This article by Rony Brauman was originally published in French on October 2, 2025, in the thematic dossier "Deux ans après : penser depuis le 7 octobre" (“Two Years Later: Reflecting on October 7”), by the Palestine Media Agency (Agence Média Palestine). The author reflects on the events of October 7, 2023, as well as on the disproportionate violence of Israeli reprisals response.

According to Israel's so-called “friends”, the October 7 attack struck like a bolt of lightning in a calm sky, an unexpected outburst of criminal violence explained solely by antisemitic hatred. Indeed, crimes were committed that day: war crimes, crimes against humanity. Hamas leaders must have known that Israel's response would be brutal, and they will have to answer, before history certainly, perhaps before a court, for this policy of escalation.

Yet, these atrocities cannot justify the excessive violence of Israel's reprisals, the rampage of killings and destruction on a scale unprecedented in this century-old conflict. October 7 is not, as seems to be forgotten, the starting point of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the longest and ultimate colonial war on the planet. Gaza is an occupied territory, and the withdrawal of Israeli settlements in 2005 did not change this reality: that the jailers of this open-air prison are no longer inside but all around it does not change the essential fact. That is why the “right to defend oneself” belongs not to the Israelis but to the Palestinians, as it does to any occupied population. The people of Gaza were and remain prisoners of the Israelis, and those attacked on October 7 were not Jews but Israelis. Attributing a “right to self-defense” to the occupier simply amounts to denying the reality of the occupation. It should be noted here that this right to resist occupation obviously does not authorize the killing or abduction of civilians.

2006, 2008, 2014, 2018, 2021: Gaza's history has been punctuated by war, resulting in thousands of Palestinian deaths and tens of thousands wounded. Since the 1990s, and even more so since the 2000s, the vast majority of Palestinians, both in Gaza and the West Bank, have known Israelis only through armored vehicles, snipers, drones, settler attacks, checkpoints, and other acts of violence and humiliation. While there are still some human relations between Israelis and Palestinians here and there in the West Bank, Gazans under the age of 30 have no perception of Israelis other than as a deadly threat. The humanitarian aid once provided by kibbutz residents to sick Gazans cannot erase this reality experienced by the overwhelming majority of Gaza's inhabitants. There is no other explanation for the hatred mentioned above. Aimé Césaire warned us that “colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to literally dumb him down, to degrade him, to awaken his buried instincts, his greed, his violence, his racial hatred, his moral relativism”Discours sur le colonialisme, PRÉSENCE AFRICAINE, 1989, p 11-12.. How better to describe what Zionism has done to Israelis?

Two years after October 7, the destruction campaign is breaking the most macabre records: daily casualties, including children, women, journalists, and humanitarian workers, killed and maimed, hospitals devastated... More than ten thousand prisoners are held without trial in Israeli prisons, dozens have died under torture. Gaza society has been reduced to overcrowded tent camps, with refugees displaced up to twenty times, living under the buzzing of drones and the constant threat of bombing, while epidemics spread. The total destruction of farmland (what threat to Israel's security?) and the blockade of aid have created the conditions for a famine that Israel's “friends” alternatively describe as staged or the responsibility of Hamas. Following the one-ton bombs - some 70,000 tons of bombs dropped on this tiny territory - bulldozers followed to complete the destruction of buildings, tear up streets, and destroy pipelines.

According to Israeli intelligence data, 9,000 Hamas fighters were killed. If the number of Gazan deaths is estimated at 100,000, a conservative estimate, the civilian casualty rate reaches 90%. This is a record matched only by the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

It is therefore not surprising that the name Israel is now synonymous with mass murder, that it provokes rejection and even hatred. One of Netanyahu's most famous unconditional supporters, Bernard-Henri Lévy, told Laurence Ferrarihttps://youtu.be/shfCnodFEdo?si=UgKqMT3dxJLpvRzn(CNews) that if the reported facts were accurate, if a genocide was truly being committed in Gaza, hatred of Israel would be legitimate. It could not be better said.

It was precisely to reassure its allies that the Israeli government, after having banned humanitarian aid to Gaza, set up food distributions through an obscure “humanitarian foundation,” the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Four hundred aid sites had been set up by UNRWA during the ceasefire; only four sites remained with the GHF, but it mattered little; what counted was the image of these distributions. Nearly 2,000 Palestinians lost their lives there, shot by the mercenaries supposedly ensuring the security of the GHF. In the memory of long-time humanitarian workers, this massacre, reminiscent of The Hunger Games, is unprecedented.

Is international humanitarian law (IHL) dead in Gaza? This is often claimed, but the assertion is debatable. While this carnage is extreme in every sense, many other mass killings have occurred in the past—and continue to occur today—without such a declaration of death. What defines the genocidal war in Gaza, what sets it apart from other ongoing conflicts around the world, is that those charged with upholding the law actively consented to its execution.

The U.S. airlift delivering ammunition is certainly essential for the bombing campaign to continue, but given American exceptionalism, we cannot expect Washington to respect IHL. It is Europe, the birthplace and promoter of IHL, that has driven the final nail into the coffin. What remained of its moral credibility has been lost, having failed to impose even the slightest sanction ; even though EU-Israel free trade agreements could have been suspended and restrictive measures applied in sports, academia, culture and the economy, as demonstrated by the policy toward Russia. European countries were not passive. They actively showed their support by maintaining all their agreements and suppressing numerous demonstrations of solidarity. This choice will remain a moral disaster, a mark of infamy.

In the absence of sanctions, recognition of the State of Palestine, however desirable remains ineffective. The crushing of Gaza City continues as these lines are being written, and an occupation plan is being drawn up in Washington. Tony Blair is even mentioned as a potential provisional governor of the Gaza Strip. The imperial imagination is very much alive. The only change is that the suspension of the association agreement and the adoption of sanctions are no longer taboo subjects for European leaders, even though, let us recall, such measures were and still are considered by some as expressions of antisemitism. The Palestinians' indisputable right to self-determination is not strengthened by this still virtual condemnation. To date, only Spain, both society and government, has taken significant measures. Will others follow suit? There is no reason to believe so.