As Israel assassinates Iranian scientists and bombs hospitals and television stations, the logic of escalation – and the outright cowardice displayed by the so-called “most moral army” in the Middle East’s “only democracy” – continues methodically and relentlessly.
This extends to the targeting and assassination of Mohamed Nasrallah, a beloved beekeeper in Hula, a Lebanese village south of the Litani River.
Nasrallah – or perhaps his bees – must have posed a mortal threat to Israeli settlers near the border.
The constant mix of random and calculated attacks makes singular loss – and the ability to grieve – almost impossible to register.
The momentary shock felt when it became clear, after only a few days of operation, that the new Mossad-affiliated, US-supported “humanitarian aid stations” were in fact kill zones, designed to pulverise Palestinian solidarity through starvation and the criminal control of food, has worn off.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s open admission that military and intelligence forces were working with criminal gangs to seize control of food distribution has gone hand in hand with Israel’s continued elimination – through targeted assassinations or outright destruction – of every tier of Palestinian civil and communal life.
In most concentration camps and gulags, the result of slave labour, meagre rations, and lack of medicine was typhus. Death followed.
But in Gaza – surely the largest concentration camp ever created – Palestinians are eliminated mathematically, in categories, through differing forms of cruelty.
Like the US sanctions regime in Iraq, the structure through which Israel carries out these murders is far harder to document than its physical consequences
The form of slave labour imposed on Palestinians takes perversity to new levels. Enacted upon the self, it consists of doing everything necessary to stay alive – following the “hunger games” of evacuation orders, running between bullets, bombs and missiles, whether fired by snipers, tanks, drones, jets or ships.
In the so-called “humanitarian corridors”, hundreds of Palestinians seeking the bare minimum to feed their starving families continue to be murdered daily – in cold blood, and at random, as examples. Many more are shot or stabbed – often critically – by criminals who steal the coveted food to sell on the black market.
In the Israeli playbook, the unthinkable becomes routine.
In Khan Younis on 17 June, an estimated 80 or more people waiting for the crumbs presented so magnanimously by White House spokesperson Tammy Bruce as humanitarian aid were torn apart by Israeli bombers paid for by US taxpayers. Some 300 more were wounded.
As Israel assassinates more Palestinian journalists, fewer eyewitness reports emerge from Gaza.
But, like the US sanctions regime in Iraq – a bureaucratic and technocratic killing machine that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives – the structure through which these murders occur is far harder to document than its consequences on the ground.
Engineered chaos
On 9 June, Dr Ezzideen Shehab, a prominent Palestinian physician, posted on X: “The World Health Organization was informed calmly and formally that the Israeli army has suspended medical coordination for all Palestinian males over the age of twelve. Twelve.”
As difficult as it is for any Palestinian in Gaza to obtain Israeli permission for medical evacuation, this new decree is a literal death sentence.
How can Palestinian medics ‘cooperate’ with Israeli health bodies during a genocide?
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Writing with the ferocity of a latter-day prophet and the clarity of a diagnostician, Dr Shehab continues:
This is not negligence; it is theology – the theology of cruelty…What is happening is not madness; it is order. And that is the horror. There is no screaming. No flames. No chaos. Only the smooth silence of denied referrals, the precision of paperwork, and the perfect quiet of children who never made it to the ambulance. And the world watches. Some count the dead; others count votes. But no one counts the unseen dying…
This engineered chaos and controlled demolition is a calculation enacted upon the land of Palestine and the bodies of Palestinians – whether they reside, as the late Walid Daqqa theorised, in the smaller prisons or the larger one that occupied Palestine itself has become.
In the graduated scales of terror and repression inflicted by Israel, it is telling that Daqqa’s widow, Sanaa Salameh, was detained on 29 May while crossing a checkpoint. Charged with “online incitement”, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir sought to deport her and revoke her Israeli citizenship.
She was with their five-year-old daughter, Milad, conceived through Daqqa’s smuggled sperm after he was denied conjugal rights – a major chapter in the annals of resistance.
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Separated from her daughter and subjected to seven court appearances, activist, journalist and translator Salameh was released on 12 June.
When asked about Milad’s reaction to her mother’s detention, an acquaintance replied: “She is smart and understands that her mother was detained.”
Alms against oblivion
As events spiral into new forms of escalation, perversity and sheer destruction – and as social media reporting from Gaza dwindles – the continuing work of visual artists offers an astonishing window onto the breadth of the human spirit at one of its most hopeless moments.
Days after what has come to be called the “Witkoff Massacre” on 2 June – in which 31 Palestinians seeking food were murdered and more than 200 wounded – artist Osama Hussein posted a harrowing drawing: a group of people carry bags of flour on what might ordinarily, in Gaza at least, have been used as a stretcher.
Balancing the flour bags on their shoulders, their faces peer down at a group of corpses on the ground. In an equally harrowing caption accompanying the drawing, Hussein writes:
Hunger broke all the remaining order of values, so that flour was carried while bodies remained on the ground with no one to carry them. I drew this work while feeling the weight of this contradiction. It is not an accusation, but a mirror of an impossible situation when the siege forces you to prefer your physical survival over your feelings and those who died in front of your eyes…
In a kindred vein, renowned artist Raed Issa – a founding member of the now-destroyed Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Arts in Gaza – posted a haunting drawing of a goat, shocked at what is about to take place, with this description: “The look of farewell…if there are no human rights, then where are animal rights?”
Sohail Salem, another founding member of Eltiqa, keeps a drawing diary in whatever notebooks he can find. One of them – an Unrwa children’s school exercise book – managed to find its way out of Gaza to appear at an exhibit in Amman at Jordan’s Darat al-Funun.
By all appearances, Salem’s astonishing drawings seem to be done with ballpoint pens.
One drawing, even at the very small scale present conditions dictate, is as powerful as Picasso’s monumental Guernica; the whole field of the drawing crowded with the intricately drawn faces of women in mourning staring back at the viewer.
Another artist, Kholoud Hammad – only 21 years old – draws with an overwhelming spirit of resistance, depicting heroic figures in epic tableaux, whirlwind scenes of chaos and destruction, or schematic views of exploding buildings.
As events spiral into escalation and destruction, Gaza’s artists offer a window into the human spirit at one of its most hopeless moments
As she writes: “My art springs from the reality I live every day – harsh scenes of destruction, loss, and resilience… Art became my voice when words fail me. It is my way to process pain, resist injustice, and share my truth with the world.”
As governments around the world – from Washington, London, Berlin and Paris to Cairo, Amman, Rabat and Riyadh – consolidate their powers to suppress public outrage at Israel’s continued impunity and criminal behaviour, words often fail in the face of such unprecedented cruelty.
And yet, the presence of mind displayed by these and other artists in Gaza is humbling – a testament to resilience that deserves the deepest respect and reverence.
To reverse a phrase from Shakespeare – beloved by the assassinated Palestinian poet Refaat al-Areer – these works represent “alms against oblivion”.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
