Knowledge of the Relevant Facts

Israel has assassinated a record number of Palestinian journalists, refused to allow international reporters to enter Gaza, imposed internet blackouts during its most bloody assaults, asked Meta to take down more than thirty million social media posts, and allocated $150 million for its 2025 hasbara (propaganda) budget, a twenty-fold increase on previous years. And yet, despite all these efforts, global public opinion is turning against it.

A You Gov/Economist poll from mid-August found that 43 per cent of Americans believe Israel is committing genocide. According to a Washington Post poll, 61 per cent of American Jews consider that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza and nearly 40 per cent think that its conduct amounts to a genocide. There have been mass protests throughout Europe – 250,000 people taking to the streets in Amsterdam, two million across Italy – galvanised by the hijacking of the Global Sumud flotilla in international waters. Passengers say they were beaten and deprived of food, water, medication and sanitary pads. Most have now been released, including Carlos Perés Osario, though some apparently remain in Israeli custody. On her release, Greta Thunberg urged the world to keep its focus on Gaza, not her. Because the Israeli navy was busy intercepting the flotilla, Gazan fishermen could fish unimpeded for the first time in years.

In July, the Israeli Human Rights organisations B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights published reports entitled, respectively, Our Genocide and Genocide in Gaza. In late August, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights produced its report Voices of the Genocide, which included the testimonies of 1,225 victims. On 31 August, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution declaring that ‘Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.’

On 16 September, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded that ‘Israel’s actions amount to violations of its obligations under the Genocide Convention’. As evidence the report cited the bombing of the al-Basma Fertility Clinic in Gaza, which destroyed thousands of embryos; 36 strikes that killed only women and children; and a period of weeks, from 18 March to 9 April, in which 224 residential homes and tents for displaced persons were targeted. ‘Israel has used heavy unguided munitions with a wide margin of error in densely populated residential areas,’ the report stated.

On the question of intent, much fudged and fettered by those legal minds who wish to keep the high standards for genocide untainted by Palestinian blood, the UN commission says: ‘It is not necessary for the state to share the specific intent, as long as the state has full knowledge of the relevant facts.’ The staggeringly high level of civilian casualities (83 per cent) is recorded in Israel’s own military data.

The UK government, however, continues to deny that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. States have a legal duty not only to prevent and punish the crime, but also to avoid actions that might assist or enable it. UK arms exports to Israel reached a record high in June.

Israel’s ground offensive into Gaza City began in August with the mobilisation of sixty thousand reservists. This allowed Israel – bankrolled since October 2023 to the tune of $21.7 billion by the US – to level the remaining highrises, eradicate the skyline, carbonise the earth and further terrorise the starving population. For weeks, I did not hear from K., who had 39 family members in her tiny apartment in Gaza City. On 26 September she told me they had left for the south: ‘It is very difficult, for my heart, Gaza City, my house,’ she wrote.

Rulla Alami’s social media posts include a photo she took of the Rafah checkpoint in 2022 as she returned to Gaza after completing her medical studies in Egypt, about to marry and desperate to be home. In a more recent video she takes one last look around her apartment, not knowing where she will go next. She jolts, flinches, covers her ears at the bombing.

Another Instagram account has two videos I can’t forget. The first shows a modern, marble-floored flat with throw rugs and a breakfast bar. The footage is taken by someone hiding behind a door, filming a far window. Flames roar across it, like a forest fire, except they come on command, at the press of a button, engulfing orange wave after engulfing orange wave. The second image: a dead body spreadeagled on the street as passersby walk around it, barely glimpsing, averting their gaze.

Sara Alkhaldy, one of the contributors to We Are Still Here, a new Gazan anthology of student writing, says: ‘I wish I could bottle the scent of our home and take it with me as I left.’ Rula Elkhair writes of studying during displacement: ‘Even in places with no electricity, no water and no stable internet, I installed an eSIM on my phone and climbed to the rooftop under buzzing drones to download lectures. I took exams in cafés by the sea. I studied while hungry, while afraid, while grieving.’

On 14 September, Israel bombed the remaining structures of the Islamic University of Gaza, which was housing displaced students. By early September more than 86 per cent of the Gaza Strip was under Israeli displacement orders. ‘We’ve done the demolition phase,’ Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, boasted. Now it was time for a ‘real estate bonanza’.

Throughout August, Israeli protests demanding an end to the war and the release of the hostages stopped traffic and drew together varied coalitions in their hundreds of thousands (a marked increase from the earlier days of the genocide). On 18 August, Hamas agreed to a ceasefire proposal put forward by Qatari and Egyptian mediators, offering the return of half the Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinians detained by Israel. On 27 August, the Qatari Foreign Ministry was still waiting for a response from Israel. On 8 September, after Israel bombed three more highrises in Gaza – al-Ruya, Soussi and Mushtaha – the US president warned Hamas that they had to accept his terms. Hamas reiterated its readiness to release all Israelis in exchange for a clear announcement ending the war. On 10 September, an Israeli airstrike on Doha, targeting the Hamas negotiators, was condemned by the UN as a ‘war crime’. The Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, was unrepentant. ‘Israeli security doctrine is clear – its long hand will act against its enemies anywhere.’

Meanwhile in the West Bank, the massive E1 Settlement – frozen since 2012 because of EU opposition – obtained planning approval. Smotrich said the idea of a Palestinian state was being ‘erased’. Israel told the Palestinian Authority it would be ‘destroyed’ if it ‘raised its head’. The financial stranglehold on the Palestinian leadership was tightened as more than 140,000 work permits for West Bank Palestinians employed in Israel were revoked, and Israeli armed forces raided a currency exchange in Ramallah, removing undisclosed amounts of cash and wounding dozens of people.

To date, up to two thousand people have been killed seeking aid from the perversely named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The BBC revealed that members of the Infidels Motorcycle Club, ‘a US biker gang with a history of hostility to Islam’, were among those being paid $1000 a day to provide ‘security’ for the GHF. One of them invited any of his Facebook followers who ‘can still shoot, move and communicate (this will be tested)’ to get in touch. On a visit to the site, Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, saw no problem with the GHF and declared that starvation did not exist. Acccording to Unicef, Gaza’s entire child population under five is at risk of acute malnutrition.

It is grating, galling and grotesque to have to take Trump’s monstrous proposition, for which he expects the Nobel Peace Prize, seriously. For a start, where is the Palestinian representation? It is also peculiar, to say the least, that Israel is being given, in a ‘peace deal’, land that it has not managed to capture militarily. As the Indian diplomat Talmiz Ahmad has pointed out, Gaza is not a ‘corporate sector’: it’s home to more than two million people. ‘A Jewish observer has called it a concentration camp and you set up a board with the American president to discuss real estate? It’s an embarrassment and it’s a travesty.’

How one sustains one’s spirit when a genocide stretches into its third year – with the ‘carcass of Western liberal democracy’, as Arundhati Roy puts it, ‘buried under the rubble’ – is a source of discussion, particularly among those averse to therapeutic models that encourage them to avoid political situations they supposedly can’t change. Legal challenges are winning, despite the asymmetry of financial resources: a US judge earlier this month dismissed a lawsuit accusing UNRWA of funding Hamas. ‘For law,’ as Ghassan Abu Sitta said in the Jimmy Reid Memorial Lecture last week, ‘is the Achilles heel of capitalism.’

Personally, I found regeneration in solidarity when I travelled to Mexico in September, for the Hay Festival in Querétaro. It felt good to view the world from a different angle. More than 150,000 people filled Mexico’s largest square, el Zócalo, for a free concert by the Puerto Rican rapper Residente. He was accompanied on stage by a young Gazan family who had fled the genocide, arriving in Mexico the previous day.

I also loved being part of the advisory team for the Together for Palestine concert at Wembley Arena on 17 September. It was tough to get a venue to host it, to vet and appoint charities, and important to keep our messaging clear, our performers on board, to credit those who have spoken out for years but balance them against new voices, including a mixture of Palestinian talent. The Gazan artist Malak Mattar and stage designer Es Devlin curated the visuals. The outcome was exhilarating and magnificent, with a unique interplay of the legal, political, cultural, humanitarian, musical and the literary. It has so far raised close to £2 million for Gaza and is still open for donations.