As news broke about an imminent ceasefire deal, the Israeli government intensified its attacks on Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Since the ceasefire announcement, the Israeli military has killed at least 87 Palestinians. This is horrific. Unfortunately, it’s also what Palestinians warned of. The Israeli military typically increases its attacks days and hours before a ceasefire is implemented, and this time is no different.

The Israeli government, with the eager assistance of the United States, is laying the groundwork for for how we respond to genocide and atrocities in the 21st century. The total and expanding devastation in Gaza is a result of Zionism—the racist colonial movement that led to the establishment of Israel, an apartheid state built on land stolen from massacred and forcibly exiled Palestinians.

In two weeks, the Knesset plans to ban @UNRWA from operating in Gaza, further endangering humanitarian efforts to support Palestinians enduring the devastating impact of the Israeli military’s genocide. Support for aid workers is critical as the Israeli military continues to block food and essential supplies from reaching Gaza.🧵 UNRWA Commissioner-General @UNLazzarini says, “If implemented, the decision will have a disastrous impact on the people we support. This includes the delivery of humanitarian aid to people in Gaza + basic services in the occupied West Bank including education for 50,000 children who go to UNRWA schools. Other UN agencies have acknowledged they cannot fill in the void & provide direct education & healthcare.

“The fate & future of over 650,000 children in Gaza, who are out of school for a second year in a row, hangs in the balance. In the absence of UNRWA or functioning Palestinian institutions, the State of Israel - as an occupying power- will have to provide assistance + services to the population across the occupied Palestinian territory including in Gaza.”

Since the start of the Israeli government's genocide on Palestinians in Gaza, the BDS (“Boycott Divestment and Sanctions”) movement has gained significant global momentum, with remarkable growth and impact from July to December 2024. @BDSmovement 🧵 This surge in activism has proven that intensifying pressure to end state and corporate complicity in the Israeli military’s war crimes leads to tangible victories. Check out the slides above for key BDS victories in the United States. There are countless more global wins to celebrate.

After a 10-day journey through occupied Palestine, Ta-Nehisi Coates highlights the harrowing reality of life under the Israeli government: “a world where separate and unequal is alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others is policy.”

In his new book of essays, The Message, author Ta-Nehisi Coates describes confronting Israel’s regime modeled after Jim Crow enforced through a segregationist order backed by the “biggest guns [he’d] ever seen in [his] life.”🧵 Coates felt mortified by his years of ignorance to the brutal simplicity of the Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. He asked, “how could I not know?”

Coates told @nymag how astonished he was “by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other.”

We have the power to leverage millions of dollars to shut down Israel’s genocidal economy. If you pay taxes in the US, you are uniquely positioned to end the crucial financial support that the Israeli government relies on in committing genocide.

Why? Because the US is the primary financial backer of the Israeli government and military. The Israeli military’s genocide is raging on, and as the Israeli government spends US military funding, the Israeli economy is increasingly dependent on bonds bought by states and municipalities across the US.

CONFIRMED: The first 25 days of the Israeli military’s genocide in Gaza were the deadliest and most devastating air campaign on civilians in all of modern history, according to @airwars.🧵 In its new report Airwars, a nonprofit watchdog monitoring civilian harm in conflict zones, revealed that at least 5,139 civilians were killed during the first month of the Israeli military’s genocide in Gaza, marking it as the deadliest and most intense air campaign for civilians in the 21st century.

As of this morning, the Israeli military is directly targeting Al Awda Hospital in Jabalia, North Gaza, threatening to kill everyone inside unless all patients, medical staff, and sheltering Palestinians evacuate immediately. This demand is impossible to fulfill, as the Israeli military is also targeting the area surrounding the hospital, leaving no safe options for Palestinians in the hospital.🧵 This comes just one week after the Israeli military began yet another brutal attack on Kamal Adwan Hospital, which it had besieged for months. Last Friday Israeli soldiers abducted hospital director Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and they’ve kept him illegally detained ever since. Dr. Abu Safiya has been a leading voice for healthcare in northern Gaza, refusing to abandon his patients even after his own family was targeted and his son killed by the Israeli military.

“Around the world, backpacks represent freedom—school, work, adventure—but in Gaza, they have come to mean something entirely different. Backpacks are what we use to carry what’s left of our lives,” says Eman Alhaj Ali (@EmanAlhajAli1) for @nationmag. 🧵 When the the Israeli military’s genocide began and Eman and her family first fled their home, they packed backpacks with essential documents like IDs and birth certificates. As the Israeli military continued to attack and displace Palestinians, those backpacks were filled with memories, hopes, and remnants of normalcy.

We will never forget 2024. This year, 76 years after the Nakba and 17 years into the Israeli military’s blockade of Gaza—and with the full support of the US—the Israeli government has escalated its genocide against Palestinians living in Gaza to horrific proportions. With grief, we remember the at least 45,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military tallied by the Ministry of Health in Gaza, though we know that number does not come close to the true death toll, and that there are tens of thousands unaccounted for. We resolve to never forget them.

In the span of one week, six babies and Dr. Ahmad Al-Zaharneh froze to death in Gaza due to their forced displacement by the Israeli government. Three of the babies died of hypothermia in Al-Mawasi, two of whom were 20-day-old twins who were born one month prematurely. Doctors warn of rising cases of hypothermia, malnutrition and other preventable deaths, as the Israeli military continues its relentless attacks on hospitals and medics, preventing Palestinians from seeking medical care.🧵 After two-week-old Sila Al-Fasih froze to death, her father, Mahmoud, recounted her story to @Mondoweiss: “Sila woke up in the middle of the night, so her mother breastfed her, and then she went back to sleep. In the morning, her mother picked her up to breastfeed her again but found her frozen to death.

“We sleep on sand, and water drips on our heads. Our children are dying of cold, hunger, and fear. This war has destroyed us,” Mahmoud said.

For the fifth night of Hanukkah, we remember the Turkish anti-Zionist Jewish poet Roni Margulies (1955-2023), Z”L. Born to a Sephardi mother and an Ashkenazi father, Roni grew up at the heart of multicultural Istanbul which gave him an intellectual curiosity and a sense that he was “more at home in water” than on land. He studied economics in London, where he lived for decades, and began writing poetry in 1991, winning the prestigious Yunus Nadi Poetry Award in 2002 for Saat Farkı (Time Difference). His poems captured simple moments like "buying bread and cigarettes," a "favorite blue pullover... thinned at the elbows," and "brewing tea nightly at eleven."

This morning, Israeli soldiers forced hundreds of injured patients to evacuate the last functioning hospital in North Gaza and set it ablaze. Footage shows dozens of injured Palestinians and medical workers forced to strip and walk in the direction of the Indonesian hospital. The fate of Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya and the remaining staff of Kamal Adwan Hospital is unknown.

https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1872677455980319039

We are appalled, yet unsurprised, to see Israeli soldiers set up a giant menorah amidst the rubble in Gaza on the first night of Hanukkah. Hanukkah is a holiday that celebrates the miracle of light in darkness, and yet all this scene illuminates is the horror and brazen cruelty of the Israeli government’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza. This is the logical conclusion of Zionism, which requires the decimation of Palestinian life to enact Jewish supremacy on stolen Palestinian land. Zionism is a political ideology that envisions the establishment of an ethnostate where Jews have more rights than Palestinians.

Christmas is canceled for the second year in Palestine while Christian Palestinians focus on surviving genocide. In reflection of the holiday, we recall the historical birthplace of Christianity: Palestine. Before the Nakba, Christians made up around 9.5% of the total population of Palestine; today, they make up only 1-2.5% in the occupied West Bank, around 1.5% in ‘48 borders, and less than 1% are left in Gaza, seeking shelter from the genocide being inflicted by the Israeli military there.

The Israeli military has besieged the last remaining hospital in North Gaza, the Kamal Adwan Hospital, for months. Now it is using robots to place massive explosives surrounding the hospital: clear plans for annihilation if the world permits it. Earlier today two of these explosive robots detonated, injuring at least 20 Palestinian patients and medical staff. This is a pattern. This is what a well-funded genocide looks like.

While Syrians were celebrating the downfall of the brutal Assad regime and political prisoners were reuniting with their families, the Israeli government took advantage of the regime’s fall by invading Syria. In violation of its 1974 agreement with Syria, the Israeli military invaded and seized more parts of the Golan Heights—territory it illegally annexed in 1967. This marks the Israeli military's largest land grab in Syria in decades. And now, Netanyahu has said that the Golan will remain occupied by the Israeli state “for eternity.”

A new report from @humanrightswatch finds the Israeli government guilty of extermination and acts of genocide by deliberately restricting safe water for drinking and sanitation to Palestinians in Gaza. 🧵

Graphic: @democracynow This comes just two weeks after Amnesty International released its investigation concluding that the Israeli government is perpetrating genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Human Rights Watch explains how the Israeli military has been using water as a weapon of war in Gaza. By shutting off water supplies from the Israeli government, cutting electricity and fuel required to operate water systems, destroying solar panels at wastewater treatment facilities, and obstructing essential repairs, it has exacerbated the humanitarian crisis it created.

Every child deserves to dream of flying—of soaring above the clouds, unburdened by fear.

On November 2nd, @activestills reported how, “amid ongoing Israeli attacks on Khan Yunis and continued displacement, children sought refuge on a large hill where army vehicles were once stationed in Hamad Town… They traveled from distant areas to escape the atmosphere of war, finding a place to play and have fun after a year of being unable to visit amusement parks.”🧵 This week, a Palestinian NGO in Gaza released a new study revealing that 96% of children in Gaza, enduring the horrors of war, believe their death is imminent due to the immense trauma they have experienced. Almost half of the Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza are under 18 years old.

The trauma Palestinian children endure is entirely caused by the Israeli government, rooted in its settler-colonial agenda of seizing Palestinian land and erasing the Palestinian people.

All people have the right to bodily autonomy: to choose whether to have children and to raise families in safe, supportive communities. Yet right now, as the Israeli military is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinian families are losing this fundamental right.🧵 The Israeli military’s ruthless bombing campaign is forcing pregnant women in Gaza to face unimaginable horrors as hospitals are decimated, prenatal care is obliterated, and women are killed before and after pregnancy because seeking medical help has become a deadly risk.

Two weeks ago, Dr. Areej Hijazi, an obstetrician and gynecologist at the Emirati Hospital in Rafah, wrote in Mondoweiss how, “in many cases, pregnant women who need to undergo a cesarean section are refusing to stay in the hospital even overnight because hospitals and their surroundings have been repeatedly targeted by Israeli aggression. Many chose to attempt to recover in overcrowded schools that lack basic living necessities out of fear for their lives.”

Over 400 days into the U.S-backed, Israeli genocide of Palestinians, none of us pictured we’d be here. So if you’re feeling hopeless or uncertain about how we move forward together once Trump takes office — you’re not alone. 🧵 That’s why we’re gathering in one week to understand the shifting terrain, get clear on strategy, and get organized for the next phase of the work.

The place to do that is the quarterly JVP Virtual Mass Meeting on Thursday, December 19 from 7:30-9pm ET. Register at jvp.org/massmembermeet…