Introduction to the special issue Palestine : perspectives on decolonisation

Abstract

After 20 months of calculated and unrelenting horror aimed at the starving and terrorized population of Gaza, the Israeli/US/UK/EU genocide is being ratchetted-up. As we go to press the official casualty count — 60,000 deaths from traumatic injury — is an immense undercount. It excludes the thousands buried under the rubble and deaths resulting from preventable disease, manufactured famine, malnutrition, the lack of water, inadequate sanitation and the availability of chronic medication. Sadistically, the Israeli Occupation Force and the US have orchestrated ‘death traps’ using food as bait to lure hungry people to areas where scores are routinely and casually murdered, as if the hideous massacres over the past 650 days have not been enough — each new atrocity vying with the previous one in a macabre pattern of inhumanity and brutality. Gaza has the greatest number of children per capita whose limbs have been amputated in the world, often without anesthesia and close to 40 000 children have lost one or both parents.