Gaza being burnt by Israel

Over the last few days the western media has been propagating an Israeli headline, “Gaza is burning”. On the contrary it should have been, “Gaza being burnt by Israel”. The Israeli troops are moving deeper into the enclave's main city. The number of soldiers is rising with each passing day as IDF believe that up to 3,000 Hamas combatants are still in the city.

Please allow us to say that Gaza is not merely a battlefield; it is a society in flames. Over two years of intensive military operations, territorial encirclement, and an all-but-complete blockade have produced a cascade of death, displacement, and institutional collapse.

The question of agency — whether Gaza “is burning” as an accident of war or because a party intends and effects its devastation — is not rhetorical. Evidence from humanitarian agencies, human-rights groups, and UN investigators points clearly to a campaign of force and policy by Israel that has produced, and continues to produce, catastrophic civilian destruction and deprivation.

The multiple UN and humanitarian reports document mass casualties, widespread displacement and the conditions of famine and disease now ravaging Gaza. The UN’s humanitarian coordination office describes Gaza City — home to nearly a million people who have nowhere safe to go — as facing daily bombardment and “compromised access to means of survival.”

The WHO’s public-health analysis confirms the lethal public-health consequences: rising malnutrition and deaths from starvation and disease, with hundreds of children already dead from malnutrition and famine conditions confirmed in parts of Gaza.

These outcomes are not incidental side effects of a narrowly targeted counterterror operation. Human-rights organizations have documented patterns of attacks that repeatedly hit schools, hospitals, shelters, and entire neighborhoods — precisely the civilian infrastructure that normally offers protection in war.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have catalogued repeated strikes on schools and hospitals, extensive razing of towns, and the use of siege tactics that cut off food, fuel, and medical supplies — measures they say amount to unlawful collective punishment and, in Amnesty’s assessment, further evidence of genocidal intent.

An independent UN commission of inquiry has concluded that actions by Israeli authorities and forces meet the threshold of genocide, citing acts that include killing, causing severe bodily and mental harm, and imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction.

That finding is explosive in normative terms because it reframes the humanitarian crisis as one driven not only by military necessity claims but by a pattern of conduct that international law treats as among the gravest crimes.

Three interlocking dynamics matter. First, operational doctrine: tactics emphasizing area bombardment, extensive use of heavy munitions in dense urban areas, and commands for mass civilian displacement dramatically increase civilian death and infrastructure destruction. Second, blockade and siege: restricting entry of food, fuel, water, and medicines turns even partial destruction into sustained catastrophe by preventing recovery and medical care. Third, accountability failures: continued supply of weapons and limited enforcement of international humanitarian law incentives have, critics argue, reduced the political and legal costs of tactics that imperil civilians.

The human consequences are immediate and wrenching. Schools that once sheltered displaced families are being struck; hospitals struggle to operate without fuel and supplies; entire neighborhoods have been razed to foundations; and children face not only the trauma of violence but death from malnutrition and preventable disease.

If civilian protection were the operational imperative, the combination of precise targeting, unfettered humanitarian corridors, and a halt to displacement orders would reduce civilian suffering. Instead, the combination of intense urban combat, orders pushing mass displacement within a sealed territory, and the impediment of essential supplies has produced conditions that human-rights experts interpret as deliberate or recklessly indifferent to civilian life. That is the core of the charge that Gaza is being “burnt” by Israeli policy and force.