PREFACE
The Gaza that existed on the morning of October 7, 2023, is gone, decimated by saturation bombing, shelling, bulldozing and controlled demolitions. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that there are more than 61 million tons of debris contaminated with unexploded ordnance, asbestos and human remains in Gaza.1 It will take 20 to 30 years to clear the rubble.2 Friends and colleagues with few exceptions are in exile, dead or, in most cases, have disappeared, no doubt buried under mountains of debris.
The daily rituals are no longer possible. I used to leave my shoes on a rack by the front door of the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in Gaza, in the Daraj Quarter of the Old City. The white stone walls had pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret encircled by a carved wooden balcony that was crowned with a crescent. The mosque was built on the foundations of ancient temples to Philistine and Roman deities, as well as a Byzantine church. I washed my hands, face and feet at the common water taps, carrying out the ritual purification before prayer, known as wudu. Inside the hushed interior with its blue-carpeted floor, the cacophony, noise, dust, fumes and frenetic pace of Gaza melted away.
The mosque was destroyed on December 8, 2023, by an Israeli airstrike.3
Joe spent months in Gaza for his books Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza. I covered Gaza as a reporter for seven years. All that was familiar to us in Gaza has vanished, transformed into an apocalyptic landscape of shattered concrete and rubble. My New York Times office in the center of Gaza City. The Marna boarding house on Ahmed Abd El-Aziz Street, where after a day’s work I would drink tea with Margaret Nassar, the elderly woman who owned it, a refugee from Safad in northern Galilee. On my last visit to Marna House, I forgot to return the room key. Number 12. It was attached to a large plastic oval with the words “Marna House Gaza” on it. The key sits on my desk.
The razing of Gaza is not only a crime against the Palestinian people, it is a crime against our cultural and historical heritage, an assault on memory. We cannot understand the present, especially when reporting on Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not understand the past.
History is a mortal threat to the Zionist project. It exposes the violent imposition of a European colony in the Arab world. It reveals the ruthless campaign to de-Arabize an Arab country. It underscores the inherent racism toward Arabs, their culture and traditions. It challenges the myth that, as former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, said, Zionists created “a villa in the middle of a jungle.” It mocks the lie that Palestine is exclusively a Jewish homeland. It recalls centuries of Palestinian presence. And it highlights the alien culture of Zionism, implanted on stolen land.
When I covered the war in Bosnia, the Serbs blew up mosques, carted away the remains and forbade anyone to speak of the structures they had razed. The goal in Gaza is the same, to wipe out the past and replace it with amnesia, to mask Israeli crimes, including genocide.
The campaign of erasure allows Israelis to pretend that the inherent violence that lies at the heart of the Zionist project, going back to the dispossession of Palestinian
land in the 1920s, and the larger campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, does not exist.
This denial of historical truth and historical identity permits Israelis to wallow in eternal victimhood. It sustains a nostalgia for an invented past. Were Israelis to confront these lies, they would face an existential crisis. They would be forced to rethink who they are. Most prefer the comfort of self-deception. The desire to believe is more powerful than the desire to see.
As long as truth is hidden, as long as those who seek truth are silenced, it is impossible for a society to regenerate and reform itself. It becomes calcified. Its lies and dissimulation, however, must be constantly renewed. Truth is dangerous. The administration of US President Donald Trump is in lockstep with Israel. It too seeks to prioritize myth over reality. It too silences those who challenge the lies of the past and the lies of the present.
Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed-upon laws and rules. It was often violated by the United States in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but it was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The U.S. and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide but obstruct any efforts to preserve international humanitarian law. They have carried out attacks against the only nation, Yemen, which has tried to halt Israel’s mass slaughter.
The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watchtowers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, the apartheid existence that comes with being stateless or undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe, as they are to the Palestinians.
The genocide exposes Israel’s lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians, sometimes dressed in Israeli army uniforms and with their hands bound, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad are responsible the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations buildings or mass casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking trucks or smuggling weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies were beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass sexual assaults of Israeli women on October 7. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza are “Hamas terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of ceasefire agreements.
Israel’s genocidal visage has been exposed.
The expansion of “Greater Israel” which includes the bombing of Iran, the seizing of Syria’s Golan Heights, parts of Syria’s Quneitra province and sections of southern Lebanon, along with Gaza and the occupied West Bank is being cemented into place.
The Gaza that Joe and I knew was a sea of boxy concrete structures and apartment blocks on a parched piece of land, about twice the size of Washington, D.C. A haze of grit and dust hung in the air.
At least 67 percent of the people in Gaza are refugees or descendants of refugees. In the eight densely packed refugee camps, young men without work lived 10 to a room.
Small, dingy stalls sold roasted corn on the cob and falafel. Hunks of meat hung on large hooks, a magnet for flies, alongside wooden tables piled with tomatoes, potatoes, green peppers and green beans.
The walls in the refugee camps functioned as billboards. They advertised shops and houses for sale. People spray-painted congratulations for couples who made the Hajj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. These prosaic messages were interspersed with the portraits of Palestinian luminaries such as Yasser Arafat, who led the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and who died in 2004 perhaps after being poisoned and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, who was assassinated by Israel in the same year.4, 5
The small houses and apartments Joe and I entered in Gaza were always immaculately clean. We shared meals, told jokes, celebrated holidays and birthdays, and drank tea from decorative porcelain cups. We stood solemnly as friends knelt on ornate prayer mats for the evening prayer, Isha. We sat with them on plastic chairs in their small gardens and orange groves. And then, like all Gazans, we walked down to the beach. The sand, the waves and the sea air reminding us that there was a vast world beyond the confines of the Strip.
Occupied Palestine has a literacy rate of 98 percent, one of the highest on the planet.6 Education is revered. Gaza’s 12 universities, all destroyed by Israel in the genocide, were the centrepieces of life.7 The Strip churned out doctors, engineers, professors, lawyers, computer programmers and teachers. It produced accomplished poets, novelists and musicians. These were Gaza’s main contributions to the Arab world.8, 9 This highly educated and artistic class, along with all educational and cultural institutions, in an act of scholasticide, was targeted for elimination by Israel from the inception of the genocide.
Israeli officials propose the “voluntary transfer” of Palestinians.10 The Israeli think tank Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy staffed by former military and security officials published a paper on October 17, 2023, calling on the government to take advantage of the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip,” and resettle Palestinians in Cairo, with assistance from the Egyptian government.11 A leaked document from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry recommends resettling Palestinians from Gaza to the northern Sinai and constructing barriers and buffer zones to prevent their return.12 Any mass expulsion would likely entail a lethal standoff with the Egyptian military, instantly throwing the regime of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who has described any ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza as a “red line,” into crisis.13
Israel covets the maritime gas fields off Gaza’s coast.14 The main gas field, located 22 miles west of Gaza City, contains an estimated 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Israel has floated plans for a new canal to bypass the Suez Canal, to connect Israel’s Port of Eilat on the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.15, 16 These projects require emptying Gaza of Palestinians and populating it with Jewish colonists.
“President Donald J. Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict,” in an act of stunning betrayal of the Palestinians, was endorsed by most of the U.N. Security Council in November 2025, with China and Russia abstaining. Member states washed their hands of Gaza and turned their backs on the genocide.
The adoption of Resolution 2803, as the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein writes, “was simultaneously a revelation of moral insolvency and a declaration of war against Gaza. By proclaiming international law null and void, the Security Council
proclaimed itself null and void. Vis-à-vis Gaza, the Council transmuted into a criminal conspiracy.”17
First, it was Israel’s right to defend itself. Then it was a war, even though, by Israel’s own military intelligence database, 83 percent of the casualties were civilians.18 The approximately 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, living under an Israeli air, land and sea blockade, have no bomb shelters, no army, no air force, no mechanized units, no tanks, no navy, no missiles, no heavy artillery, no fleets of killer drones, no sophisticated tracking systems to map all movements, or an ally like the U.S., which has given Israel at least $21.7 billion in military aid since October 7, 2023.19, 20
Now, we are told there is a “ceasefire.” Except, as usual, Israel only abided by the first of the 20 stipulations. It freed around 2,000 Palestinian captives held in Israeli prisons 1,700 of whom were detained after October 7 as well as around 300 bodies of Palestinians, in exchange for the return of the 20 remaining Israeli captives.21
Israel has violated every other condition.22 It has tossed the plan, brokered by the Trump administration without Palestinian participation, into the bonfire with all the other past ceasefire agreements and peace accords. Israel, at the same time, refuses to abide by three sets of legally binding orders by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and two ICJ advisory opinions, as well as the Genocide Convention and international humanitarian law. This presages a world where the law is whatever the most militarily advanced countries say it is.23
The next phase is supposed to see Hamas surrender its weapons and Israel withdraw from Gaza. But these two steps will never happen. Hamas, along with other Palestinian factions, rejects Security Council Resolution 2803.24 They say they will disarm only when the occupation ends, and a Palestinian state is created. The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that if Hamas does not disarm, it will be done “the hard way.”25
The “Board of Peace,” headed by Trump, will ostensibly govern Gaza along with armed mercenaries from the Israel-allied International Stabilization Force, although no country seems anxious to commit their troops.26 27 Trump promises a Gaza Riviera that will function as a “special economic zone” a territory operating outside of state law governed entirely by private investors, such as the Peter Thiel-backed charter city in Honduras.28 This will be achieved through the “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians, with those fortunate enough to own land offered digital tokens in exchange.29 Trump declares that the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip” and “own it.”30 It is a return to the rule of viceroys.
Israel committed 738 violations of the ceasefire agreement between October 10 and December 12, 2025, including 358 land and air bombardments, the killing of at least 383 Palestinians and the injuring of 1,002 others.31 That is an average of six Palestinians killed daily in Gaza. In October 2025, some 9,300 children under five were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition.32 Israel, by the end of 2025, had seized some 58 percent of Gaza. It is steadily moving its demarcation line, known as “the yellow line,” to expand its occupation.33 Palestinians who cross this arbitrary line which constantly shifts and is poorly marked when it is marked at all are shot dead or blown up, even if they are children.34
Their offense? Returning to the ruins of their homes.35 December 2025 saw an average of 140 aid trucks allowed into Gaza each day instead of the promised 600 to keep Palestinians on the edge of famine. Israel blocks or severely restricts shipments of construction supplies, including cement and steel,
shelter materials, water infrastructure and fuel, so nothing can be rebuilt.36 Israel is also blocking the entry of the 60,000 mobile homes meant to provide temporary housing for displaced Palestinians that were included in the ceasefire agreement.37
Palestinians are being crammed into a shrinking, fetid, overcrowded concentration camp until they can be deported. Ninety-two percent of Gaza’s residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed and around 81 percent of all structures are damaged, according to U.N. estimates.38, 39
There is almost no clean water, electricity or sewage treatment.
Eighty-two percent of Israeli Jews support the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of Gaza and fifty-six percent support doing the same to Palestinian citizens of Israel.40
Forty-seven percent support killing all civilians in cities captured by the Israeli military.41
Seventy-nine percent of Israeli Jews say they are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and suffering among the population in Gaza, according to a survey conducted in July 2025.42
Israel is a genocidal state and a genocidal society.
One of the newest forms of genocidal celebration in Israel where social media and news channels routinely chortle over the suffering of Palestinians is the sprouting of golden nooses on the lapels of members of the far-right political party Otzma Yehudit,43 Israel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, including one worn by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.44
The Knesset has passed a bill that mandates outside of “special circumstances” the death penalty by hanging for Palestinians convicted of killing an Israeli citizen or Israeli resident, in an act of “terrorism.” The sentence must be carried out within 90 days of sentencing. There are no pardons. Palestinians in the West Bank, unlike Jewish settlers, are tried in military tribunals under martial law. Palestinians are convicted at a reported rate of between 96 and 99 percent in Israeli military courts. The law does not apply to citizens or residents of Israel.45
The law joins the more than 30 anti-Palestinian laws enacted since October 7.46
The message the genocide sends to the rest of the world, more than a billion of whom live on less than a dollar a day, is unequivocal:
We have everything and if you try to take it away from us, we will destroy you.
The genocide in Gaza presages a new world order. Concentration camps. Starvation. Obliteration of infrastructure and civil society. Mass killing. Wholesale surveillance. Executions. Torture, including the beatings, electrocutions, waterboarding, rape, public humiliation, deprivation of food and denial of medical care routinely used on Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Epidemics. Disease. Mass graves where corpses are bulldozed into unmarked pits and where bodies are dug up and torn apart by packs of ravenous wild dogs, as in Gaza.
Israel knows what it wants to do in Gaza. It knows no nation will intercede.
Our book is our effort to combat erasure, to preserve memory, to defy an indifferent world, to record scraps of existence, to pay homage to the villages, refugee camps and cities that have been obliterated, to set down the stories of butchery, carnage and loss, as well as resilience, courage and self-sacrifice, to name and condemn the killers, to mourn the extermination of families, including tens of thousands of children, and to preserve a vanished world.