Months after 'ceasefire', Israel's genocide in Gaza has destroyed every sphere of life
Shells weighing tonnes plummet onto a densely populated residential neighbourhood. Where a crowded street stood moments earlier, a deep crater swallows everything above it.
This spectacle has become routine across the genocide in the Gaza Strip, where more than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023.
Israeli leadership received generous external backing in the form of war machinery and political support, despite warnings from leading human rights organisations and mass protests around the world.
After each bombardment, the toll was expressed in staggering numbers of victims and missing persons, most of them children and women. The instruments of modern bombardment have left voids across nearly the entirety of the Gaza Strip, encompassing multiple dimensions of destruction - the dimensions of a compounded genocide.
To grasp this, one must reconstruct the scene before one of these strikes. A local community inhabited a residential neighbourhood, bound together by ties of extended family, kinship and friendship.
At the site of the air strike, brothers lived with their families and children, alongside the elderly, in a single multi-storey building - the typical Gaza home, built by successive generations of a family, floor upon floor, after years of toil.
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These bonds extended across neighbouring buildings, which also vanished in the bombardment or were reduced to rubble.
Genocide of Palestinian childhood
The Israeli genocide has descended first and foremost upon children.
Those under 18 constitute the majority of the local Palestinian community, and international officials repeatedly warned that the Israeli war machine was killing the equivalent of an entire classroom of children each day.
Facilities dedicated to raising children were among the foremost targets of destruction: kindergartens and schools - including those run by Unrwa - playgrounds, hospitals, clinics and family homes. Educational facilities that survived became shelters for displaced families.
There is not a single child in the Strip who has not witnessed dismembered bodies and blood on multiple occasions - and in most cases, these scenes belonged to relatives, neighbours and friends
Premature babies were among the most vulnerable. Many stopped breathing, one after another, in incubators after electricity and fuel were cut, and because the Israeli army prevented their rescue or transfer despite repeated pleas.
There is not a single child in the Strip who has not witnessed dismembered bodies and blood on multiple occasions - and in most cases, these scenes belonged to relatives, neighbours and friends.
There are accounts of children pulled from rubble after long hours during which they endured the fading breaths of their parents and siblings, despairing of survival until an arm finally reached them.
A child who survives bears immense burdens: the loss of parents, siblings, grandparents and companions. The eradication of Palestinian childhood is manifest in the destruction of daily security, the stripping away of future hope, the tearing apart of social bonds and the repeated uprooting amid constant displacement.
It is also manifest in a reality that compels the child into daily paths of humiliation to obtain water and food.
This is a child whose life expectancy has been curtailed by the absence of healthcare, by exposure to harmful substances in a contaminated environment, and by the probability of death. Like others in Gaza, this child has been deprived of successive school years, effectively erased from their educational life.
Notebooks, books, toys and pets have been stripped away. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers have been filmed tampering with children's belongings - one riding a wooden rocking horse in a Palestinian home in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza in September 2025; another smashing school supplies and toys in a shop in northern Gaza in December 2023.
Cultural genocide
Schoolteachers, doctors, engineers, university professors and skilled workers lived in the homes destroyed by successive rounds of Israeli bombardment. Universities have lost vast numbers of their professors, scholars and researchers, some of them recipients of international awards.
To be an academic in Gaza has rendered one a candidate for a long list of those killed alongside their families in crowded homes or in the tents of the displaced. Some were aware of this in advance and mourned themselves, leaving testament to their people and to the world.
The renowned professor of English literature, Refaat Alareer, published a text days before the Israeli bombardment that killed him on 6 December 2023: "If I must die, you must live, to tell my story …" The poem was translated into dozens of languages.
Among the practices of cultural eradication has been the destruction of Palestinian libraries, public and private. Israeli soldiers tampered with university libraries west of Gaza City. Entire university facilities and cultural institutions housing academic theses and ancient manuscripts were detonated.
The elderly university professor, Fayez Abu Shamala, appeared in video clips apologising to well-known poets and writers because he would be compelled, with deep pain, to burn their complete works as emergency fuel after available firewood ran out.
With the elderly among the victims, popular culture has also lost traditional knowledge and oral memory. Possessions of cultural and historical value were annihilated - old household items, black-and-white photographs and property deeds to homes seized during the Nakba of 1948.
Air raids and ground incursions were interwoven with acts of cultural destruction: the levelling of archaeological structures and heritage landmarks, the reduction of Gaza's Old Town to rubble and the destruction of prominent historic houses of worship.
The Great Omari Mosque, the symbol of Gaza and its foremost historical landmark, was reduced to ruins. The Church of Saint Porphyrius was targeted on 19 October 2023, killing Christian and Muslim civilians who had sought shelter within it.
Environmental genocide
In the homes that collapsed upon their inhabitants, pets were torn to pieces; the remains of cats and birds mingled with building rubble.
Animals were later seen emaciated to the point of death in an environment from which the Israeli army barred humanitarian supplies, while UN trucks remained stalled at nearby crossings, forcibly prevented from passing through.
The donkey, which became a popular means of transport after fuel imports were banned, collapsed near craters after shrapnel lodged in its body.
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The horse that hastened to pull a cart of wounded from Israeli shelling on 18 March 2025 could not complete the journey to the hospital - in that scene, the Palestinian tragedy appeared condensed, like a coloured reprise of a silent film from the early 20th century.
Donkeys, mules and horses were found lifeless in streets and peripheral areas where the Israeli army imposed fire control. Converging accounts reported that soldiers sniped them from a distance.
Hungry dogs mauled pregnant women and gnawed at the bodies of humans and animals killed by Israeli fire and left along roadsides in northern Gaza, where the army had grown accustomed to shooting at any living thing that approached.
Livestock pens and poultry farms were targeted, with many collectively wiped out in the first weeks of the war in autumn 2023.
Others were left to die after the Israeli army cut water and feed supplies under the siege announced by Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on 9 October 2023, declaring it included cutting water, food, medicine, electricity, fuel - "everything".
The vegetation cover of the Gaza Strip has almost entirely disappeared. It had been concentrated in the northern, eastern and central lands, constituting a basic food source for more than two million people, particularly vegetables, fruit and the oranges for which Gaza was renowned, along with crops prepared for export such as strawberries, flowers and cherry tomatoes.
Systematic Israeli policies have transformed the Gaza Strip into an environment submerged in pollution harmful to public health. With the electricity, fuel and cooking gas cut off, families resorted to burning plastic fragments and other substances that emit toxic fumes.
The destruction of civilian facilities disabled the sewage system and halted waste treatment, producing stagnant pools rife with contamination, insects and reptiles unfamiliar in the local environment, surrounded by accumulating heaps of solid waste.
Gaza's old commercial centre, Souq Firas, has been transformed into an enormous rubbish dump that, according to UN data, had reached 300,000 cubic metres and 13m in height by February 2026.
Toxic substances have seeped into soil and groundwater from accumulated pollution and from components contained in Israeli munitions. The coastline has become a receptacle for untreated sewage, damaging the marine environment and its biodiversity.
Toxins seeping into fish likely make their way into residents' bodies through the limited fishing still possible, while Palestinian food and health inspection authorities have ceased functioning.
Desecrating the dead
An additional trajectory has marked the genocide in the Gaza Strip: the desecration of the dead.
The Israeli army has pursued Palestinians even in their graves - through mass bulldozing of cemeteries, the exhumation of remains and their transfer to Israeli facilities for DNA testing.
The genocide perpetrated by the Israeli leadership in the Gaza Strip is a composite genocide formed of multiple, interlocking forms of annihilation
Some were later returned in hundreds of bags carried by rusted trucks to be buried collectively in vast trenches, in scenes that recall certain horrors of the Second World War.
This policy suggests a posture saturated with racial supremacism that shows no regard for the dead of others while displaying the highest reverence for its own. Tanks, bulldozers and military vehicles have been documented driving over and repeatedly crushing the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli gunfire.
The genocide perpetrated by the Israeli leadership in the Gaza Strip is a composite genocide formed of multiple, interlocking forms of annihilation. Hardly any human, civil, cultural or ecological sphere has been spared.
It has been carried out with ferocity and methodical progression across successive phases, imposing comprehensive destruction, mass displacement, starvation and the tearing apart of social structures grounded in family ties, kinship and neighbourhood.
These horrors were accompanied by the destruction of hospitals and medical facilities, the obstruction of therapeutic necessities and the targeting of medical staff - among them Hussam Abu Safiya.
The Israeli army abducted Abu Safiya on 27 December 2024 as punishment for remaining steadfast at Kamal Adwan Hospital, which he directed.
Ideological motivations
This compounded genocide has ideological motivations, reinforced by narratives drawing on selective quotations from sacred texts, as invoked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several ministers in his government, such as references to the genocidal episodes in the story of Amalek.
The matter did not begin with Netanyahu. The state he leads arose upon the ruins of Palestine, and its armed forces carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing at its founding, documented in well-known historical studies.
The idea of eliminating this portion of Palestine entirely has long haunted Israeli leaders, as expressed by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin: "I would like Gaza to sink into the sea," he said on 2 September 1992.
Exactly three-quarters of a century after the Nakba of 1948, the Israeli leadership resumed its trajectory.
Likud Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said: "This is Gaza's Nakba 2023," in an interview with Israel's Channel 12 on 11 November 2023.
This most recent Nakba arrived with a ferocity surpassing its predecessor, armed with military capacities unavailable in the mid-20th century - including the tonnes of shells dropped upon residential neighbourhoods, annihilating them in an instant. Within each lies a terrifying detail of a multidimensional, compounded genocide.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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