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The Israeli war on Gaza is epitomized by the story of Beit Lahia, a small Palestinian town in the northern part of the Strip.
When Israel launched its ground operations in Gaza, Beit Lahia was already largely destroyed due to many days of relentless Israeli bombardment, which killed thousands. Still, the border town resisted, leading to a hermetic Israeli siege, which was never lifted, even when the Israeli military redeployed out of much of northern Gaza in January 2024.
Beit Lahia is a largely isolated town, a short distance away from the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel. It is surrounded mostly by agricultural areas that make it nearly impossible to defend.
Yet, a year of grisly Israeli war and genocide in Gaza did not end the fighting there. On the contrary, 2024 is ending where it started, with intense fighting on all fronts in Gaza and with Beit Lahia — a town that was supposedly “conquered” earlier on — still leading the fight.
Beit Lahia is a microcosm of Israel’s failed war in the Strip: a bloody grind that has led nowhere, despite the massive destruction, the repeated ethnic cleansing of the population, the starvation, and the genocide. Every day of Israel’s terrible war on the Palestinians serves as a reminder that there are no military solutions and that the Palestinian will cannot be broken, no matter the cost or the sacrifices involved.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, remains unconvinced. He began this year with more promises of “total victory” and ends it wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges.
The issuing of an arrest warrant for the Israeli leader was a reiteration of a similar position taken by the International Court of Justice at the start of 2024. However, that court’s position was not as strong as many had hoped or wanted to believe. The world’s highest court in January ordered Israel “to take action to prevent acts of genocide,” but stopped short of ordering Tel Aviv to halt its war.
Israel’s objectives have remained unclear in 2024, although some Israeli politicians have provided clues as to what the war on Gaza is really all about. In January, several ministers, including 12 from Netanyahu’s Likud party, took part in a conference calling for the resettlement of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. “Without settlements, there is no security,” extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said.
For that to happen, the Palestinian people themselves, not merely those fighting on the ground, had to be tamed, broken, and defeated. Thus the “flour massacres,” a new Israeli war tactic that aimed to kill as many Palestinians as possible as they waited for the few aid trucks that were allowed to reach northern Gaza.
On Feb. 29, more than 100 Gazans were killed while queueing for aid. They were mown down by Israeli soldiers as they desperately tried to lay their hands on a loaf of bread, some baby milk, or a bottle of water. This scene was repeated again and again in the north, as well as in other parts of the Gaza Strip, throughout the year.
The aim was to starve the Palestinians in the north so that they would be forced to flee to other parts of the Strip. Famine actualized as early as January and many of those who tried to flee south were killed anyway.
From the early days of the war, Israel understood that, to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, they must target all aspects of life in the Strip. This included hospitals, bakeries, markets, power grids, water stations, and the like.
Gaza’s hospitals, of course, received a large share of the attacks. In March, Israel attacked the Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City with greater ferocity than before. When it finally withdrew on April 1, the Israeli army destroyed the entire compound, leaving behind mass graves containing hundreds of bodies, mostly medical staff, women, and children. They even executed several patients.
Aside from a few statements of concern by Western leaders, little was done to bring the genocide to an end. Only when seven international aid workers with the World Central Kitchen charity were killed by Israel was a global outcry heard, leading to the first and so far only Israeli apology of the entire war.
Desperate to distract from its failure in Gaza, as well as the northern border with Lebanon, and keen on presenting the Israeli public with any kind of victory, the Israeli military began escalating its war beyond Gaza. This included the strike on the Iranian Consulate building in Damascus on April 1. Despite repeated attempts, which included the July assassination in Iran of the head of Hamas’ political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, an all-out regional war has not yet come to pass.
Beit Lahia is a microcosm of Israel’s failed war in the Strip: a bloody grind that has led nowhere, despite the massive destruction.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud
Another escalation was taking place, this time not by Netanyahu but by millions of people around the world who demanded an end to the Israeli war. A focal point of the protests were the student movements that spread across US college campuses and, ultimately, worldwide. Instead of allowing free speech to flourish, however, America’s largest academic institutions resorted to summoning the police, who violently shut down many of the protests and arrested hundreds of students, many of whom were not allowed to return to their colleges.
Meanwhile, the US continued to block international efforts aimed at producing a ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council. Ultimately, on May 31, US President Joe Biden delivered a speech conveying what he termed an “Israeli proposal” to end the war. After some delay, Hamas accepted the proposal, but Israel rejected it. In his rejection, Netanyahu referred to Biden’s speech as “incorrect” and “incomplete.” Strangely, but also unsurprisingly, the White House blamed the Palestinians for the failed initiative.
Losing faith in the American leadership, some European countries began changing their foreign policy doctrines on the conflict, with Ireland, Norway, and Spain recognizing the state of Palestine on May 28. The decisions were largely symbolic but indicated that Western unity around Israel was faltering.
Israel remained unfazed and, despite international warnings, invaded the Rafah area in southern Gaza on May 7, seizing control of the Philadelphi Corridor — a buffer zone between Gaza and the Egyptian border that extends for 14 km.
Netanyahu’s government insisted that only war could bring the hostages back. There was very little success with that strategy, however. In June, Israel, with logistical support from the US and other Western countries, managed to rescue four of the hostages held in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. To do so, Israel killed at least 276 Palestinians and wounded 800 more.
In August, another heart-wrenching massacre took place, this time at the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where 93 people, mostly women and children, were murdered in a single Israeli strike. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, women and children were the main victims of the Israeli genocide, accounting for 70 percent as of Nov. 8.
An earlier report by The Lancet medical journal stated that, if the war had stopped in July, “186,000 or even more” Palestinians would have been killed. The war, however, went on. The genocide in Gaza seemed to maintain the same killing rate, despite the major regional developments, including the Iranian-Israeli tit-for-tat strikes and the major Israeli ground operation in Lebanon.
Still, Israel failed to achieve any of its strategic goals of the war. Even the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in battle on Oct. 16 would not alter the course of the war in any way.
Israel’s frustration grew by leaps and bounds throughout the year. Its desperate attempt to control the global narrative on the Gaza genocide largely failed. In July, after listening to the testimonies of more than 50 countries, the International Court of Justice issued a landmark ruling that “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal.”
That ruling, which expressed international consensus on the matter, was in September translated into a UN General Assembly resolution “demanding an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine within the next 12 months.”
All of this effectively meant that Israel’s attempt at normalizing its occupation of Palestine and its quest to illegally annex the West Bank were considered null and void by the international community. Israel, however, doubled down, venting its rage against West Bank Palestinians, who have also been experiencing one of the worst Israeli pogroms in many years.
The Palestinian Health Ministry stated in late November that at least 777 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023, while hundreds more had been wounded and more than 11,700 arrested.
To make matters worse, Smotrich called for the full annexation of the West Bank. This call was made soon after the election of Donald Trump as the next US president, an event that initially inspired optimism among Israeli leaders, but later caused concern that Trump may not serve the role of savior for Israel after all.
The International Criminal Court last month issued its historic ruling to seek the arrest of Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The decision represented a measure of hope, however faint, that the world is finally ready to hold Israel accountable for its many crimes.
The year 2025 could indeed represent that watershed moment. This remains to be seen. However, as far as Palestinians are concerned, even with the failure of the international community to stop the genocide and rein in Israel, their steadfastness, or “sumoud,” will remain strong until freedom is finally attained.
— Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and author. He is editor of The Palestine Chronicle and nonresident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappe, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out.”
X: @RamzyBaroud