I have covered many wars in the past but nothing—absolutely nothing—prepared me for the brutality, cruelty, and the sheer savagery of Israel’s war in Gaza. I wasn’t alone. Veteran colleagues at Al Jazeera—battle-hardened reporters who had walked the ruins of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, the Balkans, and Ukraine—confessed they had never seen such merciless devastation.
The relentless bombing of the tiny Gaza Strip after Hamas’s devastating attack on the military installations and communities of southern Israel on October 7, 2023, has been compared to the worst wars in memory. In just two months, the Associated Press reported, the Israeli war had “wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the US-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.” It has been “the conflict for children in modern times,” as well as the war that has seen an unprecedented targeting of journalists, doctors, humanitarian workers, and United Nations staff. No one was spared. Nothing was sacred. A Brown University report concluded that “more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in the US civil war, both world wars, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the wars in Yugoslavia and the US war in Afghanistan combined.”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu also saw Israel’s war in a historical perspective. Just a few weeks after the October 7 attack, Netanyahu justified Israel’s obliteration of civilians in Gaza with a comparison to Operation Carthage, a British air raid in World War II that targeted the Nazi intelligence headquarters in Copenhagen but instead hit a school and killed eighty-six children. Netanyahu claimed that the deaths of these children were the tragic consequences of a legitimate act of war, but “not a war crime.” Drawing an equivalence between Nazi Germany, which dominated much of Europe in World War II, and Gaza, the biggest open-air prison in the world that is home to the oldest refugee camp, is not simply an overreach, it is grotesque and absurd.
Israel’s war in Gaza echoed the Nakba of 1948. Once again, communities were driven from their homes; only this time, they did so under drones and satellites.
Israel’s war wasn’t just a historical comparison. Many of us lived the conflict, in real time, twenty-four hours a day, through phone screens we gripped in our trembling hands. There was nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide. It tested our sanity to maintain normalcy amid the carnage. Each day opened a new abyss. Nonstop scenes of panic and chaos, of children crying for parents they would never see again; of parents clutching the mutilated remains of their toddlers; of entire families massacred.
Israel’s war in Gaza echoed the Nakba of 1948. Once again, communities were driven from their homes; only this time, they did so under drones and satellites. Israeli soldiers filmed themselves in high definition laughing, looting homes, destroying entire rows of buildings, humiliating civilians, even killing them. Gone are the days when Israelis saw themselves “shooting and crying,” projecting an image of a people averse to killing. They now broadcast their exploits live, unashamed and proud. To call such televised brutality sick would be to insult the sick. This was something else. This was cruelty made spectacle.
It soon got personal. Our colleagues, friends, and loved ones were gone, blown into pieces by faceless drones, casualties of Israel’s vengeful war. These were not random casualties or collateral damage, but targeted erasures. Faces we knew, people we had laughed with, suddenly vanished. And yet those who survived kept reporting, unintimidated, undeterred, chronicling massacres as they moved between funerals and hospital shifts.
Curious what the perpetrators of this war were thinking, feeling, and saying, I read the Hebrew-language newspapers and watched Israeli television, but the horrific images of civilian casualties in Gaza rarely made it into the media. Instead, Israeli networks broadcast orgies of hate. News anchors, generals, and even celebrities competed to see who could scream the loudest: “Punish them!” “Kill them all!” “Nuke them!” A government minister openly mused about dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza. A former Knesset member warned, “Every child in Gaza is the enemy.” A pop star demanded: “Erase Gaza completely.” This wasn’t rational debate. It was racist dehumanization. The Israeli media were essentially “drafted to the main goal of winning the war,” as a senior Israeli investigative reporter, Raviv Dror, put it in January 2024. The country that prided itself on being an oasis of democracy in the Middle East had replaced freedom of expression with the unfettered right to incite vengeance.
What began as Israel’s military response to Hamas’s brutal attack on October 7 quickly morphed into one of the most destructive military campaigns against civilians in modern times. By the time the UN Security Council adopted a toothless, American-diluted ceasefire resolution in March 2024, Gaza had endured six months of pulverizing bombardment, medieval siege conditions, and engineered deprivation.
The images from this time were unbearable. Children were not just wounded, but left utterly alone; the grim acronym WCNSF—wounded child, no surviving family—should not exist in any language, yet it became part of our daily vocabulary. Entire families were vaporized by a single two-thousand-pound bomb. The violence was not exactly indiscriminate; it was massive but selectively engineered for maximum devastation, systematically engulfing homes, hospitals, schools, UN shelters, and refugee camps. Nothing was spared.
The destruction was staggering, industrial in magnitude. By March 2024, 90 percent of Gaza’s population, over two million people, had been displaced. More than 92 percent of Gaza’s homes had been damaged or destroyed. Neighborhoods were flattened. Schools, bakeries, clinics, civil infrastructure, all gone. Open markets were turned into graveyards. This wasn’t a battlefield; it was an extermination zone. Gaza’s health system collapsed. Its largest medical center, Al-Shifa Hospital, was besieged, bombed, and raided, under false pretexts, resulting in hundreds of deaths inside. Medical staff operated without anesthesia, electricity, or basic sterilization. Patients died untreated in hallways. Gaza’s health care system was already fragile under seventeen years of blockade; now it was crippled.
Over a million people in Gaza faced catastrophic hunger as Israel tightened its blockade, bombed farmland, and destroyed water supplies. In northern Gaza, children died from malnutrition and dehydration. In March 2024, Josep Borrell, a top EU diplomat, accused Israel of creating a famine and using starvation as a weapon of war. “In Gaza we are no longer on the brink of famine,” said Borrell, “we are in a state of famine, affecting thousands of people.”
International law seemed unable to halt the devastation. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in January 2024 that it was “plausible” Israel’s actions in Gaza could amount to genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The ICJ ordered six provisional measures, including a halt to genocidal actions, unfettered humanitarian aid, and the punishment of those inciting genocide, but to no avail. The International Commission of Jurists confirmed that Israel failed to comply with the ruling. A UN Commission of Inquiry found in May 2024 that Israeli forces had committed numerous serious violations of international law between October and December 2023. These incidents included war crimes and crimes against humanity: weaponizing hunger; intentionally targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure; murder; sexual and gender-based violence; torture; arbitrary detention; and the forcible transfer of civilians. Israel again rejected the commission’s findings. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued warrants for the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, who were accused of using starvation as a method of warfare. (The ICC also issued warrants for the arrest of Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Muhammad Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh, but they had all been killed by Israel.) The warrants marked a rare instance of the ICC targeting an ally of the United States. Predictably, the ICC quickly faced retaliation from Washington, which imposed sanctions against its prosecutors instead of reprimanding Israel.
Despite allowing Israel a free hand in waging its war, US president Joe Biden could not convince Netanyahu to allow aid into Gaza through Israel or even one of the Egyptian crossing points. In March 2024 Biden therefore announced that the United States would build a special offshore pier on the coast of Gaza to receive international aid, which would be shipped from Cyprus after being inspected by Israel. Constructed at a cost to the US taxpayer of $300 million, the pier was retired after operating poorly and sporadically for just twenty days. It was a textbook boondoggle, a classic Bidenism—failure to confront Netanyahu at US expense. To call it absurd barely scratches the surface.
Adding insult to injury, Biden’s other initiative, the so-called Day After peace plan, ignored the unfolding genocide to propose diplomatic normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The plan promised Saudi recognition of the State of Israel, including security guarantees, in exchange for a pathway to Palestinian statehood that was ostensibly “clear and credible” but actually vague and unrealistic. Despite Biden’s willingness to reward the Israeli genocide by brokering an unprecedented peace deal, Netanyahu rejected his proposal. Instead, he insisted on a long war that would lead to a decisive victory, with Hamas eliminated and Gaza uninhabitable. The generals who had joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet resigned, tired of his shenanigans. But the bombing continued.
The war on Gaza was not a war. It was a reckoning: a reckoning with civilization itself. As Gaza was reduced to ashes, the whole world watched—and turned away. Gaza wasn’t only destroyed. It was abandoned.
Yet Gaza endured. As did Israel. As did the suffering.
In those dark times, writing was my only sanctuary in the midst of mayhem; it threw me a lifeline. Eventually, as the roar of the war drowned out all other sounds, even writing failed me. Writing while bombs were falling felt like playing the violin inside the back of an ambulance racing through a disaster zone. I still commented on the conflict for television, but I could no longer find the words to write.
As Gaza was reduced to ashes, the whole world watched—and turned away. Gaza wasn’t only destroyed. It was abandoned.
There was no escape from the horror streaming live on our screens. You asked yourself: Am I the only one watching? Where is the outrage? Where are the values? So you took it out on the technology. You cursed at the TV. You damned the computer. You screamed at the phone. You even tried to reason with the tablet. It all fell on deaf ears. Siri wasn’t listening. Alexa didn’t care. There was only silence. They win; you lose. You crawled back defeated, watching in disbelief, indignant at both the horror and the hypocrisy of the elected politicians and the so-called liberal media who preach about humanity but condone human suffering, proclaim universal values yet crack down on international solidarity. If protests at the killing of children are criminalized, what is left to protest? Yesterday they cried for Ukraine, screaming “genocide” at Russia. Today they whisper, mumble, and stutter as genocide devours Gaza. You wonder why. You know why. You’ve always known. You’ve been in denial. Denial gave way to rage, then rage collapsed into despair, for there is no bargain to be made with genocide. But despair doesn’t suit you. You snap back…but what can you do?
A temporary, three-phase ceasefire began in January 2025, more than a year too late. It promised a permanent cessation of hostilities and the reconstruction of Gaza. But, as expected, Israel opted out after Phase One, taking advantage of the US presidential transition from Biden to Donald Trump. If you thought the situation couldn’t get any worse, the advent of the Trump administration showed it certainly could. In February, only one month into office, Trump advocated for transferring Palestinians out of Gaza, paving the way for its takeover and reconstruction by the United States, and turning it into an eastern Mediterranean Riviera after the war. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza would be permanent.
On March 18, 2025, Israel resumed bombing.
“Bombing what?” you might well ask! There was nothing left, yet still they bombed. Each time you thought Netanyahu couldn’t sink lower, he surprised you. It took The New York Times until July 2025 to conclude that Netanyahu had cynically “prolonged the war to stay in power,” as if staying in power, not leading a genocide, was the worst thing a leader could do.
By then, by the summer of 2025, estimates of those killed in bombings and airstrikes surged to over sixty thousand Palestinians, two-thirds of whom were women and children. A Lancet study had earlier reported the actual death toll might be 40 percent higher than the official number. In August 2025, it was revealed that at least five in six Palestinians killed were civilians, according to the Israeli military’s own data. The UN reported that at least one hundred children were killed or injured every single day after the strikes resumed. Gaza was reduced to ruins, and its people were trapped in a cycle of loss and suffering, as the conflict continued to rage. The population was still displaced. Homes were still flattened. People were still starved.
Then Gaza’s theater of cruelty took a surreal turn. To replace the food-aid distribution system previously run by UNRWA—the UN agency for Palestine refugees—which Israel had effectively banned in October 2024, an American consortium of self-styled entrepreneurs, mercenaries, and evangelicals established a new nonprofit, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), in February 2025. Under increasing international pressure to halt weaponizing hunger, Israel supported the GHF to weaponize aid itself. Gruesome, stomach-turning scenes unfolded every day at GHF food distribution sites, where hundreds, even thousands, of starving children were shot at as they rushed desperately to collect food for their families. Thousands more children died of starvation.
If you thought it couldn’t get any more nihilist, think again. In May 2025, Netanyahu told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, “We are destroying more and more homes, they have nowhere to return to. The only inevitable outcome will be the desire of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip.” He clarified to the parliamentarians that the “main problem” preventing Palestinians from leaving the Strip is with the countries where they would emigrate to, not Israel. The relentless bombing continued through the summer and into the second anniversary of October 7, when a ceasefire was finally agreed and announced by President Trump the following day.
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After a yearlong hiatus I returned to writing—my only weapon—as Israel’s war in Gaza roared back into our lives in spring 2025. I decided that I had no intention of letting the bombs have the last word, nor would I allow the engineers of destruction to write the final chapter in Gaza’s blood. Headfirst and heart heavy, I threw myself into writing the book that became Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East, a chronicle of the first twelve days of the war that shattered Israel and shook the very foundations of the Middle East.
Why twelve days? Why not more, or less? Well, because twelve days were enough. It took no more than twelve days, from Netanyahu’s October 7 war speech to Biden’s October 19 rare Oval Office speech, to expose the anatomy of Israel’s war, its intent, its strategy, and the method to its madness. After that, the rest is history. Horrific history. Although disguised in the language of “security” and “self-defense,” what followed was no accident of war or collateral damage. After those twelve days, the bloodshed followed a deliberate design. The genocide was not a slip; it was the result of a predetermined strategy for which there existed a blueprint, if not a premeditated decision.
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From Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East: Origins of a Genocide by Marwan Bishara. Copyright © 2026. Available from Haymarket Books.
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