Nakba 2025: The world now sees Israel as an unhinged killer

A second Nakba is unfolding, not in secret, not whispered through trembling lips, not passed as rumours between fleeing survivors, but in the full, merciless light of day.

It is live-streamed. Captioned. Digitised. A genocide unfolding in high definition and real time.

This is no echo of 1948. It is its evolution. Its mutation. The same machinery of erasure, now upgraded, modernised, militarised, and globally broadcast.

More ruthless.

More unapologetic.

More spectacularly cruel.

In Gaza, genocide is not denied. It is performed.

Women, children, and the elderly are not collateral damage, they are the target. Homes are not caught in crossfire, they are marked for annihilation. Schools, mosques, hospitals, bakeries, every corner of life is mapped, bombed, buried. Reduced to ash at the push of a button, under the silence of diplomatic complicity.

Gaza is not a battlefield. It is a graveyard, built in slow motion, streamed with surgical precision, and narrated with lies.

But the violence is not confined to Gaza. In the Occupied West Bank, too, killings, raids, and settler terror escalate by the day. And still, the world clings to the delusion that this all began on October 7 - as if Palestinian life before that date were defined by dignity and peace. As if checkpoints, home demolitions, nightly arrests, extrajudicial killings, and siege had not already brutalised every breath of Palestinian existence.

No. This is not reaction.

It is not security.

It is the continuation of a long war on presence.

An ethnic cleansing project nearly eight decades in the making, now executed with bunker-busting bombs, AI-guided missiles, and genocidal resolve. What was once done with rifles and whispers is now done with algorithms and megaphones.

And this time, there are no euphemisms. Only declarations.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said what others try to obscure: "We are occupying, cleansing, and staying… we are destroying everything that remains in Gaza, because everything there is one large terrorist city. The residents will go south - and from there, to third countries - as part of Trump’s plan."

Former Israeli MK Moshe Feiglin went further still, declaring on Channel 14: "Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy. The enemy is not Hamas… We need to conquer Gaza and colonise it and not leave a single Gazan child there. There is no other victory."

This is not a slip of the tongue. It is the blueprint. A second Nakba, stated plainly and executed in real time.

This is not about Hamas. It is not about security. It is about annihilation. The crime is not hidden. It is confessed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, too, made the goal clear: "We will take control of all the territory of the Strip". He said this not in a speech of reconstruction, not in a gesture of restraint, but as he justified allowing in a trickle of humanitarian aid - not out of duty, not out of law, but, in his own words, to "silence those who do not want to see famine".

He permitted five trucks - five - into a territory where at least 600 are needed daily just to keep people alive. The UN humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, called it "a drop in the ocean".

This was not mercy. It was spectacle. Not relief, but curated starvation. Not to save lives, but to dull the optics. A logic not of law, but of siege. A regime that treats hunger not as a humanitarian concern, but as a public relations dilemma.

Israel has grown more extreme, more messianic, more unbound by law or convention. Mass murder is now rebranded as 'self-defence'

Israel has grown more extreme, more messianic, more unbound by law or convention. Mass murder is now rebranded as "self-defence". The flattening of refugee camps is presented as "surgical precision". Starvation is a tactic. Displacement is strategy. Erasure is the endgame.

Even some within Israel’s own establishment are recoiling. Yair Golan, head of the opposition Democrats and a former general, warned bluntly: "Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was. A sane country does not fight civilians, does not kill children as a hobby, and does not give itself the aim of expelling populations."

His words cut through the fog of propaganda with rare clarity. But they fall on deaf ears inside a government that has chosen the path of annihilation.

We are witnessing, in real time, families herded into tents, bombed as they flee, starved as they beg for water. Children interviewed one day, buried the next. Doctors operating without anaesthetic. Premature babies dying in cold incubators. Mothers clutching limbs that were once sons.

This is not warfare.

It is spectacle.

It is theatre.

And the audience is global.

And still, it is not enough.

Netanyahu and his cabal press forward with the "Gideon's Chariots Plan", a blueprint not for military victory but for extermination. Gaza is to be turned into a skeletal wasteland, cleansed and repurposed. Palestinians removed, exiled, forgotten.

And in Washington, the president dreams of rebuilding Gaza as a "Riviera of the Middle East", a luxury playground on the bones of a people, where the survivors of genocide are reimagined as the "Red Indians" of modern empire: conquered, displaced, historicised.

This second Nakba has its enablers, just as the first did. In 1948, it was Britain that paved the way, issuing the Balfour Declaration, gifting a land it did not own, and turning a deaf ear to the cries of its native people. The United States, then an ascending empire, followed suit.

Today, America leads, with weapons, with vetoes, with lies lacquered in diplomacy. Europe trails close behind, offering moral fog and ethical cowardice. The flags have changed position, but the empire has not.

Still, not all are complicit. There are sparks of clarity - nations like Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, Denmark - who have dared to name the crime, to say genocide, to break with the consensus of cowardice. Their courage matters. Their voices carry.

But the greatest difference today is not the horror.

It is the visibility.

The first Nakba lived in memory, in the brittle pages of books, in the haunted stories of the displaced. This Nakba is livestreamed. It arrives in every home, in every feed, in every language. It cannot be unseen. It cannot be unfelt.

The Zionist narrative of moral purity and victimhood now lies naked, a tired script played by bad actors to an audience that has stopped clapping.

The architects of this second Nakba want us to believe it is too late, that the future is sealed, the erasure complete. But history is not finished

The world has seen the roofs collapse.

It has seen the camps burn.

It has seen the snipers, the bulldozers, the mass graves.

It has seen hospitals levelled, ambulances bombed, children dismembered.

And something, finally, is stirring.

From New York to London, from Paris to Santiago, from the streets to the gates of college campuses, the people rise. Not yet enough to halt the killing, but enough to expose the silence. Enough to rupture the lie.

Students are occupying.

Workers are striking.

Artists are boycotting.

The ground beneath the political order begins to shift.

Let us cling to that shift. Let us protect that ember of hope amid the ash. The architects of this second Nakba want us to believe it is too late, that the future is sealed, the erasure complete.

But history is not finished.

And shame is a powerful weapon.

Palestine has not fallen.

It is being killed.

And yet it resists.

It bleeds, but it speaks.

From the rubble, from the exile, from the hunger and the fire, Palestine still cries out.

And the world, slowly, fiercely, defiantly, is beginning to listen.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.