By Jeremy Salt

This is the dark side of what is called ‘human nature,’ the fate of millions of people, enslaved,  invaded, occupied, terrorized and massacred through the millennia.

In the 16th century, the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder had already painted Gaza in the 21st century.

His canvas, The Triumph of Death, depicts an army of skeletons moving across a darkened landscape destroying the living.

A skeleton on an emaciated horse cuts them down with a scythe, skeletons hang and flog, a skeleton on horseback drags a wagonload of skulls, skeletons stand in white-shrouded rows while ranks of others press into against the scene from all directions, warlike and bent on more killing.

A dog nibbles on the corpse of an infant. Sinking boats, plumes of smoke, and fire by the sea and on a distant headland signify destruction everywhere.

An isolated cross stands below a bell rung by skeletons while others enjoy themselves banging a tympani and turning a hurdy-gurdy, a medieval stringed instrument driven by a wooden wheel.

A noble awaits his fate while gold coins pour out of an overturned chest.

No one is safe, nothing is sacrosanct, yet oblivious to what is happening elsewhere and will happen to them, a woman turns the pages of music undisturbed while a man plays the lute. As allegory ‘The Triumph of Death’ has been subjected to numerous interpretations but death is at the bottom of them all.  Hieronymous Bosch and Goya shared Bruegel’s bleak vision of a world that was no more than a crust, forever hammered at by death as it breaks through.

Goya’s ‘black paintings’ include one of a colossus striding over a valley of fleeing humans and stampeding livestock and another of the Roman god ‘Saturn devouring his son’ because he fears his children are going to destroy him.

The thousands of dead children in Gaza are not Israel’s but the fear that when they grow up they will take their revenge, has been repeated in Israel many times.

The allegories to Gaza abound.

The colossus is the Israeli military filling the people in its path with terror, and Bruegel’s skeletons are the soldiers massacring, murdering, torturing, tormenting and humiliating and often taking pleasure in doing it.

No one and nothing is safe.

Soldiers recently out of schools and universities take pleasure in blowing them up in Gaza.  They wear or pose with women’s dresses and underwear in the homes they have destroyed,  they loot and smash while mocking their victims, even the children whose classrooms they have wrecked and whose toys they steal to mock them further.

The ‘Triumph of Death’ is art imitating life, not the other way around.

Those tormented figures on the canvas could be Vietnamese running away from napalm dropped from on high or trapped by Lieutenant Calley and his buddies as they machine-gunned villagers in 1968 while lounging on a bridge at My Lai.

Men, women, children,  young and old, they did not differentiate.

They were in no danger themselves. Like the Israelis, they shot people who could not shoot back because they had no weapons. They shot them because they could, because they were bored and shot them because they were not real people anyway, only ‘gooks’ and ‘slopes’, the ‘human animals’ of their time.

From the few photographs available they were indifferent to the carnage they were spitting out from their guns.

This is the dark side of what is called ‘human nature,’ the fate of millions of people, enslaved,  invaded, occupied, terrorised and massacred through the millennia, now the fate inflicted on the people of Gaza just as remorselessly and cruelly as that inflicted by the skeletons in ‘The Triumph of Death.’

After a year it is even more incomprehensible that Gaza’s Palestinians still are being wiped out while the governments of the world look on and do nothing to stop the genocide, while in many ways enabling it.

In her latest report, ‘Genocide as Colonial Erasure,  the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, notes that the Gaza genocide is “part of a long-term systematic, state-organized forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinians.“

The Israeli order given to 1.1 million Palestinians to move to the south of Gaza on October 14, 2023, was “one of the fastest mass displacements in history” and an acceleration of the ongoing 1948 Nakba.

Since then, at least 90 percent of the Palestinians have been displaced, some more than 10 times, amidst calls in Israel for settlers to rebuild the colonies that were dismantled in 2005.

Israeli soldiers have built roads and military bases in 26 percent of Gaza, “suggesting the aim of a permanent presence.”

A ‘buffer zone’ along the Gaza perimeter has been expanded to 16 percent of the strip, with homes, apartment blocks and farms being “flattened” in the process.

By August 2024 repeated evacuation orders over about 84 percent of Gaza had “corralled” the majority of the population into a shrinking unsafe ‘humanitarian’ zone covering 12.6 percent of Gaza’s territory “now being reconfigured in preparation for annexation.”

The genocide is comprehensive in nature, “prompting allegations of domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and ecocide,”  Albanese writes.

An estimated 93 percent of agricultural, fishing and forestry economies have been destroyed, with 83 percent of food aid prevented from reaching Gaza in recent months.

The tens of thousands of civilians “killed”, ie mass murdered, include police and clan leaders, while others have been subjected to systematic abuse “in a network of torture camps.”

Thousands have disappeared, many after long periods of detention in appalling conditions, “often bound to beds, blindfolded and in diapers, deprived of medical treatment and subject to unsanitary conditions, starvation, tortuous cuffing, severe beatings, electrocution and sexual assault by both animals and humans.”  Dozens, including doctors, have died while in ‘custody’.

The sexual assault would include at least one reported rape of a man by a dog, along with rape by other men. When the video of the gang rape of a man by soldiers at the Sde Teiman prison was leaked, Finance Minister Bezalel  Smotrich was outraged more by the video than the alleged rape, because of the damage it had done to Israel’s image around the world. He demanded the arrest of the person who leaked it while supporting protests against the “terrible injustice” of arresting the accused soldiers.

The destruction in Gaza has created 40 million tons of debris, writes Francesca Albanese, “including unexploded ordnance and human remains,” contaminating the ecosystem, while more than 140 temporary waste sites and 340,000 tons of waste and sewage overflow contribute to the spread of diseases such as hepatitis A, respiratory infections, diarrhea and skin infections. As Israeli leaders promised, Gaza has been made unfit for human life.”

With Gaza largely destroyed the genocide “metastasized” to the West Bank, as Yoav Gallant had said it would in December 2023, remarking that “when what the IDF did in Gaza becomes clear, that will also be projected on to Judea and Samaria” (the West Bank of Palestine).

From October 7, 2023, to September 30, 2024,  the West Bank was raided more than 5505 times by Israeli forces. Illegal settlers launched 1084 attacks.

By September 30, 692 Palestinians had been killed by soldiers or settlers, 165 of them children, nearly 80 percent shot in the head or the upper torso.

The 9,400 West Bank Palestinians detained include academics, students, lawyers, journalists and human rights defenders, with at least 12 of those abducted dying in custody.

In August 2024 Israel launched ‘Operation Summer Camps,’ targeting mainly Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Tulkarem and Tubas, thus “fulfilling the promise to treat the West Bank like Gaza.” Curfews were declared, ambulances targeted, hospitals besieged, roads and infrastructure destroyed by D9 bulldozers.

In May, the West Bank had already been placed under the full administrative control of Bezalel Smotrich, who had referred to the Palestinians as “two million Nazis.”

Land seizures and home demolitions followed along with the “depopulation” of 18 Palestinian communities in area C, the 60 percent of the West Bank totally and directly controlled by the occupying regime.

Albanese asks whether there is a genocidal mentality. The facts certainly leave no doubt that one has been created.

She refers to three totalities behind the genocide of the Palestinians:

1.     the totality of the land (‘eretz Israel’)
2.     the totality of the group to be destroyed (the Palestinians)
3.     the totality of the conduct by the genocidaire, rationalized by Israel as ‘self-defense’ when there can be no ‘self-defense’ against the population under its occupation.

Israel’s conduct has been on global display for more than 12 months although only when the dust settles on Gaza, she writes, “will the true extent of the horror experienced by Palestinians become known.”

Genocidal intent – implicit in zionist ideology from the beginning – was signaled in genocidal statements by members of the security and war cabinets,  “who used their ministerial responsibilities to implement their words.”

Israel’s Attorney-General had failed to investigate and prosecute “acts preparatory to and associated with genocide”; its judiciary had failed to enforce accountability; while its media had a role in inciting genocide.

The UN rapporteur found that the state of Israel “is predicated on the goal of Palestinian erasure; its entire political system is directed towards this goal.”

The Palestinians were treated like a “hated encumbrance” and a threat that had to be eradicated through their removal. The entire state apparatus had “encouraged, articulated and engineered genocidal violence through acts which in their totality may lead to the destruction of the Palestinian people.”

The genocidal violence in Gaza,  Albanese writes,  is “part of a century-long project of eliminatory settler colonialism in Palestine (that is) a stain on the international system and humanity.” 

Her findings are augmented in a recent research report by Sophie Stamatopoulou-Robbins; ‘Costs of War. The Human Toll: Indirect Deaths from War in Gaza and the West Bank, October 7 2023 forward,’ Brown University, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, October 7, 2024.

She refers to the conclusion reached in October by 99 US volunteer doctors, nurses and midwives in Gaza that more than 118,908 people had already been killed or had died as a result of the Israeli onslaught (5.4 percent of the population),  including 62,413 from starvation.

In their report – addressed to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris –  these American medical volunteers said malnutrition in Gaza was leading to spontaneous abortions, underweight newborns and the inability of mothers to breastfeed, with polluted water adding to the risks for malnourished mothers and their children.

The rate of infections in C-sections was “astonishing.” Women were having vaginal or C-section deliveries without anesthetic, “and were given nothing but Tylenol (paracetamol) afterward because no other pain medication was available.”

With epidemics raging, the Palestinian population was being ‘displaced’ to areas without even running water or toilets. Even the polio virus had re-emerged: many would die in the coming winter months, and “most of them will be young children.”

On the operating table, “every one of us who worked in emergency intensive care or surgical settings treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even daily basis.

“It is impossible that such widespread shooting of children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year, is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civil and military authorities.”

The US government (through its arms supplies and political support for Israel) was a participant in “scenes of unbearable cruelty” directed at women and children.”

Hospital emergency departments (the few still open and able to take in patients) were overloaded by patients seeking treatment for chronic medical conditions such as renal failure, hypertension and diabetes.

Most ICU beds “were occupied by patients with type 1 diabetes who no longer had access to insulin … the lack of medication, loss of electricity and refrigeration or inconsistent access to food made managing these diseases impossible.”

In her report,  Sophie Stamatopoulou-Robbins estimates that up to September 30, 2024, there have been 67,413 “indirect deaths” in Gaza, including 62,413 from starvation. She notes that in July 2024, the British Lancet medical journal put the number of “direct and indirect deaths” as of June 19 at 186,000.

She repeats statistics that must now be familiar to many: the number of hospitals damaged or destroyed, the 96 percent food insecure, the 90 percent of the population ‘displaced,’ the 17-18,000 children who lost one or both parents in the first three months of the Israeli onslaught and the UN Women estimate in January 2024 that two mothers were being killed every hour.

A new acronym had to be invented for children – WCNSF (Wounded Child No Surviving Family)  –  estimated months ago to number about 17,000.

Women were giving birth in tents or on the streets (one reason being that the hospitals were no longer safe from Israeli attack) and hospital staff were no longer seeing “normal-sized” babies. Cancer care was no longer available.

Ninety percent of the population was living in tents or makeshift shelters. As of March 2024, there was one shower for 3600 people in Rafah and one toilet for 850.  Sanitation systems, including 65 sewage pumping stations that no longer pump and 43 miles (69 km) of the sewage network, have been destroyed.

An estimated 35 million gallons of wastewater flow into the streets of Gaza and shelters for displaced people every day.

In Mawasi, the strip of sand in southern Gaza into which thousands of Palestinians have been herded, there is no infrastructure at all. Already in June Oxfam reported that there were 121 latrines for 500,000 people.

As Sofia Stamatopoulou-Robbins observes,  since October 7, 2023,  the US has spent $22.76 billion on aid to Israel and other “aid in the region,” thus underwriting the genocide with continuing arms supplies and protection of Israel through the buildup of its military presence in the region.

The destruction is systematic, as Albanese writes,  and part of a long-term program.

In 2010 UNICEF estimated that Israel’s Cast Lead attack on Gaza (2008-9) had damaged more than 30 km of water networks,11 groundwater wells, 6000 roof tanks and 840 household connections, leaving about 500,000 people without clean water.

In 2020 the UNDP (UN Development Program) reported that 92 percent of water in Gaza was unfit for human condition. Even before October 7, 2023, the figure was being raised to 97 percent.

Food was being eked out years before by the occupying regime at a bare subsistence level:  now it has been deliberately lowered and the malnourished are dying of starvation.

The destruction of clean water sources and sewage plants and the lack of products needed to maintain basic hygiene beginning with soap has generated waves of disease.

In May 2024 the WHO reported 800,000 cases of acute respiratory infection and 345,000 cases of bloody diarrhea, including 100,000 in children under the age of five, with scabies, skin rashes, lice, chicken pox and jaundice also spreading among the young.

UNICEF now describes the level of child deaths in Gaza as “horrific” even though they have been horrific from the beginning.

Indeed, Gaza is the horror of Bruegel in real life. The Israeli soldiers, pilots and operators of quadcopters and killer drones are not skeletons, however, but flesh and blood. They are not an allegory but the real thing.

The inhumanity of these mainly young people is measurable thousands of times over.

Creating their own triumph of death in Gaza, they have been groomed for this moment by decades of propaganda and indoctrination. The cost to Israel is global revulsion, isolation, the possibility of suspension from the UN and what even Israelis horrified at the madness of their government see as a doomed future.