The Two-Stage Killing of Palestinians in Gaza: Annihilation, Then Abandonment

A colleague, an editor at a widely read outlet that centered Gaza throughout the two-year genocide, recently voiced his frustration that the Strip is no longer a main focus in the news. He hardly needed to say it. The shift is palpable and profound. Gaza has been decisively pushed to the margins—not only by the mainstream Western media, with its long-documented structural bias in Israel’s favor, but also by outlets often described, however imprecisely, as “pro-Palestine.”

On the surface, this retreat might appear routine, even logical: during the peak of extreme violence, Gaza demanded constant attention; in a period of so-called “ceasefire,” it ostensibly requires less. This assumption, however, collapses under the slightest scrutiny, because the genocide in Gaza has not ended. It has merely mutated into a second, more insidious phase, where the mechanisms of destruction operate through enforced deprivation, systemic obstruction, and the global weaponization of indifference.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, nearly 500 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded since the major ceasefire was declared in October, despite repeated claims that large-scale massacres had ceased. These are not mere isolated incidents or “violations”; they are the deliberate continuation of the same lethal policies, now operating under a thin veneer of procedural normalcy. The killing has simply been bureaucratized and slowed to a pace deemed palatable for international consumption.

Beyond this steady daily death toll lies a physical and social devastation of almost incomprehensible scale. More than 71,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023. Entire neighborhoods have been erased, critical infrastructure pulverized, and the basic prerequisites for civilian life rendered nearly impossible. To grasp the depth of Gaza’s ongoing crisis, one must confront a series of brutal realities:

A Landscape of Deliberate Suffering: Well over 1 million people remain displaced, trapped in tents and makeshift shelters that collapse under winter storms, are swallowed by floodwaters, or are shredded by strong winds. Infants have frozen to death. Families are swept from one temporary refuge to another, trapped in a perpetual cycle of exposure, disease, and trauma.

A Land of the Missing: Beneath Gaza’s ruins lie thousands of bodies still buried under rubble, unreachable due to Israel’s systematic destruction of heavy machinery, roads, and emergency services. Thousands more are believed to be buried in mass graves, awaiting excavation and dignified burial—a process indefinitely obstructed.

The Fiction of Safety: Hundreds of bodies also remain scattered in areas east of the so-called “yellow line,” a boundary Israel claimed separated military zones from Palestinian “safe areas.” This line was a fiction from the start, a theatrical prop used to manufacture the appearance of restraint while violence continued everywhere. Israel never respected it, and it now serves as a ghostly demarcation for areas where return is permanently denied.

From Israel’s perspective, the war has never truly stopped. Only Palestinians are expected to honor the ceasefire, compelled by the understanding that any response, however minimal, will be seized upon as a casus belli for renewed mass killing—a response fully endorsed by the US and its Western allies. The violence has merely been calibrated. On a single day in mid-January, Israeli attacks killed 16 Palestinians, including women and children, across Gaza, despite the absence of any military confrontation. But as long as the daily death toll remains below the psychological threshold of mass slaughter—below, say, 100 bodies a day—Gaza quietly slips from the headlines. The normalization of “acceptable” levels of violence is complete.

Today, more than 2 million Palestinians are confined to roughly 45 percent of Gaza’s already tiny 365-square-kilometer area. Only a trickle of aid enters, clean water is a luxury, and a health system that was targeted is now barely functioning. Gaza’s economy has been annihilated. Even fishermen, practicing a centuries-old livelihood, are either blocked entirely from the sea or restricted to less than 1 km offshore, turning sustenance into a daily gamble with death.

Education has been reduced to a component of survival. Children study in tents or in the skeletal remains of partially destroyed buildings, as nearly every school and university has been damaged or obliterated by Israeli bombardment.

Critically, Israel has not abandoned the rhetoric that laid the ideological groundwork for its genocide. Senior officials continue to articulate visions of permanent devastation, “voluntary migration,” and demographic engineering—language that systematically strips Palestinians of their humanity and political future while framing their erasure as a strategic necessity.

But why is Israel determined to keep Gaza suspended on the precipice of collapse? Why obstruct stabilization and delay movement toward any semblance of recovery? The blunt answer is that this state of engineered crisis preserves the option for permanent demographic change. Senior officials have openly advocated for the denial of any Palestinian return to vast destroyed areas, effectively transforming temporary displacement into permanent ethnic cleansing. The slow grind of starvation, disease, and despair is a tool of policy.

And the media? For its part, the Western media has embarked on a project of rehabilitating Israel’s image, reinserting it into global narratives of “normalcy” and “shared values” as if a campaign of collective punishment and extermination never occurred. More troubling still, segments of the so-called pro-Palestine media appear to be “moving on,” treating the genocide as a concluded, if tragic, news cycle rather than an ongoing moral emergency that demands persistent witness.

This neglect might be rationalized by pointing to other global crises—in Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, or elsewhere. But that argument holds only if Gaza had truly emerged from catastrophe. It has not. It is being actively prevented from doing so.

Israel has succeeded, to a terrifying degree, in systematically dehumanizing Palestinians through mass violence. Once that violence reaches genocidal proportions, lesser—yet still deadly—forms of violence become normalized. The slow death of survivors becomes background noise, a static hum easily tuned out.

This is the essence of the two-stage killing. Palestinians are killed first through bombs, bullets, and siege—the active, spectacular phase of genocide. They are killed a second time through erasure: through silence, distraction, and the gradual, deliberate withdrawal of global attention from their ongoing, collective suffering. This second death is one of abandonment, where the world looks away from the consequences of its own complicity.

Therefore, keeping Palestine and its people at the center of global moral and political solidarity is not an act of charity or a niche ideological stance. It is the bare minimum owed to a population the world has already failed—and continues to fail every single day. To look away now is not to report on a ceasefire, but to become an accomplice to the second stage.

 

Our Pashto-Dari Website

  Donate Here