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Unless those complicit in the Gaza genocide are held to account, the brutal consequences will be felt far beyond that shattered land. The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas offered a respite for traumatised survivors. But Donald Trump’s declaration that he is not confident it will last has prompted renewed terror. From the new president’s decision to lift the pause on shipments of 2,000lb bombs to Israel, which were dropped repeatedly on civilians in so-called safe zones, to his pick for the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who once said there was “really no such thing as a Palestinian”, those hoping for lasting peace are right to worry that the carnage will soon begin again.
The assault on Gaza is normalising an almost limitless violence against civilians, all facilitated and justified by multiple western governments and media outlets. It is worth recalling the destruction of Guernica by Nazi and Italian forces during the Spanish civil war nearly nine decades ago. Guernica was one of the first aerial mass bombardments of a civilian community, and it scandalised the world. The then US president, Franklin D Roosevelt, deplored how “civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered from the air”. The Times journalist George Steer wrote that, “In the form of its execution and the scale of destruction it wrought, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history.” Alas, Guernica turned out to be a trial run for the aerial obliteration of European cities a few years later: the Nazi military leader Hermann Göring told the Nuremberg trials that Guernica allowed the Nazis to test out their Luftwaffe.
What of Gaza? Last week, Joe Biden claimed he told Benjamin Netanyahu, “You can’t be carpet-bombing these communities”, at the start of Israel’s military onslaught in October 2023. Presumably, the former president believed telling the world he has said this would aid his rehabilitation. But it seems more like an inadvertent confession of criminal complicity. The US, after all, handed Israel nearly $18bn worth of weapons the following year, when he knew, or should have known, that Netanyahu’s bombing campaign violated international law. In the first three weeks of the conflict, according to the NGO Airwars, at least 5,139 civilians were killed. This was a conservative estimate; the true number is probably higher. The bombs that killed them were supplied predominantly by the US.
What was the military purpose of this? The US doesn’t seem to have an answer. Its former secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said last week that Hamas had “recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost”. If that is true, it undermines the entire stated aim of Israel’s brutality, which was to eliminate Hamas. Israel’s other claimed objective was to bring back hostages by military means. Yet, as a commentator in the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom recently put it, “We can state with certainty that military pressure has killed more hostages than it has returned alive.” Most hostages have been released during ceasefires, not as a result of IDF operations. It’s hard not to conclude that Israel’s actions amounted to slaughter for its own sake.
Most of the western media has played a pivotal role in normalising these obscenities. From October 2023 to January 2025, 1,091 babies were killed in Gaza, more than the total number of Israeli civilians killed on 7 October. A total of 17,400 children have been killed – the equivalent of one every 30 minutes. A recent study in the Lancet reported the total number of deaths in Gaza were probably an underestimate.
The Times newspaper splashed on a story about lurid and unverified allegations of Hamas cutting babies’ throats; two days later, it followed up with another story about the allegedly “mutilated” babies. The unevidenced allegations were later found to be rumours. More than 1,000 Palestinian dead babies aren’t rumours – they really have been killed by Israeli forces. As far as I’m aware, no equivalent Times front page exists.
The horror is not limited to the massacre of children. Early in the conflict, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. Two US government agencies then concluded last spring that the Israeli state was deliberately blocking shipments of essentials from entering Gaza. All 36 hospitals in Gaza have been repeatedly attacked; only 17 are still partly operational. Amputations and caesarian sections are taking place without anaesthetics, and more than 1,000 healthcare workers have been killed. By the summer of 2024, nearly 10,000 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, were imprisoned. The United Nations has catalogued horrific reports of torture and sexual assault: men and women kept in cage-like enclosures, tied to beds in diapers and blindfolded, stripped naked, deprived of food, water and sleep, and tortured with cigarette burns, waterboarding, electrocutions and even rape and allegations of gang rape.
None of this should come as a surprise. Israeli general Ghassan Alian, charged with civilian affairs in Israel’s occupied territories, described Gaza’s civilians as “human beasts”, promising to punish them with a total blockade and subject them to “hell”. An unnamed Israeli defence official said that Gaza would “eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.”
Unlike Guernica, the crimes committed in Gaza have been documented in real time. Israeli soldiers gleefully posted evidence on social media and survivors took to the internet to share footage of what they were enduring. Many of those survivors were, in the words of the Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, “broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something”.
Yet the UK government has continued to arm Israel, and only paused 30 of 350 arms licences after significant public and legal pressure. Meanwhile, most of the British media defended or whitewashed Israel’s atrocities, and failed to link its criminal intent with its murderous actions. Faced with the potential of a reckoning over their own complicity, political leaders and media outlets have sought to portray the opponents of Israel’s genocide as dangerous extremists. The former home secretary Suella Braverman called protests “hate marches”; the Sun labelled them “hate demos”. The police crackdown on protests in London this weekend was merely the latest example of this tendency.
The destruction of Guernica provoked widespread shock, but it’s worth remembering that after the attack, far more cataclysmic aerial bombardment became a new norm. An estimated 1,650 were killed there; in Gaza, the official figure of 47,283 Palestinians is likely a drastic underestimate, but the greater atrocity of Gaza does not trigger anything like the same establishment outrage today.
There must be a reckoning. Those who continued supplying weapons to Israel ought to be put on trial for helping to facilitate it. Those who used their media platforms to justify it should see their reputations in tatters. Without that accountability, even more depraved violence will become normal, even acceptable.
This risk is particularly acute in an era when the far right is forming governments and when the climate emergency threatens even greater global turmoil. The complicit know that the only way to defend themselves is by demonising those who stood against genocide, and turning the world upside down. But if they get their way, that world will burn.
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Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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