Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Gaza Genocide Page 1 of 3

I’d Like To Be Optimistic About the Latest Gaza Peace Plan

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On October 9, 2025

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Sounds on good on screen:

Hamas & Palestinian factions agree to Gaza ceasefire plan. A formal agreement is set to be signed today, Thursday, in Egypt, with Hamas officially approving the deal. The agreement includes the immediate opening of five crossings to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, adjustments to the Gaza withdrawal map, and the release of 20 Israeli captives alive in the first phase. The deal is guaranteed by the U.S., Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey, ensuring that attacks will not resume as long as both parties adhere to its terms.

But, after all, this is basically the same agreement as in January, with release of Israeli captives in phases. You’ll remember how quickly Israel broke that deal. The only good, possibly, will be getting some food and medicine in Gaza. (Remember, again, that Israel let in very little last time.)

Netanyahu, and most Israelis, want to commit genocide. The polling and their own statements are really clear on this. The vast majority of Israelis don’t want to stop till all Palestinians are dead or gone, whether from Gaza or the West bank.

That means the only way a deal like this can work is if Trump will cut off all military supplies in order to enforce it if Israel breaks it. Odds of that? Pretty close to zero, I’d guess.

Rarely have I wanted to be wrong about something more than this, however, and I pray I am. The counter-argument is that Israel is, in fact, exhausted economically by the war, reservists are increasingly refusing to call up, and Israel has become a pariah nation and thus it is time to declare victory, at least for now. May that argument prove correct.

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The Nuremberg Movement

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On August 14, 2025

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It’s time to start a movement for new Nuremberg trials. After WWII many Nazis were tried for genocide and various war crimes, and they were executed.

I remember a long time ago my friend Stirling Newberry told me that western elites had only one moral rule, “Don’t be Nazis.” Anything short of being a Nazi was OK: mass murder that didn’t quite reach genocide, mass impoverishment, police states that didn’t quite reach “we are the Gestapo” levels, etc…

This struck me as not much of a red line, you can do a lot of evil without being as bad as the Nazis, after all.

But they’ve crossed even this red line. They’re Nazis. Trump, Trudeau, Biden, Harris, almost every leader and politician in Europe, outside of Spain and Ireland, certainly virtually every German and British politician, has aided and abetted genocide. We’re not just talking looking the other way, they’ve locked up those opposed to genocide and they’ve sent weapons and in many cases (Britain) they’ve actively defended Israel from those trying to stop the genocide militarily, like Yemen and Hezbollah.

Nor are we just talking politicians. One journalist was executed at Nuremberg, and most of the journalists in the West have covered for genocide now. The New York Times, the BBC, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Guardian, the Telegram, every major TV news show, etc, etc… They knew genocide was happening, they lied about it, they did everything they could to make sure it could continue.

And, of course, almost every Israeli politician and almost all members of America’s congress, many members of Britain’s and Canada’s House of Commons, most Germany politicians, most EU officials, and so on.

All of these people need to hang from the neck till dead. All of them. If we don’t have “supports genocide” as a red line, we have no red lines at all.

This isn’t politically possible now. They’re in power. But they won’t be in power forever. Never forget. Never forgive. And ensure justice.

Fair trials and if they aided genocide, hang them from the neck till dead. There is no statute of limitations on genocide.

And if you’re completely selfish, understand this. They think they can even commit genocide and get away with it. This time it was a bunch of brown people in another country, but having crossed that line, the next line is “what if we mass murder white people in the first world? Could be we get away with it? They let us make them poor and homeless, is killing them that big a step? They’re just useless eaters, anyway.”

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Real Time Iraq War Death Estimates Were Wildly Off

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On July 29, 2025

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During the Iraq War, we were fed very low death estimates:

  • The Iraq War Death count had an upper estimate of 43,000 by the end of 2006.
  • The Iraqi Ministry of health and the US armed forces (really the same thing) said about 20,000 by the end of 2005.

But when the Lancet did a population study in 2006 they came up with about 655,000, and in 2013 PLOS revised that number down to 461,000.

Either way the Iraq War Death count was about ten times too small. The official count was at least twenty times too small.

The Gaza Health Ministry’s death count is simply not credible, especially as it has risen more slowly over time, which is the opposite of what one would expect as water and food, medical services and supplies and shelter have all become radically rarer as the genocide has continued. It is surely an undercount. The indirect to direct-deaths ratio is also likely to be higher than in previous wars. The US deliberately hit a lot civilian infrastructure in Iraq and dismantled the economic supply networks which had kept Iraqis fed, but it wasn’t going all out to kill civilians or trying to demolish every building in Iraq.

We are also now into the early stages of a famine, and the amount of aid that Israel is letting in is pathetically small, plus in most cases to get it Palestinians have to risk being shot, and all accounts are that a few hundred Gazans do indeed get shot every day trying to get a few scraps food.

The last official death toll number from the Gaza Ministry of Health was 59,866. Multiply that by ten, and you have a death toll of 600K, and that’s a conservative estimate, and is before the worst of the famine hit.

This is genocide. It is entirely deliberate and being done with the aid of most of the Western world. We now know that our leaders, had they been Germans in the 30s and 40s, would have gone along with the Holocaust and in many cases, enthusiastically participated. We also know that most of our journalists would have provided cover, along with most of our pundits. (Yglesias is a good example as is almost everyone at the New York Times, BBC, Washington Post and so on.) Britain, Germany and America in particular have gone after anti-genocide activists hard.

Out entire elite class is not just OK with genocide, they’re onside and actively helping it.

If you think they wouldn’t do it to you, you’re in lalaland. They’ve proved they are OK with mass murder, and even if you’re white, don’t think it would save you. Look at Trump’s massive health care and food cuts, or Labour’s Starmer taking away aid from disabled people and cutting off heating for old folks, not to mention both being completely callous towards the exploding number of homeless people. In America far more homes are empty than there are homeless people, yet all the vast majority of politicians do is criminalize homelessness more and more.

You aren’t even the dirt beneath your elites’ fingertips. The only reason you aren’t Soylent Green yet is they haven’t been able to figure out how to make it pay. But your deaths mean nothing to them if they have any reason to kill you, no matter how slight. Your suffering isn’t a consideration either. They’ve spent 50 years systematically reducing pensions, health care and increasing poverty so they could make themselves richer.

You’re just sheep. They’ll sheer you as long as they can, and when they have any reason to, they’ll slaughter you.

And not only won’t they lose any sleep over hurting and eventually killing you, they’ll feel good about doing so.

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The Serious Starvation Deaths Are About To Begin In Gaza

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On July 21, 2025

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I’ll keep this one brief. Almost no food or water has gone into Gaza for months. What I’m seeing is that it’s hit the crisis point. I’d expect a few hundred thousand more people to die in the next two to three months. The minimum death toll pre-Trump was about 400K as I read it, and probably more.

This is a holocaust.

There wasn’t much anyone who reads this site could have done about it, but I hope, for your sake, that you were consistently against it.

As for Israel, they have damned themselves and so has every politician and corporate executive in the world who could have done something and didn’t.

Forgive the lack of a long article with sources. We’re past that. Anyone who doesn’t see this and doesn’t expect it at this point simply doesn’t care to know.

Iran Screws Up & Gaza Death Toll

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On June 24, 2025

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So, Iran has accepted the ceasefire offer. Iran was winning, as best I can tell. The Iron Dome could not stop their more advanced missiles and was days from running out of interceptor missiles (maybe two weeks if the US sent its entire stockpile). The US attack on Iran’s nuclear facility was a dud, the enriched uranium has been moved, etc…

I said that Iran had finally gotten over its caution, and that I feared it would revert, and so it has. It’s clear that the sooner Khameini dies and is replaced, the safer Iran will be — especially because that will be the end of the non-nuclear fatwa. (It should be noted that 60 percent-enriched is enough to create a dirty bomb which would render Israel uninhabitable, and Iran should inform Israel that it has created a number of them, ready for missile deployment.)

Iran could have kept going and insisted that Israel withdraw from Gaza and Lebanon (to be confirmed by Russian and Chinese satellites). Once again, Iran has abandoned its proxies as disposable proxies, not allies.

That said, this is an Iranian victory, just a very limited one. Israel and the US were the ones who begged for a ceasefire, not Iran.

Meanwhile, we have further confirmation that Gaza casualties are likely at least 377K.

A year ago, I estimated Gazan casualties at 500K. A new estimate has come out based on fairly conservative metrics, which puts them at a million.

(Source)

I find this estimate plausible, unfortunately — especially given the ongoing starvation campaign. (Regular reports now come in that the few aid stations permitted by Israel are being used to draw civilians in, then murder them.)

I reiterate that the only moral nation in the world appears to be Ansar-Allah’s Yemen. In a few years, everyone is going to be scrambling to pretend they were against this genocide or “didn’t know,” but we have the receipts.

There is no statute of limitations for genocide.

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The Embassy Shooter’s Manifest

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On May 23, 2025

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From Ken Klippenstein, written by Elias Rodriguez

The Embassy shooter’s manifesto is short, to the point and entirely sane. I won’t wring my hands and say I think he was wrong, I will merely note that it is illegal to kill Israelis, and that unlike the butchers of Gaza, he will be punished.

Explication

May 20, 2025

Halintar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning. In the wake of an act people look for a text to fix its meaning, so here’s an attempt. The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification. Instead of reading descriptions mostly we watch them unfold on video, sometimes live. After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well. At time of writing the Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force, at least ten thousand lie under rubble, and who knows how many thousands more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity. The Gaza information office includes the ten thousand under the rubble with the dead in their own count. In news reports there have been those “ten thousand” under the rubble for months now, despite the continual making of more rubble and repeated bombing of rubble again and again and the bombing of tents amid the rubble. Like the Yemen death toll which had been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi-UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500k dead, all of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount. I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more. More have been murdered since March of this year than in “Protective Edge” and “Cast Lead” put together. What more at this point can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children. We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians’ forgiveness. They’ve let us know as much.

An armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions. Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point. Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West. Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings, too. But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much. The Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians. Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they’ll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they’re doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright. Aaron Bushnell and others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre and the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home. We can’t let them succeed. Their sacrifices were not made in vain.

The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion, then. The impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires. A surgeon who treated victims of the Mayan genocide by the Guatemalan state recounts an instance in which he was operating on a patient who’d been critically injured during a massacre when, suddenly, armed gunmen entered the room and shot the patient to death on his operating table, laughing as they killed him. The physician said the worst part was seeing the killers, well known to him, openly swagger down local streets in the years after.

Elsewhere a man of conscience once attempted to throw Robert McNamara off a Martha’s Vineyard-bound ferry into the sea, incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam as he sat in the ferry’s lounge laughing with friends. The man took issue with McNamara’s “very posture, telling you, ‘My history is fine, and I can be slumped over a bar like this with my good friend Ralph here and you’ll have to lump it.'” The man did not succeed in heaving McNamara off a catwalk into the water, the former secretary of state managed to cling to the railing and clamber back to his feet, but the assailant explicated the value of the attempt by saying “Well, I got him outside, just the two of us, and suddenly his history wasn’t so fine, was it?”

A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn’t exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.

I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*****

Free Palestine

-Elias Rodriguez

 

What Do You Call Two Dead Nazis?

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On May 22, 2025

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A good start.

So, someone killed two Israeli diplomats in D.C., and everyone is crying crocodile tears and screaming about anti-semitism. (One of them was a Christian fundamentalist, as an aside.)

These two diplomats are agents of a genocidal state. Their job is to keep the weapons and ammunition flowing to Israel so that Israel can kill more Palestinians, wipe out the last remaining hospital, torture Palestinians, rape Palestinians (including, it appears, with dogs), deliberately snipe children in the head, cause a huge famine, and turn every building in Gaza into dust.

And I’ve left a number of sickening crimes out.

So, am I sad they are dead? No. Am I going to pretend I give a shit when someone who supports genocide winds up dead? No. Every single pious well-wishing for Biden is the equivalent of wishing Petain, the leader of Vichy France, who helped the Holocaust along, a good life.

All of these people are knowingly involved in genocide. They have had many opportunities to stop supporting mass murder, and they have refused every single one of them.

They are all, forgive me for using the word, evil. The bad guys. Torture. Rape. Mass murder. Deliberate killing of children.

It is my dream that every single one of them will eventually hang from the neck for their crimes. No exceptions. I think it would be wise to add the corporate leadership of companies like Palantir and Microsoft, both of which are helping the genocide along.

This is a moral stance, but it is also a pragmatic stance. People who have gotten away with genocide once are not the sort of people anyone wise wants in their society, or in a position of power anywhere. Once could easily become twice.

You don’t even have to give a damn about Palestinians. You just have to have good judgment, and a concern for your own neck and the lives, rectums, and limbs of people you care about.

From the neck. Unil dead. For everyone who knowingly aided or committed genocide.

(Addendum): If this is someone lashing out in rage at any Jew and just happening to kill two Israeli diplomats I can only say, “Thank God he killed evil people,” and note that the reason that people are conflating “Jewish” with “Zionist,” as I have written repeatedly, is that Israel constantly says they’re the same thing, and then goes on to mass murder children, rape, torture, and so on. Some people are going to believe them, “Oh, Israel is Jewish, not Zionist. The Israelis say they’re the same thing, and so do many non-Israeli Jews. I guess they know what they’re talking about.” Nobody and nothing causes more anti-semitism in the world than Israel itself. For them to cry crocodile tears about anti-Jewish racism after plastering themselves with the Torah then covering themselves in the blood of children is nauseating.

And, for a little leavening of the anger and rage, a classic:

Amidst Everything Else, the Palestinian Genocide Is Picking Up Steam

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On May 16, 2025

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A healthy person can survive forty to sixty days without food, depending on how fat they were to begin with. Women last longer than men (women are better at all extreme endurance feats I am aware of).

It’s been about two months since Israel cut off all food and water to Gaza. There were storehouses and some food, and it took about 30-40 days to exhaust the stores, but even before that, there wasn’t enough.

And even before this cut-off there wasn’t enough. There was a brief period after Trump took power with supplies moving in large amounts, but since the start of the crisis, Israel has been choking off food, medicine, and everything else, and Israeli citizens have stopped and hijacked aid trucks.

So, there aren’t any fat people in Gaza, except for some Zionist genociders who cosplay as soldiers. Most people in Gaza haven’t had enough food for well over a year.

Palestinians are going to start dying in massive numbers right about now, and the deaths will accelerate.

This is the first live-streamed genocide. Everyone knows it’s happening, and no one except the Ansar-Allah is doing shit, though credit to Hezbollah for trying until Mossad ripped them apart. (I do maintain Hezbollah’s strategy was awful, but that’s water under the bridge. At least they tried.)

I include Iran in this general indictment. It has enough missiles to really hurt Israel and proved that it could get thru the “Iron” Dome.

But, again, they’ve done more than pretty much every other country in the world.

I will note, for the record, though that it’s unlikely to matter much, that for the rest of my life I will judge people based on whether they were against the Palestinian genocide at the time. In a few years almost everyone will pretend they were against it, but we have receipts. And even if you are good to puppies and children, give lots of money to charities and are perfectly aligned with my politics on everything else, I will regard you as evil and a piece of human garbage, who could only improve the world by committing suicide, if you were OK with this.

This genocide could be stopped tomorrow by the US simply halting all shipments and aid to Israel. Even Europe, were it to act similarly, might be able to stop it.

But no one with the power to do anything decisive, is. Which means they’re all monsters.

And if you are depraved enough to think “who cares, it doesn’t affect me?”, let me assure you that on top of being human filth, you are also stupid and a fool. If they’ll do it to Palestinians, they’d do it to you and yours if they thought it was in their interest and they could get away with it.

Which, so far, they have every reason to believe they could.

Certain actions, like genocide, rape, torture and deliberate child murder have to be off the table entirely for the protection of everyone. You never want to normalize them, even if you are an evil piece of shit, because once something becomes routine, who knows who is next on the table?

Welcome to Hell.

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