Genocide Will Not End Unless the Palestinian Political Leaders are Free
Vijay Prashad
SLOWLY, a full picture of the devastation of Gaza by Israel is becoming clear. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) released a report around the time of the ceasefire that began to lay out the numbers: Israel’s bombardment of Gaza resulted in the total destruction of 190,115 buildings and the almost total destruction of another 330,500 housing units. The constant artillery and aerial fire for the 734 days of the genocide resulted in the wrecking of eighty-five percent of Gaza’s water and sewage system. Only one medical facility remained open in Gaza City at the time of the ceasefire, with ninety-four percent of hospitals and clinics destroyed or badly damaged. In fact, according to the PCBS, Gaza is currently unliveable.
It is impossible to know the full extent of the physical and mental damage inflicted upon the Palestinian people of Gaza: the Ministry of Health has inadequate numbers for the dead and injured, and the trauma will only be known over the course of the years if there is indeed the return of specialists to the area. The United Nations reports that its entire child protection apparatus in Gaza has ‘almost collapsed’. Stunningly, the UN notes that one in five babies in Gaza is born preterm or underweight, and that 11,000 pregnant women in June 2025 faced famine conditions while 17,000 more pregnant women struggled with acute malnutrition without much relief.
THE COST OF REBUILDING
To rebuild the lives of the survivors of the genocide is a task that has not yet been totally understood. Gaza has been pummelled by Israel since at least when Hamas prevailed in the 2006 parliamentary elections. These punctual attacks by Israel of Gaza’s Palestinian population and infrastructure – including near genocides in 2009 and 2014 – resulted in major rebuilding efforts largely financed by the Gulf Arabs (led by the Qataris) and by the European Union (in 2014 through the Cairo Conference on Gaza Reconstruction, the donors pledged $5.4 billion but only spent $2.6 billion partly due to Israeli intransigence through the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism).
In February 2025, the UN, the European Union, and the World Bank released an Interim Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment that estimated that $53.2 billion would be needed for recovery and reconstruction over a decade and that $20 billion would be needed over the next three years to rebuild infrastructure, to restore essential services, and to restart the destroyed economy. An Egyptian plan came up with the same estimate of $53 billion, but to be spent over five years. All eyes are on the Gulf states to foot the bill, but this is not something that can be relied upon for the Palestinians. There is no voice in the debate that says that Israel must pay for the reconstruction, since it was Israel that destroyed Gaza.
POLITICIDE OF THE PALESTINIANS
One of the reasons why there is no such clear voice that demands reparations from Israel is that Palestinian politics itself has been wounded by the long-term occupation going back decades and by Israel’s policy of targeted assassination and incarceration of popular Palestinian leaders. For instance, of the five major factions, their most popular leaders have suffered in prison for over two decades: Marwan Barghouti, by far the most popular Palestinian leader and one of the key figures in Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), has been a political prisoner for twenty-three years and six months, while Ahmad Sa’adat, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), has been a political prisoner for twenty-three years and eight months. Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders have either been in exile or have been killed in a regular fashion in Gaza (from Hamas, its founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was killed by an Israeli strike in Gaza in March 2004, then Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi was killed in April 2004, and then a wave of assassinations in the past few years – Saleh al-Arouri, Muhammad Ismail Darwish, Osama Mazini, Ismail Haniyeh, and Yahya Sinwar).
Between the prison and the bomb, almost the entire leadership structure of the major Palestinian political parties has been decimated. The fourteen Palestinian leaders who came to Beijing in 2024 to sign a joint agreement certainly represented their organisations, but they were not the most widely known or popular figures (such as Fatah’s Mahmoud al-Aloul, who is often spoken of as a successor to Mahmoud Abbas; Musa Abu Marzouk, often thought of the Hamas foreign minister; and Jamil Mazhar, who is a leader of the PFLP). The seriousness of the fourteen party talks would have been amplified had Marwan Barghouti and Ahmad Sa’adat been at the table. But Israel will not permit them to leave the prisons, even as the Palestinians continue to put them high up on their prison exchange lists. Israel knows that if it can continue to decapitate the Palestinian political leadership, it will make Palestine rely more on the compromised presidency of Abbas, on the Gulf Arabs, and on the spineless Arab neighbours (such as Egypt and Jordan). No one will speak directly for the Palestinians or the need to end the occupation; they will only talk of rebuilding in the mildest way for the refugees and of security guarantees for the Israelis to continue their occupation.
WHO WILL SPEAK FOR THE PALESTINIANS?
One cannot judge Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO, merely for his surrender of the Palestinian position at the Oslo Accords in 1994. That will not allow one to properly understand his role, which was cemented when he led the foundation of the PLO thirty years previously, in 1964 in Kuwait. From that date till the late 1980s, Arafat was highly respected as the visible face of the Palestinian cause, and whatever differences existed amongst the factions, Arafat spoke for the Palestinian people as their undisputed spokesperson. Since Oslo, since the delegitimization of Arafat, there has been no such political figure who has been permitted to articulate the Palestinian position in any negotiation or dialogue. The Israeli incarceration and assassination policy against Palestinian leaders and its policy of demonization of Palestinian political organisations (designating them all as terrorists, for instance) has meant that no figure has been able to arise in Arafat’s place as the voice of the Palestinian people.
What this has meant is that others speak for Palestine, and often misrepresent the Palestinian position because that position cannot be democratically arrived at without regular meetings of the factions and without their main political leaders being at the table. Israel knows this very well, which is why either it has held the political prisoners for decades without allowing them access to any media or to their colleagues or it has assassinated any leader, even mid-level leaders, who shows any promise of being an articulate spokesperson for the Palestinian cause (such as the PFLP’s Abu Ali Mustafa in 2001 and Hamas’ Salah Shehade in 2002).
For decades now, the Israelis have complained that there is no ‘partner to peace’ from the Palestinian side. But how can there be a ‘partner to peace’ if the Israelis routinely murder Palestinian political leaders or else hold them in terrible conditions inside Israeli jails on administrative – or non-criminal – grounds. To say that every one of the Palestinian factions is a terrorist organisation, which the Israelis have done with full US backing, is to delegitimise all Palestinian politics. This is why the Israelis and the United States as well as the Gulf Arabs are quite happy to talk about the rebuilding of Gaza without any Palestinian representation at the table. Indeed, even the Egyptian plan, which suggests the need to have Palestinian involvement, is content to speak of the need for ‘Palestinian professionals’ to be at the table and not the actual political organisations that represent the Palestinian people’s interests. The systematic attempt to destroy Palestinian politics results in a situation where Israel can determine when it bombs Palestinians and how it rebuilds their homes with the money of the Gulf Arabs; it is to Israel’s advantage to prevent any Palestinian representation to be built and to be at the table.
RELEASE BARGHOUTI AND SA’ADAT
But, indeed, the continued resilience of the Palestinian factions frustrates Israel’s ambitions. The political organisations remain alive and well and they will demand a role in the reconstruction of Gaza as well as in any talks that take place regarding Palestine. It is easy for the US government to designate whomever it wants unilaterally as a terrorist organisation, just as it is easy for Israel (and the European Union) to do so. The United Nations has never placed any Palestinian group on its sanctions list, and it has not designated any of these groups as a terrorist organisation. Despite the parochial nature of the Western idea that Hamas or the PFLP are terrorist organisations, this is not the view of most of the world. They see them as political groups, indeed as national liberation groups that are fighting for Palestinian emancipation from apartheid, occupation, and now genocide. Because of the overwhelming role of the US and the European Union on the side of Israel, the Palestinian organisations are often absent from the discussions about the future of Palestine. This means, in fact, that Palestine is absent from the conversations about its own future.
One way to change this equation is to release the political leaders (such as Marwan Barghouti and Ahmad Sa’adat), allow their organisations to openly deliberate the future of Palestine, and then allow them to represent those views at the rebuilding and negotiation table. Anything other than that is merely the continuation of the genocide by other means.
