In the midst of despair over Gaza, a regional struggle for freedom is brewing
The World Food Programme has announced that it has officially run out of food supplies in the Gaza Strip, as a result of Israel's total blockade, now entering its third month.
At the same time, Israeli officials are making their intentions plain: to maintain military control over Gaza, cleanse it of genocide survivors and partition Syria.
Israel's onslaught against Palestinian and Arab life, organisation and resistance over the past 18 months has been devastating beyond words.
This period will be remembered, alongside 1948 and 1967, as a moment of major Palestinian and regional defeat at the hands of Israel and its western sponsors, marked by rapid settler-colonial expansion and an aggressive redrawing of the status quo.
And yet, from this defeat, new contradictions will emerge - from which the long struggle for liberation will burst forth once more.
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Unimaginable depths
The situation in Gaza has once again reached unimaginable depths. As of the end of April 2025, the official death toll had surpassed 52,400, and at least 90 percent of the strip's population had been displaced. The actual number of dead is likely far higher.
Already, by September 2024, projections had exceeded 300,000. Since then, conditions have only worsened.
Doctors Without Borders has described the whole of Gaza as a mass grave
Doctors Without Borders has described the whole of Gaza as a mass grave. Even before the latest announcement by the World Food Programme, all bakeries had shut down, baby formula had run out, and children were receiving "less than one meal a day".
Access to water has been weaponised, as Israel cuts off electricity and fuel. The genocide has shifted from a military campaign of successive massacres to a slow, systematic mass murder by starvation and daily bombing of displaced Palestinians. Words fail to capture such a hell.
Israel's "day after" vision is now unmistakable. As it once did in the West Bank, it is carving out small bantustans in Gaza, segmented by Israeli-controlled corridors named after former settlements: Netzarim, Philadelphi and Morag.
This campaign of mass expulsion and starvation is designed to "thin out" the Palestinian population and force it into dramatically smaller zones, far from most arable lands - especially between Rafah and Khan Younis.
Beyond Gaza
Israel's assault extends well beyond Gaza. It has expanded military operations into Lebanon and Syria, raining fire on civilians, indiscriminately destroying infrastructure and seizing territory.
In doing so, Israel has delivered a major victory for US imperialism, weakening Iran and its allies while expanding its own settler-colonial control. Israeli officials now openly state that they will remain "indefinitely" in these countries, establishing military bases, carrying out routine air strikes and unilaterally imposing demilitarised "zones of influence".
In the West Bank, Israel intensified its campaign of terror long before 7 October 2023. Since then, more than 1,850 settler attacks have been recorded, alongside at least 860 Palestinian fatalities, including 177 children. In just one year, 20,000 new settlement units and 49 new outposts have been established.
Most strikingly, Israel is moving to redraw the status quo on Palestinian refugees - the seven million living reminders of past ethnic cleansing and the need for redress.
It has outlawed Unrwa, enabling a direct assault on Palestinian refugee services such as schools and welfare support. At the same time, it is carrying out military expulsions from key refugee camps across the West Bank.
At least 40,000 people have been displaced in a process that shows no sign of slowing.
What now?
In the face of such overwhelming defeat, it is difficult not to be swallowed by despair. It seems nothing will compel the US and its western allies to withdraw the vast military, diplomatic and financial support they continue to provide Israel.
The genocide against Palestinians, plainly visible to the world, is a price our rulers are willing to pay to preserve their influence in a region crucial to the global economy - particularly amid declining US hegemony. They lie openly, and the horror continues.
Yet, it would be a mistake to lose hope. Across the western world, people are fighting back and standing with the Palestinian people against their governments.
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The boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS) has grown exponentially. Massive protests have rocked the capitals of former colonial powers. Students are refusing to accept their universities' complicity in apartheid and genocide.
Most significantly, workers and trade unions have begun mobilising their collective power to present the ruling class with a stark ultimatum: end your support for Israel, or face economic disruption.
Crucially, resistance is also building across the MENA region.
Most recently, Moroccan dockworkers blocked a Maersk shipment of US fighter jets bound for Israel - a vital development. The Moroccan monarchy has played a key role in normalising ties with Israel, expanding military contracts and allowing the Israeli arms firm Elbit Systems to open a factory on Moroccan soil.
These deals are deeply unpopular, and the fact that this anger is now spilling into the streets and workplaces - despite the real threat of violent repression - is significant.
And Moroccans are not alone. In Jordan and Egypt - two of Israel's neighbouring states that have long spearheaded the normalisation process - popular resistance is also mounting.
Both governments have deepened trade and security ties with Israel even as the genocide in Gaza unfolds. In Jordan, large and regular protests have erupted throughout the war, demanding an end to the Wadi Araba peace treaty with Israel, the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, and the severing of all economic and diplomatic relations.
In response, the Hashemite monarchy has launched a crackdown, most recently banning the Muslim Brotherhood under the laughable pretext of foiling a plot supposedly sponsored by the group.
In Egypt, where repression is even more brutal and sustained, people continue to seize rare opportunities to voice their opposition to their government's complicity in Israel's crimes.
Liberation
This growing regional resistance, which targets not only Israel but also the Arab reactionary regimes that sustain it, is essential for the liberation of Palestine. The Palestinian left, since the 1960s, has understood that Palestine's liberation is inseparable from that of the wider region.
This is partly due to the regional nature of Zionism itself: a military outpost used to suppress challenges to western power and influence. Israel's actions across the Levant over the past 16 months provide a contemporary example of this.
It is also a reflection of class relations inside Palestine. Israeli workers are deeply invested in the settler-colonial project, including its genocidal present form. They have often led efforts to escalate it. They are not a credible force for Palestinian liberation.
This growing regional resistance, which targets not only Israel but also the Arab reactionary regimes that sustain it, is essential for the liberation of Palestine
Palestinians, by contrast, are excluded from Israel's economic core, relegated to peripheral sectors such as construction, agriculture, and low-wage services. The internal balance of forces does not favour them. Unlike workers in South Africa, Kenya or Algeria, they are not in a position to shut down the settler economy to achieve their freedom.
Palestinians must therefore struggle alongside the broader regional masses for liberation from western imperialism, local ruling elites and Israeli settler colonialism. Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian revolutionary, writer and theorist, described these three forces as the "enemy trinity" facing Palestinians - the principal threat to their liberation.
Similarly, the Marxist thinker and revolutionary Jabra Nicola wrote that "the struggle against imperialism - inseparable from all democratic struggles - can only be a struggle against all the existing dominant classes and regimes in the region".
Both men were writing in the 1970s, after another regional defeat, but their insights remain crucial today. In the words of Kanafani's comrade George Habash: "The road to Jerusalem goes through the capitals of the Arab world."
We caught a glimpse of this in 2011, when a revolutionary wave swept the region. From Tunisia to Syria, from Bahrain to Egypt, people linked their freedom to that of Palestinians and demanded an end to normalisation and Arab complicity.
Those uprisings were rooted in solidarity with the Second Intifada. Now, a decade and a half later, Israel's genocide in Gaza and the silence of Arab regimes are re-energising once-defeated mass movements. Their revival remains the key to a free Palestine.
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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