genocide

Jamal’s nine-year-old body is paralysed. He experiences constant, uncontrollable, violent spasms. He cannot sleep through them. Nor can his mother. To keep the spasms under control, a drug called baclofen is required. It relaxes the muscles and stops the shaking. Suddenly halting the use of baclofen can have serious health consequences.

Jamal’s mother, my cousin Shaima, wrote to me from the family’s tent in al-Mawasi displacement camp in Gaza a week ago. It was her son’s seventh day without the medicine. The violent, neurological spasms that seize Jamal’s limbs leave him screaming out in pain.

Baclofen is unavailable anywhere in Gaza: not in hospitals, not in clinics, not in Ministry of Health warehouses, and not even through the Red Cross. Shaima has searched all of them. It is one of the many medicines blocked by Israel, along with painkillers and antibiotics.

Jamal now endures dozens of spasms each day. There is no alternative medication or substitute. There is no relief, only pain.

Jamal’s story is not to be told, if the likes of former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are to have their way.

Speaking at the United States-based, Israel-focused MirYam Institute last month, he said, “We need to make sure that the story is told properly so that when the history books write this, they don’t write about the victims of Gaza”. At this line, the audience applauded.

Pompeo went on to say that every war has civilian casualties, but the true victims in this case are the Israeli people. His concern is that October 7th and the war in Gaza would be remembered “incorrectly”.

It seems Pompeo wants to argue that the people of Gaza are just “collateral damage” in Israel’s war.  They are to remain nameless, faceless, forgotten. He wants their stories erased from the pages of human history.

His remarks reflect the next phase in Israel’s genocide. Dissatisfied with its progress in eliminating Gaza’s people, their mosques, their schools and universities, their cultural institutions, economy and land, Israel and its Christian-Zionist allies like Pompeo have now embarked on the erasure of memory and martyrdom.

The campaign is evident both inside and beyond Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) – an institution that has long preserved the status of the Palestinian refugee population and safeguarded their right of return under international law – is being systematically undermined and dismantled. TikTok – one of the few social media platforms where Palestinian voices have had a bit more freedom to speak – is now shadow banning and restricting pro-Palestinian accounts, after being taken over by an Israel-friendly conglomerate.

In the US, United Kingdom, and elsewhere, local laws are weaponised to come after pro-Palestinian youth, with scores being detained for using what should be their protected right to free speech. Laws are even passed at the state level in the US to shape what can be taught at schools about Israel and Palestine.

But what Pompeo – and those like him who misread biblical verses to justify their support for Israel and its genocide – do not understand is that Palestinians have faced erasure before and have overcome it. We will do so again.

In thinking about memory and bearing witness, the word “martyr” comes to mind. “Martyr” comes from the Greek word “martus”, meaning “witness”, and features prominently in the Bible. Similarly, the word “shaheed” in Arabic is derived from the root of the word for “witness” or “witnessing”. As the word evolved, it also took on connotations of violent suffering due to one’s beliefs, and even a sense of heroic steadfastness due to the scale of one’s sacrifice.

I can think of no better word than “shaheed” to describe Jamal and the people around him: they are living martyrs. Jamal’s little body has witnessed immense suffering; it has been pounded with the violence of the war, and he – like his mother – pushes on because of his overwhelming desire to live.

All around Jamal and Shaima’s tent are thousands of other tents. Day and night, each of them is pierced by the sound of Jamal’s screams. Inside the tents, cold and often wet from the recent floods, are thousands of other people who require urgent and important medical evacuation to hospitals.

The pain and suffering are immense, yet the likes of Pompeo continue to justify the ongoing and historically rooted process of the elimination of the Palestinian people.

The Palestinian people are also poets at heart. And what Pompeo – who devalues language, memory and history – will never understand is that the poet is a witness.

As Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in one of his verses:

Those who pass between fleeting words

Take your names with you and go

Rid our time of your hours, and go

Steal what you will from the blueness of the sea and the sands of memory

Take what pictures you will so as to understand

That which you never will:

How a stone from our land becomes the ceiling of our sky.

The Palestinian people will keep memory alive, just as we have kept alive the pain of Beit Daras, Deir Yassin, Jenin, Muhammad al-Durrah, Anas al-Sharif and the roots of every olive tree ripped from its soil. The Palestinian people, and millions in solidarity around the world, witnessed Israel’s destruction of Gaza. In defiance of Pompeo and honouring the living martyr Jamal, each of us will take the stones of Gaza and build a new sky.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Israel has killed more than 500 Palestinians since agreeing to end its genocidal war under a US-brokered ‘ceasefire’, which has been a truce in name only. Here are some of their stories.

While diplomatic circles welcome the recovery of the last Israeli captive’s remains in Gaza and the imminent partial reopening of the enclave’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt, a quieter, darker reality is taking shape on the ground.

According to comments by retired Israeli General Amir Avivi, who still advises the military, Israel has cleared land in Rafah, an area in the southern Gaza Strip that it had already flattened in more than two years of its genocidal war, to construct an enormous facility to entrench its military control and presence in Gaza for the long term.

Speaking to the Reuters news agency on Tuesday, Avivi described the project as a “big, organised camp” capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people, stating it would be equipped with “ID checks, including facial recognition”, to track every Palestinian entering or leaving.

Corroborating Avivi’s claims, exclusive analysis by Al Jazeera’s Digital Investigations Team confirms that ground preparations for this project are already well under way.

Satellite imagery captured from December 2 through Monday reveals extensive clearing operations in western Rafah. The analysis identifies an area of about 1.3sq km (half a square mile) that has undergone systematic levelling.

According to the investigation, the operations went beyond mere debris removal and involved the flattening of land previously devastated by Israeli air strikes.

The cleared zone is located adjacent to two Israeli military posts, suggesting the new camp will be under direct and immediate military supervision. The satellite evidence aligns with reports that the facility is to act as a controlled “holding pen” rather than a humanitarian shelter.

The trap of return

To analysts in Gaza, no humanitarian intent is behind this projected high-tech infrastructure, which they say is in fact a trap for Palestinians.

“What they are building is, in reality, a human-sorting mechanism reminiscent of Nazi-era selection points,” Wissam Afifa, a Gaza-based political analyst, told Al Jazeera. “It is a tool for racial filtering and a continuation of the genocide by other means.”

The reopening of the Rafah crossing, tentatively scheduled for Thursday, according to The Jerusalem Post, comes with strict Israeli conditions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted on full “security control”.

For Palestinians hoping to return to Gaza, this means submitting to what Afifa describes as “human sorting stations”.

“This mechanism is designed to deter return,” Afifa said. “Palestinians will face interrogation, humiliation and the risk of arrest at these Israeli-run checkpoints just to go home.”

By leveraging facial recognition technology confirmed by Avivi, Israel is creating a high-risk ordeal for returnees, he said. Afifa argued it will force many Palestinians to choose exile over the risk of the “sorting station”, serving Israel’s longstanding goal of depopulating the Strip.

Permanent occupation within the ‘yellow line’

The Rafah camp is just one piece of a larger puzzle. Israel in effect occupies all of Gaza with a physical military presence in 58 percent of the Gaza Strip. Its forces directly occupy an area within the “yellow line”, a self-proclaimed Israeli military buffer zone established by an October ceasefire.

“We are witnessing the re-engineering of Gaza’s geography and demography,” Afifa said. “About 70 percent of the Strip is now under direct Israeli military management.”

This assessment of a permanent foothold is reinforced by Netanyahu’s own remarks to the Knesset on Monday. By declaring that “the next phase is demilitarisation”, or disarming Hamas, rather than reconstruction, Netanyahu signalled that the military occupation has no end date.

“The talk of ‘reconstruction’ starting in Rafah under Israeli security specifications suggests they are building a permanent security infrastructure, not a sovereign Palestinian state,” Afifa added.

A ‘show’ of peace

For the more than two million Palestinians in Gaza, the hope that the return of the last Israeli captive would bring relief has turned into frustration.

“There is a deep sense of betrayal,” Afifa said. “The world celebrated the release of one Israeli body as a triumph while two million Palestinians remain hostages in their own land.”

Afifa warned that the international silence regarding these “sorting stations” risks normalising them. If the Rafah model succeeds, it would transform Gaza from a besieged territory into a high-tech prison where the simple act of travel becomes a tool of subjugation, he said.

“Israel is behaving as if it is staying forever,” Afifa concluded. “And the world is watching the show of peace while the prison walls are being reinforced.”

Malik from Gaza had just graduated from high school when an Israeli air strike killed him and more than 20 of his relatives during the war. Over 2,700 Palestinian families have been wiped out in 27 months by Israel’s genocide.