How far will the Israeli government go in Gaza? How many more deaths, how much more destruction will it take?

In 120 days, the Israeli army has dropped more bombs on Gaza than the United States dropped on Iraq in 2003. With 28,000 dead and 100,000 wounded officially recorded, this tiny strip of land has turned into a death row. And now, Netanyahu is launching an offensive on Rafah, which has been under bombardment since Friday!

The city, located in the south of the Gaza Strip, is home to 1.3 million displaced Palestinians and is the only point of entry for humanitarian aid to the territory. But for Netanyahu, this is not a problem: civilians will simply have to “evacuate”.

The evacuation plan alone is chilling. The refugee population in Rafah is surviving in makeshift tents; the wounded and the sick, the children and the elderly are completely exhausted. Their lives depend on the food and water supplies provided by NGOs. So, "evacuate"? How and where to? Egypt is still refusing to open up its border.

Netanyahu justifies this new escalation by the need to destroy the last pockets of Hamas fighters. In reality, it's a policy of terror against the entire population. After months under the bombs, the Palestinians of Gaza are now starving, because the Israeli government and its American and French accomplices have cut off funding to UNRWA, the UN agency that was their last lifeline.

"As long as these people are healthy, they will continue to fight. But if we deprive them of everything, we can stop the war," boasted an Israeli settler, ready to assume an ethnic cleansing.

If this policy of terror was designed to defeat the Palestinians of Gaza in the long term, it will also give birth to the next generation of rebels and fighters.

When the guns fall silent, no one will be at peace. Not the Palestinians, who will mourn their dead and gather their forces to fight back. Nor the Israelis, condemned to live with their hand permanently on the trigger and enclosed behind ever-higher barbed wire fences.

Since the creation of the State of Israel, its leaders, supported by the imperialist powers, have promised the Jews peace and security, far from the anti-Semitism and genocide they suffered.

The Arabs had nothing to do with the persecutions that culminated in Nazi Germany, with the more or less open complicity of the other major imperialist countries. But it was at their expense that the promise to build a haven for the Jews was made.

A totally misleading promise because, as Karl Marx wrote, "a people that oppresses another cannot be free". And since it was created 75 years ago, Israel has been at war almost without interruption. As long as the colonization process, as long as the massacres and atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel continue, the Jewish population of Israel will have neither peace nor security.

The tragedy unfolding in Gaza will determine the future of the Middle East for decades to come. And who can be sure it won't set the whole planet ablaze?

Even the United States, the global cop and hegemonic superpower, fears this. And with good reason! Their policy of plunder and the repeated wars they have waged in the Middle East have led to general instability there. And they are doing little to prevent Netanyahu and his far-right accomplices from setting the region on fire.

The war in Gaza has already had a ripple effect in southern Lebanon, where there are numerous Palestinian refugee camps and where the Iranian-backed Hezbollah constitutes a state within a state. It has spread to the Red Sea, where Yemen’s Houthi rebels attack commercial vessels. It has re-emerged in Iraq and Syria, where numerous militias thrive on the desolation and hatred sown by successive Western interventions.

The spiral of war has begun. And the imperialist powers, who have manufactured the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine, are incapable of stopping it. The only alternative to this march to war is that which the workers of the world could represent by attacking their own rulers and the capitalist order they embody.

Nathalie Arthaud