On 26 October, Caroline Willemen of Médecins Sans Frontières stated that Israel continues to use the need for humanitarian aid in Gaza as “means of pressure”. “The humanitarian situation in Gaza has not improved significantly”, she told the press, “as water and shelter shortages persist and hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in tents as winter approaches”. Israel’s armed forces have now annexed more than half of Gaza’s land and are dumping vast amounts of debris into that zone, turning it into a mountain of garbage. To move the rubble without experts and equipment is very dangerous, as about ten to twelve percent of the Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza have not exploded.
“Every Gazan person is now living in a horrific, unmapped minefield”, said Nick Orr of Humanity and Inclusion, a non-governmental organisation at work in Palestine. “The UXO [Unexploded Ordnance] is everywhere. On the ground, in the rubble, under the ground, everywhere”. As Palestinians dig through the hills of concrete, they risk triggering a dormant bomb – creating more casualties of the Israeli genocide.
Over the past two years, Israel has dropped at least 200,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza, a tonnage equivalent to thirteen atom bombs of the scale dropped on Hiroshima by the United States on 6 August 1945. This is unimaginable, particularly given the fact that Palestinians have no air defence systems, no air force and no ability to defend themselves from high-altitude and drone bombing or to strike back in any comparable way. Genocides are, by their nature, asymmetrical. But to describe these past two years as asymmetrical is obscene: this was one-directional violence, the Goliath-like Israelis using their immense advantages against the David-like Palestinian resistance.
The opaqueness of official arms transfers means we have no precise idea how much of this tonnage came to Israel from its major suppliers during the war: the United States, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. However, we have enough evidence to know that most of the bombs came from the United States, with smaller supplies from the other countries. A new report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, entitled Gaza Genocide: a collective crime (20 October 2025), makes it indisputably clear that the countries supplying Israel with military equipment, or assisting it in any way – including through diplomatic support – are utterly complicit in the genocide.
In other words, the obligation to abide by the UN Convention on Genocide is not discretionary; the duty to do what they can to stop the genocide is mandatory. The participation makes them wholly culpable. The report notes that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza makes this “an internationally enabled crime”.
The level of complicity is extraordinary. Take the case of the United Kingdom, whose Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is a human rights lawyer and indeed wrote the textbook on European human rights law (1999).
Excerpted: ‘The Powerful Who Stand with Israel’.
Courtesy: Counterpunch.org
