The Last Phase of the OZ-Backed Gaza Genocide Has Begun

Twelve weeks ago, Netanyahu and his far-right cronies announced they’d be launching a full-scale military attack upon Rafah: the southernmost region of the Gaza Strip, which had once been deemed a safe zone, and its numbers have now swelled to 1.5 million mainly displaced people.

The depraved state of Israel is also purposefully starving the more than two million Palestinians of Gaza. And those in the north of the Strip, who, early on, got the same devasting treatment that Tel Aviv is about to mete out upon Rafah’s starving people, are now in full blown famine.

The only democracy and fascist, apartheid state in the Middle East, Israel has been wantonly killing civilians, children, women and men for over half a year now. And over 40,000 Palestinians have been murdered, if those lost under rubble are included in the toll.

And Israel has had a particular focus on targeting medical staff and journalists, which has highlighted why international laws to forbid this are in place.

Gaza’s healthcare system has also been a focus, with hospitals now sites of major military operations. And these assaults, primarily targeting staff and patients, have seen facilities destroyed, with mass graves uncovered at al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals, speaking of torture and execution. 

Israel has been committing an open act of genocide for seven months, and despite western media and governments attempting to supress local knowledge of this, the mass killings have been live online the entire time, which has served to reveal the duplicity of our systems like never before.

And now the last leg of the genocide, the invasion of Rafah, has begun.

A betrayal of the people

For its part, the Albanese government has provided unbridled support for Israel, as the PM and other key ministers have sung amongst the ‘Israeli right to defend itself’ chorus, to the point that the nation has become embroiled and complicit in the gravest colonial crime since World War II.

This did not have to be the case, however. But with the nation’s foreign policy in lockstep with Washington’s outlook, which is an arrangement that Labor has only heightened over its last year of AUKUS politicking, there seems to have been little choice but to facilitate a large-scale genocide.

And in an example of how power corrupts, federal Labor took office with the promise of recognising the state of Palestine. Yet, since last October, current PM Anthony Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong, who’d long championed the Palestinian cause, have enabled genocide against them.

Albanese held a failed referendum last October, which proposed an Indigenous voice to parliament be established to address First Nations issues, yet at the same time, the Labor administration had already begun providing support for the mass slaughter of Indigenous Palestinians.

Over the last eight months, instead of forging conciliation with First Peoples, any notion of such an outcome has been dropped, as Canberra’s been providing cover for the apartheid Israeli state in its settler colonial project, with fellow AUKUS power, the US, being its major bankroller.

Not only did Albanese last year permit Australia to be become a domestic source for military resources under US law, but our nation is continuing to supply Israel with exports of “arms and ammunition” during the waging of a genocide, with $1.5 million worth sent there in February.

And the once known-to-be hard left PM is now meeting with the leaders of major Australian Jewish organisations to condemn the Gaza solidarity protesters at local universities as antisemitic, which is a charge that relies on the conflation of opposition to genocide equalling Jewish prejudice.

Indeed, the outcomes of this conflation are so destructive that one might consider the Australian PM is potentially creating long-term social fractures locally, in order to placate the short-term needs of his US political masters and those of the genocidal Netanyahu regime.