83% of all plant life in Gaza destroyed: two devastating reports on Israel's genocide

Two reports detail the hideous consequences of Israel's Western-facilitated genocide. And yet the Western media bury or ignore them altogether.

Two devastating reports on Israel’s genocide should have been front page news. They detail how a Western ally is committing genocide facilitated by our governments. They weren’t: our media outlets have engaged in what is, in practise, a cover-up.

We didn’t need these reports, of course, as crucial as they are, to know that this is genocide.

“All the indicators of genocidal activities are flashing red in Gaza.”

These were the words of the President of the International Court of Justice 8 months ago, and before and since then the evidence for genocide is overwhelming. No genocide in history has been so documented as it happened, thanks to the work of Palestinian journalists, many of them brutally maimed or slaughtered alongside their families, the testimonies of survivors, the work of independent agencies and experts, the existence of social media, and frankly the boasting of the perpetrators, from politicians, officials and generals to soldiers on the ground.

And yet from the start we have seen a deliberate attempt by both Western media outlets and Western politicians - both of which have facilitated this genocide - to suppress and ignore the evidence, and lie about it.

One of the reports was issued by the United Nations Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices, which covers the period between October 2023 to July 2024, and looks at Israel’s onslaught against Palestinians across the occupied territories, but focused on Gaza. It concludes that the developments in the report that it charts are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.”

The report notes how the official death toll is likely to be a devastating underestimate, that it could take up to three years to retrieve the bodies of slaughtered Palestinians, and that the decomposition of bodies raised serious health concerns and itself risked further deaths.

In looking at the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure, the report examines a crucial detail which most media outlets simply do not even engage in: how artificial intelligence systems relying on mass surveillance are used to swiftly generate tens of thousands of targets, not least at night when those targets return to their families, including of course their children, and that this reliance on AI assisted targeting means that soldiers can authorise strikes within seconds, with them happening at night increasing the risk of, say, butchering their families alongside them.

This is particularly important to examine because the International Criminal Court has so far focused on the question of starvation, not the bombing campaign. This report estimates it would take approaching half a century to recycle just half of the debris produced by Israel’s onslaught.

It looks at the mass violent displacement, a deliberate policy of starvation, with a deliberate siege of the essentials of life and the war on UNRWA, UN’s Palestinian refugee agency - and the main humanitarian agency in Gaza.

The report details the mass destruction of water, sanitation and hygiene systems, the widespread contamination of soil, beaches, coastal waters and freshwater sources, with access to clean water deliberately suffocated.

It looks at how women and children and newborns have disproportionately suffered, with up to two mothers killed every hour, and women and girls’ access to essential services critically impacted, with pregnant women prevented from getting the crucial nutrition and care and emergency obstetric services they need, and horrific circumstances for women giving birth, with a surge in stress induced miscarriages, stillbirths and premature births

It documents the impact on women and girls more broadly because of the destruction of the hospital system.

It also looks at the hundreds of Palestinian women and girls subjected to sexual and gender based violence by the Israeli state. That includes being targeted, arbitrarily detained and subjected to forced nudity, inappropriate touching, sexual violence, including rape, sexualised torture, threats of rape, psychological violence and online sexual harassment, including degrading photos published on social media platforms.

It really is worth emphasising this point. For the Western media, and for Western politicians, allegations of sexual violence and rape are only of interest if they concern forces hostile to the West. In those cases such allegations are used to claim that such forces are uniquely barbaric and evil, justifying the genocidal onslaught. So where then is the outcry about overwhelming and repeated reports of sexual violence and rape when it concerns the Israeli state? Where is the commentary about how such reports underline the depravity of Israeli forces?

We also read here about the enforced disappearance of Palestinian women and children by Israel’s military, with mass graves at hospitals including the bodies of women and children who show signs of being tortured and summarily executed.

The report also specifically details the horrors inflicted on children - from intergenerational trauma to Gaza being a graveyard for thousands of children.

They state:

“Since the beginning of the war, Israeli officials have publicly supported policies that strip Palestinians of the very necessities required to sustain life — food, water, and fuel.”

And indeed they note how Israel has defied binding orders from the International Court of Justice and Security Council resolutions, concluding:

“Israel is intentionally causing death, starvation and serious injury, using starvation as a method of war and inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinian people.”

And then there is a truly terrifying report by Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at the University of London bringing together a range of experts. It’s entitled ‘A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Genocide in Gaza Since October 2023’.

They say simply: “Our analysis of this conduct reveals the near total destruction of civilian life in Gaza”, and they look at how the evacuation orders used by the Israeli state - supposedly telling Palestinian civilians to flee to areas classified as safe - have resulted in mass repeated displacements of the population, often to areas which then came under attack. This is crucial work, because apologists for the genocide have often presented these evacuation orders as some sort of humanitarian gesture.

Crucially they conclude: “The patterns we have observed concerning Israel’s military conduct in Gaza indicate a systematic and organised campaign to destroy life, conditions necessary for life, and life-sustaining infrastructure.”

They use the term genocide as it was originally defined by the Jewish Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who was influenced by the Ottoman Empire’s genocide of the Armenians, growing antisemitic persecution and of course the Shoah, the Nazi extermination of Jewish people, amongst other Nazi genocides.

As Forensic Architecture put it, Lemkin thought genocide “signifies a coordinated plan of actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”

In the report, Forensic Architecture note how Israel is destroying civilian and agricultural infrastructure to create a buffer zone and so-called raid routes - that is 13 routes from Israeli military bases - in what is already a desperately overcrowded strip of land, dividing Gaza up permanently into north and south.

That means they’ve cleared 36% of Gaza of all forms of life.

The Palestinian population has been forcibly squeezed into just 13% of Gaza’s land - bear in mind Gaza as a whole is only the size of east London, and there was a pre-war population of around 2.3 million, making it one of the most overcrowded parts of earth as it was. Today, evacuation orders cover 84% of its total area.

Of the 346 schools used as shelter, Forensic Architecture note, 70% of them were attacked by the Israeli army. Indeed all areas of Gaza have been attacked, including those designated ‘humanitarian zones.’

As the UN report itself underlined, evacuation orders themselves are inconsistent and unclear, forcing civilians to areas that are attacked.

But here are some crucial facts which should chill you to the bone. The deliberate starvation of Gaza by Israel is often - quite understandably - understood as preventing the essentials of life from getting to civilians.

That’s only one part of the story, because you have to factor in the destruction of Gaza’s own ability to offer its people the means of survival. There is not just far less entering Gaza than before 7th October 2023: there is also far less within Gaza that can be consumed.

This report finds that 83% all plant life in Gaza has been destroyed. 70% of Gaza’s agricultural land - from fields to orchards - have also been destroyed.

Nearly half of of groundwater wells and two thirds of water tanks were destroyed and damaged, with the status of another 29% is not known, and all wastewater treatment facilities in Gaza have been rendered non functional.

All of this points in one direction: a deliberate and systematic attempt to make Gaza somewhere that is impossible to sustain life. It does not get more genocidal than that.

Another pillar of genocide of course has been the all out war on the medical system, which imposes a daily death sentence on so many - from the injured to the ill to those with serious pre-existing health conditions, with 35 out of 36 hospitals rendered out of service at least once.

Forensic Architecture note that 31 out of those hospitals have been directly targeted. 11 of them have been under siege, 5 of them twice. 10 hospitals invaded, and 4 invaded twice.

In terms of the raw statistics of this assault, we could go on - 71% of shelters containing desperately vulnerable civilians were attacked, 81% of university facilities have been attacked, 80% of religious institutions attacked, 38% of them destroyed, 42% damaged. Most cultural sites have been destroyed.

All of this amounts of course to an attempt to erase the culture of Gaza, itself another core plank of genocide. It’s not just the Palestinian people being slaughtered - their imprint on the world is being deleted.

So many other attacks are documented - on bakeries, on aid personnel, and dozens of cases of civilians targeted while seeking aid. Nearly half of roads in Gaza have been damaged, they note, itself making it hard to get aid to the people who need it.

The failure of the Western media to give proper meaningful attention to these devastating facts it itself complicity in genocide. Claims of human shields, for example, make no sense when you detail the apocalyptic level of destruction, and indeed we know there is overwhelming evidence of the Israeli forces using Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Israel has wiped Gaza out. And the Western media has suppressed the truth, whitewashing Israeli crimes and regurgitating Israel’s official propaganda. they must be held to account.