Israel is escalating its genocide in Gaza, unleashing a daily onslaught of killing against a defenseless population. One horrific atrocity follows another, as the Netanyahu government, with the full backing of the imperialist powers, accelerates its efforts to starve, terrorize and annihilate the Palestinian people.
On Sunday, at least 115 Palestinians were killed, including 92 in two separate massacres targeting crowds seeking humanitarian aid. The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that in one of these massacres, 67 people were killed in Northern Gaza. It reported, “The occupation army ordered the civilians to approach aid trucks with their hands raised—a clear sign of surrender—and then opened fire on them without provocation.”
Amidst talks of a supposed “ceasefire,” the massacres are unrelenting. They included, over the past 10 days:
On July 10, an Israeli strike on a civilian area outside Project HOPE’s health clinic in Deir al Balah killed 15 people, including nine children and four women, and injured 30 others.
On July 11, an Israeli airstrike killed three people and injured several more at Gaza’s only Catholic church.
On July 11, 10 Palestinians were killed and 60 injured near a food distribution site in northwestern Rafah; the next day, 31 of 132 wounded received at the Red Cross Field Hospital died from their injuries.
Between July 10 and 13, at least four journalists were killed in separate Israeli attacks, including one targeted while checking on his home and another along with his pregnant wife and three children in an internally displaced persons tent.
On July 14, an Israeli strike on a residential building sheltering displaced people in Tal al Hawa killed 12 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 30 more.
On July 16, 21 people were killed, including 15 from suffocation and stampede, at a militarized aid distribution site in southern Khan Younis.
Israel and the US have created an entity known as the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF), which has constructed “aid corridors” that are in reality killing fields—deliberately constructed zones of entrapment, monitored and targeted by Israeli drones and snipers. Nearly 1,000 aid seekers have been killed and more than 6,000 wounded at the sites since the end of May.
The massacre of aid seekers is directly connected to a deliberate campaign of starvation. Gaza’s Health Ministry reported that 18 people died of starvation within a 24-hour period, reflecting a sharp intensification of hunger under Israel’s near-total blockade of food, water and electricity.
Over the weekend, Israel also announced a new ground offensive in central Gaza and issued fresh evacuation orders. The Israeli government is carrying out a plan to force the population of Gaza into a vast concentration camp over the ruins of Rafah, in preparation for their eventual expulsion to other countries.
The Israeli state is a criminal enterprise—and this is increasingly how it is seen by workers and youth around the world. The genocide is the culmination of Zionism’s reactionary logic. Founded on the premise of creating a religious-exclusive state through the displacement of the Palestinian population, Zionism has reached its terminal stage: a “final solution to the Palestinian problem.”
The Gaza genocide has triggered an enormous outpouring of global opposition. Millions have taken part in mass protests over 21 months up until now. However, these demonstrations—while expressing deeply felt and legitimate moral outrage—have lacked a clear political perspective. Certain critical conclusions must now be drawn.
First, the fight against the genocide is inseparable from the fight against imperialism. The genocide in Gaza cannot be understood in isolation. It is a component part of an expanding global imperialist war and the endless crossing of red lines.
In the Middle East, the US and Israel bombed Iran in June, while Israel carried out new missile strikes on Syria just last week. Also last week, the Trump administration announced it would resume massive arms shipments to Ukraine, deepening the now three-year-old US-NATO war against Russia. In the Pacific, nearly 40,000 troops from the US, Australia, and 17 other countries have launched the largest-ever joint military exercises across the Australian continent, in a dress rehearsal for war against China.
The same imperialist powers that launched wars against Iraq, Yugoslavia, and other countries on the basis of false and lying claims of ethnic cleansing or weapons of mass destruction are now fully backing Israel as it openly carries out genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
The imperialists legitimize every war crime because it sets a precedent for even greater crimes in the future, including the use of nuclear weapons. And they support the genocide because it is central to their strategy for reshaping the Middle East as a critical theater in their broader plans for global war. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz bluntly admitted last month, in relation to the bombing of Iran, Israel is carrying out their “dirty work.”
Second, the fight against imperialism must be based on the working class, the great revolutionary force in society. The global war being waged by the imperialist powers is inseparably connected to a war on the working class in every country. These same governments are carrying out a ferocious assault on the social rights and living standards of workers at home—slashing wages, gutting public services, dismantling social programs and imposing wave after wave of layoffs and austerity.
This social counterrevolution has now entered a new stage. In the United States, the Trump administration is moving systematically to dismantle public education and to destroy what remains of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Every major capitalist power is following a similar course, responding to the deepening crisis of the system by seeking to impose the full burden of militarism and economic breakdown onto the backs of the working class.
The only way to end the genocide and the broader war of which it is a part is through the massive expansion of the class struggle in every country. It is a fundamental premise of Marxism that the fight against war must be a war against one’s own ruling class. Amidst unprecedented levels of social inequality, millions of workers are seeking to enter into struggle and break free from the control of the corporatist, nationalist and pro-war trade union bureaucracies.
Third, the fight against war must be developed as an international movement against capitalism and for socialism. The genocide in Gaza is the product of a global system that subordinates all human needs to the profit interests of the financial oligarchy.
A new strategy is needed—one that bases the fight against the Gaza genocide on the industrial and political mobilization of the international working class. Workers all over the world are being drawn into struggle against the same ruling class that is sponsoring mass murder in Gaza.
The World Socialist Web Site, the International Committee of the Fourth International and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties call for the building of a new anti-war movement based on international socialism. It must be anti-capitalist and socialist, fighting to abolish the dictatorship of finance capital and put an end to the profit system that is the root cause of war. It must be completely independent of all capitalist parties and their political agents.
And it must be international, uniting workers in every country in a common struggle to put an end to the imperialist system. We urge all workers and young people who agree with this program to take up this fight.