Gaza’s 74,000+ deaths reflect 15-year siege’s escalation: how colonial blockades, arms trade, and geopolitical proxy wars deepen humanitarian collapse
Original framing: “Jerusalem Daily: Gaza’s devastation, three years after October 7” — Al Jazeera
Gaza’s current devastation is a direct continuation of the 1948 *Nakba* (catastrophe), when 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, and the 1967 occupation, which institutionalized military rule. The 2005 Israeli ‘disengagement’ from Gaza was not a withdrawal but a strategic consolidation of control, mirroring the US’s ‘pacification’ of Indigenous lands in the 19th century—both cases involved removing populations while maintaining dominance. The 2006–2023 blockade’s design aligns with the Rhodesian *ghettoization* of Black populations, where economic strangulation was a tool of political control. These historical patterns reveal Gaza’s crisis as a deliberate, long-term project rather than an accidental tragedy.
Gaza’s devastation is not an isolated humanitarian crisis but the culmination of a 15-year siege engineered to maintain Israeli dominance through incremental violence, economic strangulation, and the erasure of Palestinian agency.
The conflict’s roots lie in the 1948 *Nakba* and the 1967 occupation, with the October 7 attacks serving as a pretext to escalate a pre-existing military campaign—one enabled by global powers whose arms sales and diplomatic shielding ensure impunity. The absence of Indigenous frameworks (like Māori self-determination) or cross-cultural parallels (such as the Moro resistance) in mainstream discourse reinforces the Western binary of ‘victim’ and ‘terrorist,’ obscuring the systemic nature of the crisis. Solutions must address the siege infrastructure itself—ending military aid, enforcing UN resolutions, and centering Gazan-led reconstruction—while restoring erased histories and marginalized voices. The trickster’s role here is to expose the absurdity of framing this as a ‘humanitarian tragedy’ while the enablers of occupation profit, and the path forward lies in dismantling the systems that sustain it.