New Year, Old Crimes: How Gaza Sets the Stage for 2025’s Lawlessness

As 2025 begins, Israel accelerates genocide with plans to fully annex the West Bank. The world’s silence sets a dangerous precedent, emboldening future atrocities, marking a grim era of impunity.

As 2024 draws to a close, the diabolical reality of Israel’s war on Gaza and the world’s complicity in the ongoing genocide has never been clearer. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has already declared 2025 the "year of sovereignty," a euphemism for full annexation of the West Bank—a plan years in the making but now being executed with unprecedented audacity and urgency.

Carlos Latuff for Mondoweiss

While Smotrich and his allies openly strategize to seize what remains of Palestinian land, the U.S. and other global powers stand by in silence, ignoring occupation, land theft, and the genocide in Gaza.

The dual assault on Palestinians is relentless. Bulldozers raze homes in the West Bank, erasing lives and histories, while bombs obliterate entire neighborhoods in Gaza, leaving families buried under rubble. This isn’t happening in the shadows—it’s being live streamed, day after day, in plain sight. Smotrich’s declaration is not just a political maneuver; it’s a declaration of erasure, a systematic effort to strip Palestinians of their land, their rights, and their very existence.

Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza are enduring one of the most intense bombing campaigns in modern history – Israel has dropped over 80,000 tons of bombs on Gaza since October, far surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, & London combined during WWII. Life for its besieged population has been reduced to mere survival. The images are seared into our collective consciousness—children pulled lifeless from the rubble, families wiped out in an instant. Yet the world looks away, paralyzed by its own complicity. Gaza and the West Bank are not separate crises; they are two fronts in the same war—a war against Palestinian existence. The silence of those who claim to champion human rights is deafening, a complicity that enables this genocide to continue.

The New York Times’ recent investigation exposes Israel’s genocidal intent with chilling clarity. On October 7, 2023, the Israeli military issued an order allowing strikes that knowingly kill up to 20 Palestinian civilians per attack. On some occasions, senior commanders approved strikes that endangered over 100 civilians, obliterating any pretense of proportionality. The report disturbingly frames the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as “a contemporary Western military,” a colonial euphemism that sanitizes Israel’s violence while reinforcing the false narrative of self-defense.

The investigation also reveals that the IDF abandoned its supposed efforts to minimize civilian harm, relying on unverified methods like cell phone usage to identify targets. In Gaza—an open-air prison with no truly safe spaces—Israel’s justification for these strikes is to blame Hamas for operating in residential areas.

But in an enclosed, shrinking territory, where is legitimate anti-colonial resistance supposed to operate? The siege itself turns every civilian into a human shield, not because Hamas hides among them, but because there is nowhere else to go.

Hospitals, refugee camps, humanitarian aid convoys, journalists, even so-called “safe paths” for evacuation—none have been spared. This isn’t war; it’s annihilation. Each strike expands the parameters of “collateral damage,” a white-washed term the international community clings to in order to rationalize genocide. And yet, the word “genocide” is conspicuously absent from the report. Avoiding the term does not absolve the crime—it exposes the cowardice of a world unwilling to confront it.

This silence ushers in an era of lawlessness, setting a dangerous precedent for 2025 and beyond. By refusing to hold Israel accountable, the international community signals to other leaders with genocidal ambitions that they, too, can act with impunity. This isn’t just complicity; it’s an endorsement.

AI-generated renderings show skyscrapers, solar fields, water desalination plants, a new high speed rail corridor, and oil rigs off of Gaza’s shoreline.