political influence.

The cost to rebuild Gaza is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars. Western leaders are looking to relief agencies, their friends in the Gulf, and private investors and speculators to foot the bill and – no doubt – mortgage the future of the Palestinians themselves while Kushner, Witkoff, Trump, Blair and their ilk engorge themselves on the profits. It doesn’t seem to occur to these leaders that Israel might be held to account; that it should be isolated, boycotted and punished not only until it has paid for the rebuilding of Gaza and the rehabilitation of its population, but for all the harm it has inflicted on the Palestinian people since 1948 – including the rebuilding of their demolished homes, the return and accommodation of those it has driven into exile, and the restoration of their inalienable rights. And yet this is the only way forward until the Israelis abandon their enterprise of racial domination and genocidal exclusion, which has been feeding violence for the past 75 years and will go on feeding it for as long as we allow it to go on, existentially dependent as it is on the financial and political support of Western states.

We cannot let our politicians get away with the idea that it is time for business as usual. It falls to us, as ordinary people of goodwill, to continue protesting, striking, boycotting; to continue demanding the suspension of aid and bombs to Israel and the suspension of diplomatic relations and the expulsion of Israeli diplomats and the divestment from Israel of our institutions and universities. We have to be there when an Israeli team shows up to play; we have to be at every port when an Israeli tour ship arrives to dock; we have to be there when an Israeli orchestra starts tuning its instruments in an international concert hall; we have to be there when an Israeli politician shows up to speak. Our politicians have failed and will always fail. It falls on us to try to see some kind of justice done.                           

Saree Makdisi is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His most recent book is Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (University of California Press, 2022). This article was originally published on the n+1 website
(www.nplusonemag.com).

Notes

1.         https://arablit.org/after-the-genocide/

2.         https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/politics/no-human-being-can-exist-2/

*Third World Resurgence No. 365, 2025/4, pp 19-23