Genocide: The Nazis Hid Their Crimes. Israel Boasts About Them.

There are crimes that humanity cannot name without trembling. There are silences it cannot keep without condemning itself. Gaza, May 2026: we stand at the crossroads of both impossibilities.

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There are moments in history when ordinary words surrender. When the vocabulary of diplomacy, journalism — even literature — becomes indecently insufficient before what the eyes see and the conscience refuses to absorb. We are living through one of those moments. Its name is Gaza. And for two and a half years, it has defied every attempt to reduce it to a “conflict,” a “crisis,” a “concerning humanitarian situation.”

What is happening in Gaza has a name. The International Court of Justice pronounced it in January 2024, ordering Israel to take precautionary measures against a “real and imminent risk of genocide.” Human Rights Watch claimed it in 2024, calling Israel’s deliberate deprivation of water a “crime against humanity of extermination.” Holocaust scholars and genocide specialists at the world’s most respected universities have written it, signed it, published it. I write it now, without fear and without apology: genocide. And I add to this verdict my own contribution: it is the first genocide whose perpetrators openly claim it — on camera, in real time, before the entire world.

The Nazis hid their crimes. Israel boasts about them. That is the difference. And it is this difference that makes our era more scandalous than the one that produced Auschwitz — because Auschwitz happened in secrecy and darkness, while Gaza unfolds in daylight, under satellites, on iPhones, streamed live across social media. And the world watches.

The Riviera: A Real-Estate Man Dreams on a Mass Grave

We must take Trump seriously. Not because he deserves intellectual respect, but because history has taught us that the most dangerous madmen are not those we don’t hear — but those we don’t hear soon enough. And Trump has stated, plainly and publicly, what he intends to do with Gaza: build a Riviera. Hotels. Beaches. Marinas. A real-estate development on the bones of Palestinian children.

Image: Trump’s Gaza vision (Source)

His “Board of Peace” — a legal architecture designed to give a veneer of international legitimacy to colonization — is empty of every dollar promised, four months after its creation. A senior US official had to be dispatched to Saudi Arabia in April to beg Riyadh to honor its pledge of one billion dollars. No one paid. Israel, meanwhile, continues to kill: at least 910 Palestinians murdered since the signing of the ceasefire that Trump chairs like a boxing promoter holding a trophy he never earned.

The governance structure he designed is a legal obscenity: a hollow Palestinian authority placed under an Arab-American executive council, itself subordinate to a “Board of Peace” over which Trump holds absolute veto power — with no real Palestinian representation. This is the administrative Nakba: stripping Palestinians not only of their land and water and children, but even of the fiction of governing their own subjugation.

And let us name what the chancelleries dare not say: Trump’s recent quarrel with Netanyahu over Iran is not a rupture. It is a shareholders’ dispute over timing, not outcome. Trump wants his diplomatic deal with Tehran. Netanyahu wants total war to consolidate his domestic political survival. Both want the same thing for Gaza: a land emptied of resistance, delivered to settlement, rebranded as a Riviera, and opened to Gulf investment. The personality clash must not obscure the convergence of agenda.

Futuricide: Killing a People Down to Its Future

A French researcher recently coined a word that deserves to enter every dictionary of contemporary horror: futuricide. It describes the systematic destruction not only of a people, but of everything that would allow that people to have a future: its schools, its universities, its hospitals, its archives, its libraries, its mosques, its churches, its cemeteries, its trees, its memory, its culture, its collective imagination.

The balance sheet of Israeli futuricide in Gaza is vertiginous. All 16 of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed or rendered inoperable. Every single one. Twelve museums. Hundreds of historic buildings. Archives containing thousands of years of human presence on this strip of land. The World Bank estimated damage to cultural heritage alone at over 300 million dollars — a figure that cannot capture the loss, because the loss is incalculable. You cannot put a price tag on the erasure of a collective memory.

And the trees. Satellite imagery establishes that between 64 and 94 percent of Gaza’s vegetation — depending on the zone — was decimated in the first twelve months of war alone. Orange groves. Olive trees. Lemon trees. Trees that Palestinian families planted the way one plants ancestors, the way one inscribes a name into the earth. Uprooted. Burned. Crushed by bulldozers. The Romans salted the earth of Carthage to prevent all rebirth. Israel uses bulldozers, bombs, and concrete poured into wells.

One hundred thousand cubic meters of raw sewage pour into the Mediterranean every single day from Gaza’s collapsed sanitation systems. Israel has destroyed or damaged nearly 90 percent of water and sanitation infrastructure — desalination plants, boreholes, pipelines, sewage networks. MSF teams have documented Israeli forces firing on clearly marked water tankers. Two hundred fifty agricultural wells destroyed or condemned. This is not collateral damage. It is a strategy. Thirst as a weapon. The earth itself, sterilized.

The Children: The Register of Infamy

We must write the numbers. Read them slowly. Let them enter.

Sixty-four thousand children killed or maimed, according to UNICEF. At least 1,000 of them infants. Twenty-eight children killed every day on average at the height of the war — the equivalent of an entire classroom massacred daily, their bodies sometimes recoverable only from rubble weeks later. During the ceasefire that was supposed to stop everything: one child killed every single day, for one hundred days.

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Displaced Palestinians receive food from charitable Tekiya during Ramadan in Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip. (CC BY-SA 3.0 igo)

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These children are being killed by every means human imagination has conceived for destroying flesh: air strikes, suicide drones, sniper bullets, acute severe malnutrition, infections left untreated, rats biting infants in displacement tents at night. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, 383 children were admitted to MSF nutrition centers in Gaza, of whom 35 percent suffered from severe acute malnutrition. One child in three arriving at an MSF center is dying of hunger.

Children killed while waiting in food lines. Killed in medical clinics while waiting for nutritional supplements. Killed in their homes. Killed in their tents. Killed in their mothers’ arms — and their mothers with them. UNICEF asked the question directly, from inside Gaza, to the UN Security Council: “How many more girls and boys must die? What more atrocity must be broadcast live before the international community acts?” The Security Council responded by adopting resolutions that no one enforced.

And then there is this image, which I cannot erase: on August 25, 2025, a double strike targeted a building at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis where journalists from Al Jazeera, Reuters and AP were sheltering. A drone struck first. Rescuers rushed in to evacuate the wounded. Eight minutes later, a second strike on the same rescuers. Twenty dead. Among them, Hossam al-Masri, Reuters photographer for three decades. The next day, his 15-year-old son stood at the site, holding his father’s crushed camera. That gesture — a child holding the broken instrument of his murdered father — is stronger than any speech ever delivered at the United Nations.

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Dr Suleiman Qaoud surveys the damage at the Rantisi Specialist Hospital, part of the Nasser Medical Complex in Gaza City, following Israeli missile attacks on November 6, 2023 [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera]

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Killing the Witnesses: Darkness as an Accomplice to Crime

Gaza is the deadliest conflict for journalists in the entire history of the 21st century. This is not an accident. It is not collateral damage. It is policy. By April 9, 2026, 359 journalists had been killed in 916 days. The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote it explicitly: the war on Gaza is more lethal for journalists than any previous war on record. Reporters Without Borders concluded that Israeli forces deliberately targeted Palestinian journalists.

Since October 2023, more than 400 humanitarian workers have been killed. More than 1,300 healthcare professionals. On March 23, 2025, in Rafah: 15 first responders, clearly identifiable in marked vehicles, deliberately killed. Their bodies found in a mass grave on March 30. The Israeli government responded on December 31, 2025, by announcing the expulsion of 37 humanitarian organizations from Gaza — including MSF, Médecins du Monde, Oxfam, and Handicap International — on the grotesque accusation of “exploiting humanitarian frameworks for terrorism.”

Kill the witnesses. Expel the healers. Pour concrete into the wells. This is the triptych of the perfect crime: destroy the evidence, eliminate those who record it, and sterilize the ground so nothing can ever grow back.

Beyond the Nazis: The Accurate Word Before History

I know what this section will provoke. I anticipate the reactions and I reject them. This comparison is not provocation. It is not the product of emotion or bias. It is the result of a cold, clinical reading of facts, methods, and stated intentions.

Academic specialists in the Holocaust and in genocide studies — not activists, but scholars trained in the clinical analysis of humanity’s worst crimes — have established the comparison. They noted that by September 2024, when the death toll was far lower than today, Gaza had already surpassed, in proportion of civilian casualties, most conflicts of the past 70 years — Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Syria, Yemen included. Seventy kilotons of explosives dropped on 365 square kilometers: six times the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, on a territory six times more densely populated than that Japanese city.

But here is what the Nazi comparison illuminates specifically, and what must be said without detour: the Nazi extermination was organized in secrecy, concealed behind bureaucratic euphemisms, publicly denied by its architects. SS officers felt shame — not for their crimes, but for what public knowledge of them would do to their image. This is why Himmler told his men that this secret must be carried to the grave.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared on camera:

“We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

Minister Ben Gvir posted a video of handcuffed activists on their knees, humiliated, as a trophy. Members of the Knesset voted for the permanent colonization of Gaza. Israeli soldiers filmed their own destruction and shared it with pride. No secrecy. No shame. No euphemism. The Nazis hid their crimes. Israel boasts about them.

This reversal — the public claiming of the crime — constitutes a qualitative mutation in the history of human barbarity. It means we have crossed a threshold: the one where the executioner no longer fears the world’s gaze. And if the executioner no longer fears, it is because the world has already abdicated its function as witness.

The Famine: The Perfect Crime, the Noiseless Crime

There are the deaths that bombs make. Loud. Visible. Photographable. And there are the deaths that hunger makes. Silent. Slow. Invisible. Gaza suffers both simultaneously — and it is the combination of the two that defines the method: kill quickly those who resist, and let the survivors die slowly.

The number of humanitarian aid trucks entering Gaza fell from a weekly average of 4,200 to only 590 after Israel closed all crossing points in February 2026. Five major humanitarian organizations — including Oxfam, Save the Children, and the Norwegian Refugee Council — published a joint assessment in April: the ceasefire plan is a failure. Palestinians continue to face extreme deprivation, hunger, injury, and death. This assessment was read by every Western government. Filed. And forgotten.

Malnutrition is now the leading cause of mortality in Gaza, particularly among children. The proliferation of rodents — rats infesting tents, biting infants, contaminating food supplies — has become a compounding public health catastrophe. The collapse of sanitation systems has flooded Gaza’s alleyways with raw sewage: 44 percent of medical consultations concern waterborne diseases. Drinking the water that kills. Eating what remains. Surviving in the rubble of everything that made survival possible. This is Gaza, May 2026.

The Colonizability of the World: The Real Scandal

Malek Bennabi — that towering Algerian thinker whom the Arab world has still not read enough — theorized the concept of colonizability: that interior disposition, that fracture in the consciousness of a civilization, which renders it available to its own domination. Colonizability is not simply being colonized. It is accepting your own servitude, administering it, and ultimately protecting it against those who might seek to exit it.

The Arab world of 2026 is a textbook case. Its governments maintain their embassies in Tel Aviv. They keep their airlines flying to Israel. They sign — or prepare to sign — Abraham Accords that Trump presents as part of a package deal on Iran. Riyadh and Doha have been put on notice: normalize with Israel or be excluded from the Iran agreement. This is diplomatic blackmail in its crudest form — and several Arab capitals are preparing to yield.

Meanwhile, Gaza. Meanwhile, 72,700 dead. Meanwhile, 64,000 children killed or maimed. Meanwhile, 359 journalists assassinated. Meanwhile, the culture, the memory, the water, the trees, the universities, the hospitals: all destroyed.

And the West? It has turned the word “complexity” into a shield against truth. “The situation is complex.” No. It is not. It is simple. A state is systematically bombing a civilian population trapped in a territory with no exit, destroying its sources of water and food, killing its doctors and journalists, razing its universities and heritage, and claiming all of this publicly. That is simple. That is a crime. And to deny it is to be complicit in it.

Ibn Khaldun taught us: empires do not fall under the blows of their enemies. They collapse from within, when their asabiyyah — their sense of common good, their moral cohesion — rots to the bone. The West is living this decomposition. A civilization that spent two centuries proclaiming human rights and cannot pronounce the word genocide when it unfolds under its own satellites is a civilization whose asabiyyah is dead.

A Call to Humanity — Before It Is Too Late

I am not writing for those who already know. I am not writing for the already convinced. I am writing for those who still hesitate — who believe international politics is too complicated for them, that Gaza is too far away, that their voice doesn’t matter, that History is written by forces beyond their reach.

I am writing to tell them: History is always written by ordinary people who refused to be ordinary at an extraordinary moment. The French Resistance was made of schoolteachers, bakers, railway workers, and students. The American civil rights movement was made of pastors, high school students, and seamstresses. Nelson Mandela was a lawyer the world had sentenced to life in prison. Rosa Parks was a tired seamstress who refused to stand up on a bus.

Refusal is always possible. It begins with the smallest and the greatest gestures at the same time.

Boycott. The BDS movement — Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions — is not a radical posture. It is the only non-violent lever that History has validated to compel an apartheid regime to bend. It worked in South Africa. It can work here.

March. Taking to the streets is not symbolic. It is political. Governments count protesters the way they count votes. Hundreds of thousands in the streets of Brussels, London, Paris, Algiers, Beirut, Jakarta, Buenos Aires, New York: that changes electoral equations. And electoral equations change policy.

Demand. From your elected officials, your mayors, your ambassadors, your universities, your pension funds: the immediate severance of all economic, academic, and diplomatic ties with a state found guilty of crimes against humanity by the highest international legal bodies. Demand the enforcement of ICC arrest warrants. Demand that aid trucks enter without restriction. Demand that your country stop selling weapons to a genocidal state.

Bear witness. Do not stay silent at dinners, in classrooms, in mosques, in churches, in synagogues, at neighborhood meetings. Name what is happening. Correct the person who says “conflict” when the word is “genocide.” Name the killer when it kills. Language is a political act.

Gaza burns.

The world watches.

And in that motionless gaze, the verdict of our age is being written.

Gaza is not a cause.

Gaza is a mirror.

And that mirror reflects, today, exactly what we are.

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Laala Bechetoula is an independent Algerian historian, journalist, and geopolitical analyst.

He has been writing on Trump, American hegemony, and the collapse of the international order since 2025.

His work appears in Countercurrents, Global Research, Réseau International, Le Quotidien d’Oran, Sri Lanka Guardian, and other international platforms. This article integrates and crowns a corpus of analytical work produced between November 2025 and April 13, 2026.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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