The siege of North Gaza

U.S.-sponsored Zionist genocide makes Jabalia synonymous with Auschwitz, Treblinka

For the last year, the United States and its Zionist partners have waged a brutal and unyielding siege on Gaza. The widespread devastation and death throughout the Gaza Strip has been widely reported on in both corporate media and alternative sources. 

Neighborhoods are eviscerated. Water supplies are non-existent. Children burn in their hospital beds. And even with all of that misery, it seems that Zionist forces are escalating the genocide to yet another level. Currently, the Gaza Strip’s northern section is suffocating under the weight of that escalation. 

Since early October of this year, occupation forces have held the Jabalia refugee camp under siege. Jabalia is one of the oldest and largest refugee camps in Palestine. Jabalia is home to well over a hundred thousand people packed into an area of 1.4 kilometers. This makes Jabalia the most densely populated square kilometer in the world. The war has seen relentless occupation offensives against Jabalia since Oct. 7th. 

However, it has only been in recent weeks that the IOF has entirely encircled Jabalia. Occupation forces have ordered Jabalia’s residents to leave what is left of their homes or be killed. Fearing that they will never return home if they leave, tens of thousands have stayed. As the Zionist stranglehold has tightened, the conditions in Jabalia have become borderline untenable for human life. 

Since the siege’s start, Jabalia has been completely cut off from Gaza City and the rest of the strip. UNRWA reports that 90% of Jabalia’s water is undrinkable. Zionist troops destroyed Jabalia’s power grid completely, rendering the entire camp without electricity. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Jabalia was also one of the epicenters of the recent polio outbreak in the Gaza Strip, the first of its kind in a century. 

Unfortunately, the siege within the siege is not limited to Jabalia. The occupation air force and army have killed dozens in mere days in both Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun camps. Both camps are similarly cut off from all aid like Jabalia. Beit Lahia is home to the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza. As such, it has been under constant IOF bombardment. The Zionists are intent on targeting all facilities and infrastructure that supply the people of these camps with the most basic human necessities. 

In just weeks, the occupation has murdered 1,300 people throughout North Gaza, and that number is likely massively underreported. 

The Zionists’ goal in its siege on Jabalia and similar camps is not a secret: Their goal is to either murder or displace every single person in the area. There is a phrase for this sort of place: a death camp. If Israel in any way represented the values and history of Judaism, the so-called Jewish State would recognize a modern-day Treblinka when it saw one. 

Instead, the Zionist regime plays the role of the modern-day Third Reich. In its new role, the Zionist regime is full steam ahead towards the entire extermination of Palestine’s indigenous people. UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Joyce Msuya, stated the situation simply: “The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying.”

The people of North Gaza and all of Palestine need the intervention of the world now. The United States and their Zionist dog must be isolated economically and militarily until they end this horror campaign against Palestine. 

The lesson of the Shoah, or Holocaust perpetrated at the hands of Nazi Germany, was not the need for a fascist faux-Jewish ethnostate but the need to prevent all forms of fascism and genocide in the future. The Zionists cannot be allowed to continue to operate modern-day Treblinka and Auschwitz in Gaza or anywhere. 

Palestine must be free.  

Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.