The New Year has brought with it new hopelessness and passivism as Israel’s incessant killings of innocent people, including children and women, in Gaza has no end in sight. Israel has refused to listen even to the International Court of Justice and categorically announced that it would continue its war against Palestinians.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the PM of Israel, has declared that “Israel will pursue its war against Hamas until victory and will not be stopped by anyone, including the world court”. As the fighting in Gaza approached the 100-day mark, in his speech, Netanyahu suggested that Israel would ignore the international court’s ruling ordering a Gaza ceasefire. “No one will stop us, not The Hague, not the axis of evil and not anyone else,” Netanyahu said in televised remarks, referring to Iran and its allied militias.

South Africa has launched an application at the International Court of Justice in The Hague accusing Israel of breaching the 1948 Genocide Convention. “The court is the UN’s principal judicial organ. Its role is to settle, in accordance with international law, legal disputes submitted to it by states, and to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by UN entities and agencies. After two days of hearings, the world now waits to see how much power the court actually has. In its request, South Africa asked for provisional measures to “protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people under the Genocide Convention” and “ensure Israel’s compliance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention not to engage in genocide, and to prevent and to punish genocide.”

It should be noted that the Court’s rulings are binding but very difficult to enforce against Israel because Israel has the support of America and other European countries. Due to this unwavering support from these powerful countries, Israel has already killed around 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza. More than two million people are suffering in the besieged enclave. There is no country, organisation like the UN and OIC, that could force Israel to halt the slaughtering of Palestinians, including children and women.

In fact, the silence of the world over the killings of Palestinians, their forcible eviction, displacement, homelessness, starvation, thirst and disease is in itself a criminal act. Israel has reduced the entire Gaza to rubble, rendering the area uninhabitable. According to various reports, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have started to take water from the Mediterranean Sea and hose it into underground tunnels. The plan is to flood the vast network of underground shafts and tunnels Hamas has reportedly built and used to carry out its operations.

“I won’t talk about specifics, but they include explosives to destroy and other means to prevent Hamas operatives from using the tunnels to harm our soldiers,” said IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi. “[Any] means which gives us an advantage over the enemy that [uses the tunnels], deprives it of this asset, is a means that we are evaluating using. This is a good idea…”

Israel’s current strategy to drown Hamas’s tunnels will cause irreparable damage. “It is important to keep in mind,” warns Juliane Schillinger, a researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, “that we are not just talking about water with a high salt content here — seawater along the Mediterranean coast is also polluted with untreated wastewater, which is continuously discharged into the Mediterranean from Gaza’s dysfunctional sewage system.”

This plan has been made not only to dismantle Hamas’s military capabilities but also to further degrade and destroy Gaza’s area. Israeli officials have already declared that their goal is to make sure that Gaza will be an unlivable place once they end their ruthless military campaign.

“We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said shortly after the Hamas attack of October 7. “We will eliminate everything — they will regret it.”

Israel is now fulfilling its promise in front of the entire world. It has already damaged or destroyed up to 70% of all homes in Gaza. After filling the tunnels with polluted water, the remaining residential buildings will have structural problems and Palestinians will also have problems rebuilding.

Israel has already uprooted olive groves. Now, it is poisoning Gaza from above. According to Amnesty International, Israel has used white phosphorus bombs on densely populated urban areas, which is considered illegal under international law. “Any time that white phosphorus is used in crowded civilian areas, it poses a high risk of excruciating burns and lifelong suffering,” says Lama Fakih, director for the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch (HRW). White phosphorus also has deleterious effects on plants, animals and soil composition.

These facts clearly show that Israel has a plan to turn Gaza into a barren and unlivable land for Palestinians. The Gaza war has unmasked the hypocrisy of the West, helplessness of the UN, OIC, and other Human rights organisations and international law.

However, it has also exposed that America’s political leverage is waning in the Middle East. Simon Tisdall writes, “after 45 years of trying, Iran is finally the big kid on the block. Sanctioning, ostracising and threatening Tehran hasn’t worked. The US, Britain – and Israel – face a formidable opponent, part of a triangular global alliance backed by powerful militias and economic might. A fresh diplomatic approach is urgently needed if a wider conflict is to be avoided.”

This new reality also shows that more wars are coming in the region, a very bad omen for humanity and the people of the region.