Israel’s New World Order: Nothing but the Threat of Endless Death
by Andy Worthington | Apr 30,
2026
For the last two and a half years, the State of Israel
has unilaterally — and with jaw-dropping illegality — reimagined warfare as a
religiously-mandated existential struggle against alleged “forces of darkness”
in which there are no rules, and no sense of proportionality or restraint.
Everyone in the Gaza Strip — 2.3 million people at the
start of this “conflict” — has been regarded as, in one way or another,
“associated” with Hamas, the administrative government of Gaza whose military
wing, along with other armed factions, broke out of the “open-air prison” of Gaza on October 7, 2023, killing hundreds of
Israeli security personnel, and hundreds of civilians.
Completely supported by almost all the nations of the
west, who approved the shamefully ill-defined notion that Israel had “the right
to defend itself”, Israel has reinterpreted “self-defense” to mean genocide,
inflicting such disproportionate destruction on Gaza that almost its entire
built environment has been destroyed, and over ten percent of its population —
a quarter of a million people — have been killed or wounded.
As of today, the official death toll, as assessed by Gaza’s shattered health ministry, is
72,594, with 172,404 people injured, and with, of course, many of those injured
suffering life-changing and in many cases life-threatening injuries.
Even since a ceasefire was declared six months ago,
Israel has continued to directly kill and wound Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,
breaking the ceasefire on thousands of occasions, leading to another 818
deaths, and 2,301 injuries.
On April 20, UN Women published an article, “Who are the women and girls behind Gaza war’s
horrific casualty toll?”, pointing out that over half of those killed were
women and girls — at least 22,000 women and 16,000 girls, proportions much
higher than in previous conflicts in Gaza.
As the article also explained, “Nearly 11,000 women
and girls in Gaza have sustained injuries so severe they now face lifelong
disabilities.” In addition, “Nearly one million women and girls have been
displaced in Gaza, with many being forced into displacement an average of four
times. Access to water and food has been severely limited, with nearly 790,000
women and girls experiencing crisis-level or catastrophic levels of food
insecurity.”
Nor must we forget the men and boys who make up the
other 34,000 victims of Israel’s genocide, of whom at least 10,000 were
children, while the majority of the men were also civilians.
Israel itself admitted, in documents released last
year, and subsequently analyzed by Israel’s +972 Magazine and the Guardian,
and which I wrote about here, that, by its own assessment, 83% of those killed in
Gaza were civilians, having only been able to verify that 7,330 individuals had
been combatants.
Moreover, numerous responsible analysts have also
undertaken detailed research establishing that the true death toll is many
times higher than the figure compiled by Gaza’s health ministry — perhaps, as I
have discussed at various times over the last two years, anywhere between 150,000 and several hundred thousand.
These much higher figures rely, primarily, on
assessments of the number of secondary deaths in addition to those resulting
from direct military attacks — caused by the collapse of healthcare services,
shortage of food and clean water, and the spread of diseases.
Israel’s ongoing efforts to increase the death toll in
Gaza, despite a ceasefire
On every front, Israel has, over the last 30 months,
maximised its efforts to create as many secondary deaths as possible, through
prolonged sieges on all supplies of food, water, fuel and medical supplies,
through the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and its entire
healthcare sector, through the destruction of Gaza’s sewage systems, and, most
recently, through a refusal to allow in any kind of machinery for clearance and
reconstruction, most urgently needed for the mountains of garbage that have built
up and that have become a significant health hazard.
As the poet and writer Omar Hamad reported on X just yesterday, “Gaza is witnessing over 17,000
cases of rodent-related and parasitic infections among its displaced
population. This is the reality left behind by the genocide, an environment
forced upon Gaza by Israel’s destruction and its total ban on the entry of
insecticides and life-saving medicines.”
As the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs (OCHA) reported just last week, there is “a proliferation of
rodents, cockroaches, flies, and other pests, contributing to disease
transmission, with a high prevalence of scabies, lice, and skin infections. The
scale and persistence of such public health risks are linked to overcrowding,
inadequate sanitation, and limited access to hygiene services.”
Investigations of the various displacement sites in
which the majority of the population are living “indicated that rodents or
pests were frequently visible in 1,326 of the 1,644 assessed sites (81 per
cent), affecting about 1.45 million people. Additional alerts highlighted
persistent sanitation‑related risks, including sewage in surrounding streets
(61 per cent of sites), accumulated solid waste (56 per cent), and flooding or
stagnant water (24 per cent). Traces of open defecation and dead animals were
also reported. Only 3 per cent of sites indicated no visible environmental
health hazards within or around the site perimeter.”
As the report added, “These environmental conditions
are closely mirrored in reported household‑level health concerns. A total of
1,322 sites (81 per cent) reported the presence of skin infections or rashes,
including scabies, lice, bedbugs, or other ectoparasitic infestations. Skin
infections or rashes were reported in nearly two‑thirds of sites, lice in over
65 per cent, and bedbugs in more than half. Other ectoparasitic infestations
were identified in over one‑quarter of sites. According to health partners,
more than 70,000 cases of rodent and ectoparasitic infestations have been
reported so far in 2026.”
Aid agencies are doing what they can, but are
restrained by deliberate Israeli obstruction, either because they “rely on
items that are largely unavailable in Gaza”, or because they are “often
difficult to take in”, because “implementation requires lengthy processes
including procurement, approvals, shipment, deployment and safe application.”
The genocide, in other words, still grinds on,
deliberately maintained by Israel, which is clearly still trying to kill as
many Palestinians as possible.
Israel still wants everyone in Gaza to die
When pushed, Israeli officials still talk about their
hopes for the “voluntary migration” of the population, as though it is some
kind of humanitarian option, but it has always been a mirage, because no
country will take in significant numbers of the Palestinians, either because of
increasing anti-immigrant sentiment, or because it would so clearly involve the
crimes of ethnic cleansing or forced displacement on a significant scale.
When Israel reluctantly re-opened the Rafah Crossing with Egypt in February, it was an opportunity
for senior Israeli officials to demonstrate their commitment to their claim of
wanting to encourage people to leave, but, instead, they have persistently
restricted the numbers of those allowed out, which, yesterday, prompted the
Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom to ask, “Why is Israel
preventing Gazans from leaving?”
Polling conducted last year, by what Reuters called “a
think tank based in Ramallah and funded by Western donors”, which may not have
been reliable, apparently found “that 49% of those surveyed declared that they
would be willing to apply to Israel to help them emigrate via Israeli ports and
airports, against 50% who said they would not be willing to do so.”
The reason Israel doesn’t want to make even the most
cursory efforts to encourage Palestinians to leave Gaza, is, as senior
officials, pundits and far too many Israeli citizens have made all too clear,
with relentless barbarism, since October 7, is because they want everyone in
Gaza to die, as I first pointed out nearly a year ago, when Israel stepped up
its relentless extermination in Gaza, after deliberately breaking a six-week
ceasefire in January and February, in an article entitled, Israel Wants to Kill Everyone in
Gaza.
Not only did the Israelis admit it themselves, but
numerous international organizations and genocide experts have, since January
2024, when the International Court of Justice warned of a “plausible” genocide
being undertaken in Gaza, concluded, with increasing certainty, that the
cumulative effect of all Israel’s actions since October 2023 has been
undoubtedly and deliberately genocidal in intent, fulfilling four of the five
indicators of genocide in the 1948 Genocide Convention; namely, “acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, by “killing
members of the group”, by “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of
the group”, by “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, and by
“imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”
To cite just a handful of examples, Amnesty
International concluded that Israel’s actions constituted a genocide in December 2024, the UN’s Independent International Commission of
Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and
Israel reached the same conclusion in September 2025, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for
Palestine, has published a series of reports (“Genocide as colonial erasure”, “From economy of occupation to
economy of genocide”, “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” and “Torture and genocide”), defining the contours of Israel’s genocide, and
its support through governments in the west and businesses worldwide, and in
July 2025 the prominent US-Israeli genocide scholar Omer Bartov wrote, in “I’m
a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”, an article for the New York Times, “My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is
committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”
In November 2024, Israel was finally hit with a legal
blow that it couldn’t simply shrug off, when the International Criminal Court
(ICC) issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and then-defense minister
Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Although devious
efforts were subsequently made to topple the chief prosecutor, Karim Khan KC,
in a manufactured sexual harassment scandal, and although the US has obligingly
waged warfare on the court through the imposition of sweeping sanctions on its
judges, the arrest warrants still stand, and both Netanyahu and Gallant are, as
a result, unable to visit the 125 countries who are signatories to the Rome
Statute that initiated the ICC in 1998.
From demands for silent compliance to AI-facilitated
mass slaughter
The most grotesque innovation of the last 30 months
has involved the use of AI (artificial intelligence) in military targeting.
For most of the 16 years before October 7, 2023,
Israel sought to control the trapped population of Gaza through an insistence
on silent compliance. Despite its total control of the border, not only
preventing the entry and exit of the population, but also restricting the
supplies that were allowed in, the Palestinians were meant to endure these
persistent and deliberate deprivations in total silence.
When they did respond — primarily through militants
firing missiles at Israel — the response was brutal, via intensive bombing
campaigns that were sickeningly described by Israeli officials as a regular
process of “mowing the lawn.” Every few years, these “wars” took place — Operation Summer Rains, a four-month offensive
in 2006, Operation Cast Lead, a brutal three-week assault in 2009, the
week-long Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, the 50 harrowing days of
Operation Protective Edge in 2014, and the three-day Operation Black Belt in
2019.
Some of these attacks involved specific targeting,
because Israel has controlled the Palestinian population registry for Gaza and
the West Bank since its illegal occupation began in 1967, with any changes —
including the registration of births, marriages, divorces, deaths or changes of
address — requiring its approval.
With this vast database at its disposal, the
opportunities for mass surveillance offered by smartphone technology, and the
dawning capabilities of AI programs to process information more rapidly than
human analysts, meant that, by 2021, when Israel launched Operation Guardian of
the Walls, which lasted for eleven days, it was triumphantly described as “the world’s first AI war”, with the Jerusalem
Post enthusiastically explaining how, “in the years prior to the
fighting, the IDF established an advanced AI technological platform that
centralized all data on terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip onto one system that
enabled the analysis and extraction of the intelligence.”
As the article proceeded to explain, “Soldiers in Unit
8200, an Intelligence Corps elite unit, pioneered algorithms and code that led
to several new programs called ‘Alchemist’, ‘Gospel’ and ‘Depth of Wisdom’,
which were developed and used during the fighting”, with data collected through
“signal intelligence (SIGINT), visual intelligence (VISINT), human intelligence
(HUMINT), [and] geographical intelligence (GEOINT)”, including information
collated “in real time.” The article enthused about how the IDF stated its
belief that “using AI helped shorten the length of the fighting, having been
effective and quick in gathering targets using super-cognition.”
Aviv Kochavi, then the head of the IDF, captured most
compellingly how the new technology was transforming Israel’s concept of
warfare. “in the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this
machine produces 100 targets in a single day”, he said in admiration.
By October 2023, Israel had had another two and a half
years to expand its AI-driven military targeting, and the result was
devastation on an unprecedented scale, as apartment block after apartment block
was levelled, and entire neighbourhoods were destroyed. The attacks looked
remarkably like arbitrary carpet-bombing, but when some of those involved in
the AI-driven military targeting programs publicly expressed their misgivings
in revelatory investigations published in November 2023 and April 2024 (which I wrote about here and here), they revealed that what looked like random
carpet-bombing was actually the result of a giddy enthusiasm amongst military
commanders for the alleged accuracy of these apparently miraculous
technological developments that allowed them to target and kill at a rate that
was previously inconceivable.
While the commanders viewed the programs as a miracle,
however, those who were perturbed behind the scenes recognized fundamental
problems that were irreconcilable with notions of proportionality and accuracy
that ought to underpin any military operations.
These whistleblowers identified a 10% error rate,
which is shockingly high, but, more fundamentally, they were alarmed by the
parameters set by those who were establishing the targeting programs, primarily
because they included “low-level” targets, who may have been nothing more than
employees of Hamas’ civilian administrative government, who were not legitimate
targets, but also because “a system of mass surveillance” had been
established which assessed and ranked the likelihood of activity in the military
wing of Hamas or PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad), assigning “almost every
single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that
they are a militant.”
As I explained in an article last month, The Horrors of AI-Driven Military
Targeting, From Gaza to Iran:
Having learned “to identify characteristics of known
Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training
data”, the program then located similar “features” amongst the general
population. Those with “several different incriminating features” would “reach
a high rating”, and would automatically become “a potential target for
assassination.”
Alarmingly, however, “These ‘features’ might include
‘being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few
months, and changing addresses frequently’ — even though the former is no
guarantee of militancy, and the latter two might well involve no militancy
whatsoever. As the sources explained, the AI program ‘sometimes mistakenly
flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or
PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives,
residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an
operative, and Gazans who used a device that once [unknowingly] belonged to a
Hamas operative.’”
As a result, in the early weeks of the genocide, the
AI program “clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants”,
identifying them, and their homes, as “targets for possible air strikes”, even
though that figure was more than the entirety of Hamas’s military membership,
according to official Israeli statements.
Another key aspect of the programming was the
tolerance of mass civilian casualties when pursuing “high-value” targets, via
unheard-of rates of “collateral damage.” One, early on, involved “the killing
of approximately 300 civilians” in an attack aimed at one individual, a figure
that appalled an international law expert at the US State Department, who told
the Guardian that they had “never remotely heard” of even “a
one to 15 ratio being deemed acceptable.”
In addition, another program, the sickeningly-named
“Where’s Daddy?”, deliberately targeted individuals “while they were in their
homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than
during the course of military activity”, because, “from what they regarded as
an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their
private houses.”
As one of the sources explained, “In practice, the
principle of proportionality did not exist.”
Nor too did any meaningful human oversight. One
source, as I described it, “stated that human personnel often served only as a
‘rubber stamp’ for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would
personally devote only about ’20 seconds’ to each target before authorizing a
bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.”
That 20-second review was therefore, the only measure
of human oversight that prevented what was, in essence, a policy that I have described as “automated genocide.”
Legally, of course, this is a nightmare, as those
involving in assessing the legality of war are increasingly recognizing. An
article for the Georgetown Security Studies Review, for example, stated that, “By relying on AI, in some
cases almost granting it executive authority, Israel is undermining principles
of proportionality, distinction, and precaution”, as identified in a UN report in June 2024, which assessed attacks on civilian infrastructure in
the first three months of Israel’s genocidal assault, before the central
involvement of AI-driven military targeting had even been established.
As the Georgetown article noted, huge questions need
to be asked about the conduct of war in the AI era when “the fate of thousands
of lives [is] at the discretion of an automated system”, and when the removal
of “even the slightest shred of humanity from it leaves us all as potential
targets.”
Israel expands its depravity from Gaza to Lebanon and
Iran
What we still don’t know, as Israel has eviscerated
all sense of proportionality in its attacks on civilians, and has deliberately
erased distinctions between militants and administrative workers in Gaza’s
civilian infrastructure, is how much its other deadly targeting of key
protected individuals — medical personnel and journalists — has involved AI-driven “terrorism”
assessments, or whether these have been cynically grafted on after they were
identified and killed.
What is clear, however, is that there has never been a
conflict in which so many medical personnel and journalists have been killed,
with so much deliberate misinformation invented afterwards in a sickening
effort to justify their slaughter. Over 270 Palestinian journalists have been
targeted and murdered in Gaza, and in September 2025 the health ministry reported that 1,722 health workers have been killed, with
this figure including some of the 562 aid workers who have also been killed.
What we also know is that Israel has expanded the
depraved, disproportionate model it established in Gaza to Lebanon, which has
been suffering from Israeli depredations throughout the long blood-soaked
decades of Israel’s existence.
In September 2024, stepping up its attacks on
Hezbollah, which has long supported the Palestinians and has repeatedly engaged
in attacks on Israel, a truly depraved mass attack, involving booby-trapped
pagers and walkie-talkies, was initiated, with the support of the US tech firm
Palantir, which was reportedly aimed at Hezbollah militants, but which, in
reality, killed, maimed and mutilated numerous civilians. UN experts, who condemned the attacks as “terrifying” violations of
international law, noted that the attacks “ killed at least 32 people and
maimed or injured 3,250, including 200 critically. Among the dead [were] a boy
and a girl, as well as medical personnel. Around 500 people suffered severe eye
injuries, including a diplomat. Others suffered grave injuries to their faces,
hands and bodies.”
Israel followed up by assassinating Hassan Nasrallah,
the secretary-general of Hezbollah, in an attack in Beirut, during a sustained
period of savage attacks on Lebanon that resembled the destruction rained down
incessantly on Gaza. On the deadliest day, September 23, 558 people were
killed, including 50 children and 94 women, and 14 ambulances and fire engines
were also targeted and attacked, and on October 1 Israeli troops invaded
Lebanon for the sixth time since 1978.
Although a ceasefire was declared in November, Israel treated it with the same scorn it has applied
to ceasefires in Gaza, and on March 2, two days after Israel persuaded the US
to foolishly initiate a war on Iran, it resumed full-scale attacks, also, as in
Gaza, imperiously ordering the mass evacuation of Lebanese civilians, creating
over a million internal refugees.
On March 16, Israel followed up by invading southern
Lebanon, aiming to occupy the whole of the land up to the Litani River, and, as
was explained in the Guardian by Mohamad Bazzi, the director of the Hagop
Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New
York University, “pledging to clear frontline villages of their inhabitants and
establish a new ‘security zone’ that would be devoid of people and occupied by
Israeli troops.”
Israel’s fanatical defense minister, Israel Katz,
explicitly promised another Gaza, stating that his forces would destroy “all
houses” in Lebanese border villages “in accordance with the model used in Rafah
and Beit Hanoun”, towns in Gaza whose existence has been completely erased.
The perilous refusal of Israel to submit to any kind
of restraint, and why it must be stopped
Israel’s behavior over the last six weeks has, above
all, demonstrated its extraordinary arrogance. Having seduced Trump into
attacking Iran based on promises that another assassination — of Iran’s leader
Ayatollah Khameini — would sow discord and lead to regime change, the US soon
discovered, to its dismay, that Iran was a formidable adversary, and had been
preparing, since unprovoked attacks last year, for retaliation. After successfully targeting US
bases throughout the Middle East, Iran proceeded to shut down the Strait of
Hormuz, precipitating a global energy crisis whose magnitude is being
deliberately hidden by politicians and the media throughout the west, but which
was significant enough for Trump to recognize the need for a ceasefire.
For Iran, any ceasefire deal also had to include
Lebanon, but Israel refuses to be constrained by anyone, including the US or
Iran, because it simply doesn’t care about anyone or anything other than
itself.
This was made clear when, last September, as Gaza
ceasefire negotiations were taking place, Israel brazenly targeted Hamas officials who were meeting in Doha, in Qatar, violating
the powerful Gulf state’s sovereignty, and requiring frantic diplomatic efforts
by the US to limit the attack’s political damage.
It has also been made clear in the responses, within
the US, to the deadly attack on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, in Iran,
on the very first day of the “war”, when, it seems, Palantir-developed AI
technology misidentified the school as a military target. The attack killed 168
people, mostly schoolgirls, and, in the US, it has led, at the very least, to
some hand-wringing, and to noticeable unease within parts of the US military.
In contrast, within Israel, and with the handful of
exceptions noted above, there has been no meaningful discussion about the
extent to which AI-driven military targeting is not a miracle, but a flawed
system that has contributed to the colossal and unjustifiable slaughter of
civilians in vast numbers, and which needs serious oversight before it proceeds
any further.
Israel’s most disturbing actions over the last two
months, however, took place on April 8, when, in a deliberately provocative
snub to the US-Iran ceasefire deal, it launched the most devastating attacks ever seen on Beirut and southern Lebanon,
striking over a hundred targets in a ten-minute period, claiming it was
targeting Hezbollah strongholds without, of course, providing any evidence, and
killing at least 357 people, who seemed quite clearly not to be the 250
Hezbollah “operatives and commanders” that Israel claimed to have killed.
Despite the threat that Israel’s actions pose to the
Iranian ceasefire, it has still continued to engage in the destruction of
southern Lebanon, is still destroying village after village, and also attracted global condemnation last week
through its deliberate targeted killing of the renowned and tenacious Lebanese
journalist Amal Khalil, who, of course, it subsequently smeared as a
“terrorist.”
Whereas the US still has allies throughout the Middle
East which it needs to placate, even with Donald Trump’s tendency to insult and
belittle even those closest to him, Israel has no friends or allies whatsoever,
just a handful of countries that it manipulates — largely through infiltration
— to fulfil its aims.
As its arrogance and its derangement have grown over
the last 30 months, this now means endless war on as many fronts as possible
not only against military targets, but against entire civilian populations who
are all, following the Gaza model, regarded as, in one way or another,
“associated” with Hamas, or Hezbollah, or the Iranian “terror state”, or even
just through ever more hysterical interpretations of antisemitism, which the
Israeli state has long insisted means any criticism whatsoever of its actions.
What the last 30 months have also shown us is that
Israel’s predatory notions of “self-defense” extend far beyond the Middle East,
via high-level influence over compliant governments in the west, and especially
the US, the UK and Germany, which, as well as being Israel’s main arms
suppliers (in the case of the US and Germany), have also obligingly initiated
draconian clampdowns on free speech, protest and direct action in defense of Israel, and where (again, in the
US and Germany) alarming efforts are also being made to make citizenship or
employment dependant on allegiance to Israel.
Most alarmingly, as the dark forces behind the AI
revolution openly manifest their true ugliness, not just via their enthusiasm
for AI-driven warfare, but also for the surveillance and control of entire
populations, Israel’s reach also now threatens all of us, wherever we are.
As Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the fanatically
pro-Israeli Anti-Defamation League (ADL), explained at an event held by the Sinai Temple in Los
Angeles in March, the group has analysts “working round the clock” to “take
down” those regarded as “extremists” through monitoring social media and other
platforms, sharing the information it gathers with the FBI. The extensive
surveillance operation that he outlined “tracks activity across social media, messaging
apps, video games, cryptocurrency platforms, podcasts, short-form video,
Wikipedia and large language models.”
For those paying attention, it has been clear
throughout the last 30 months that what has been happening in Gaza will not
stay in Gaza. Instead, the genocide in Gaza is a template — for a world of
limitless slaughter, and of total surveillance and control, that will persist
as long as Israel, and those backing it, continue to be allowed to wield their
depraved power.
For all our sakes, Israel and its backers need, across
their many spheres of influence, to be restrained and disarmed.
