Genocide and the Warning of Sacrifice Zones to Come
“Gaza is a sacrifice zone. It is where the logic of settler colonialism is laid bare — a populationrendered superfluous, contained, and punished”
Chris Hedges.
For some, drawing any sort of parallel between Gaza (especially since 7 October 2023) and the Warsaw Ghetto (1942) is antisemitic, an erasure of Jewish suffering, or a distortion of history. But the point is not to collapse distinct experiences or equate incomparable horrors; it is to recognise recurring patterns of dehumanisation, enclosure, starvation, and the systematic destruction of a people’s capacity to live. Gaza forces us to confront the same underlying logic that once governed the Warsaw Ghetto: the belief that an entire population can be sealed off, punished collectively, and intentionally made to disappear.
It is in this light that the story of the Warsaw Ghetto must be revisited—not as a distant tragedy, but as a warning arising again in our own time. It is the reason too why what is happening in Gaza – and other parts of the Middel East – resonates in so many ways with the events in Poland over 80 years ago. Gaza is a warning about the lengths to which rogue states—those who brazenly flout international law—will go to achieve their ends. It is also a warning about the future and what will occur when, in the midst of a deteriorating climate and intensifying geopolitical instability, states designate entire regions as sacrifice zones—places where populations are rendered expendable in the pursuit of power, security, or territorial ambition.
Warsaw, like Gaza, reveals a cruelty unleashed not merely to erase a people—though that is unmistakably part of the design—but to impose a new order founded on racialized power and unrestrained impunity. The idea of sacrifice zones helps make sense of this pattern: spaces deliberately created through policy and violence in which life is systematically degraded, and where suffering is not incidental but integral to what is a grand political design – the creation of a “greater Israel”.
Enclosure, destruction, annihilation
The Warsaw Ghetto The final scenes of Roman Polanski’s Academy Award–winning film The Pianist (2002) are harrowing in the extreme. They depict a world once bustling with life, now obliterated—emptied of human presence, a lost world consigned to history and memory. Based on the experiences of the Polish Jewish pianist Władysław Szpilman, who spent two and a half years in hiding, the film recounts the callous brutality of the Nazi occupation—the roundups, killings, starvation, humiliations, and ultimately the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.
At its height, the ghetto held around 450,000 starved, beaten and traumatised people crammed into a 1.3 square mile killing zone, enclosed by a 10-foot wall topped with barbed wire. All contact with the outside world was severed. Jews were forbidden to leave on pain of death. Starvation and disease were rampant. Corpses lay in the streets. Lack of sanitation, food, water and medical supplies led to deadly epidemics, including typhus.
In the first two years alone, over 100,000 ghetto residents died from hunger and disease. In July 1942, the first major “resettlements” began—a Nazi euphemism for mass deportations to extermination camps. Between July and September, approximately 300,000 Jews were transported to Treblinka and murdered. Fewer than 60,000 remained in the ghetto.
On 19 April 1943, as the Nazis prepared the final liquidation, a few hundred remaining Jews—poorly armed but determined—rose in revolt. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising lasted 27 days, until 16 May 1943. The Germans labelled the fighters “criminals” and “bandits.” Many, including Mordechai Anielewicz and Mira Fuchrer, chose suicide rather than surrender. Most survivors were killed on the spot or sent to Treblinka.
On 16 May 1943, SS General Jürgen Stroop reported: “The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more.” In material terms, he was right.
In early 1945, Szpilman emerged from hiding into the ruins of his former life, a ghost walking through the ashes of memory. Nothing was left. “Everything that had been familiar,” he later wrote, “had vanished.” Whole districts had ceased to exist. Warsaw was dead.
What remained was not simply a destroyed city, but a space deliberately emptied of life—a precursor to what we now understand as a sacrifice zone: a territory in which an entire population has been rendered disposable and subjected to systematic destruction.
The Gaza Genocide
After two years of the IDF’s military onslaught—resulting in Gaza largely demolished and an estimated 875,000 Gazans killed—only about 1.5 million Gazans remain. (As reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Donald Trump estimated as few as 1.7 million surviving).
Epidemiological studies published by expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal, The Lancet, estimated that 64,260 Gazans had died violently by 30 June 2024 (day 269 of the assault), implying 136,000 violent deaths by 25 April 2025 (day 569). Using a broadly accepted wartime index, the ratio of indirect deaths from deprivation to direct violent fatalities in war ranges from 2:1 (in the Iraq War, 1990–2011) to 16:1 (in the Afghan War, 2001–2021). Epidemiologists have “conservatively” estimated four deprivation‑related deaths for every violent death in Gaza. This yields approximately 544,000 indirect deaths and a total of around 680,000 Gazans killed by 25 April 2025 (war dead-commemorating Anzac Day in Australia).
By 7 October 2025, day 731 of the Israeli onslaught against Gaza, violent deaths totalled roughly 175,000. Applying the conservative 4:1 deprivation‑to‑violence ratio produces an additional 700,000 indirect deaths, resulting in a combined total of 875,000 Gazan deaths after two years of bombardment and deprivation or 36.5percent of the pre-war population of 2.4 million. Since the so‑called “ceasefire” of mid‑October 2025, the violent killing of Palestinians has continued (albeit at a much lower rate) but deaths from deprivation will continue due to Israeli constraints on aid and aid worker entry.
Erasure, memory, and persistence
Wladyslaw Szpilman was not the first, nor indeed the last, to witness such devastation. To bear witness to the annihilation of everything familiar is the story of countless brutalised and vanquished peoples subjected to the vicissitudes of brute power. Colonised Indigenous peoples and those prey to empires know intimately what attempted erasure looks like. It is not only buildings that must be destroyed, but the very fabric of everyday life, memory, and culture.
Erasure and domination require the killing of intellectuals, artists, political opponents, journalists, trade unionists—anyone capable of reviving memory or resisting the will to power. The previous order must be overwritten with triumphalist narratives of conquest and exceptionalism.
Yet the problem for all such projects is that the erasure of memory is nearly impossible.
Inner stories, held in shared yet knowing silence, or acted out through coded rituals, become the reservoirs of resilience, resistance and survival, allowing for persistence and awaiting the moment when the struggle for justice can be ignited.
Physical places also possess their own vocabularies of attachment, expressed through ancestral stories and shared experience. Environmental philosopher Val Plumwood reminds us that “shadow places” speak of an immovable presence that defies the overlay of the present. Reflecting on the destruction of European cities in the Second World War, W. G. Sebald observed: “The remnants speak more loudly than the whole ever did.” American novelist Toni Morrison, writing of the attempted erasure of place, notes that, “all that is left is the haunting”—the presence of past lives, of grievous suffering, and the unextinguished desire for justice.
Storytelling, testimonies and revisionist histories have each refused the triumphalist narratives and discursive neutralisations that seek to erase memory and moral culpability. The land itself, covered over by infrastructures of erasure—like the Spanish colonists’ edifices built on the ruins of Indigenous foundations, or the Nazi-planned “Neue deutsche Stadt Warschau” to replace old Warsaw—speaks of a presence that cannot be dislodged from history. As the Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney observes, “the ground remembers what the mind forgets”. Ultimately, it is the shared, storied memories, weighed with meaning and connection, that pull displaced peoples back to where they feel they belong. The ruins, as Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels observes, are simply “the map of our return” to places infused with inherited griefs and the histories that refuse to stay buried.
Ultimately, shared memory pulls displaced peoples back. The ruins, as Anne Michaels observes, become “the map of our return.” Even in spaces marked for abandonment, memory interrupts the logic of sacrifice.
But what if this return is to a place that remains an active site of destruction? Reports from Gaza following the October 2025 ceasefire describe precisely such a reality. Palestinians returning to Gaza City encountered landscapes in which entire neighbourhoods had vanished. On 19 October 2025, four days after the ceasefire announced on 15 October, The New York Times reported on the experiences of Palestinians permitted to return briefly to their homes in and around Gaza City. For thirty‑two‑year‑old Majdi Nassar, the return to his hometown of Jabaliya lasted less than 24 hours. Heading back south to Deir al‑Balah, Nassar said he would not return until clean drinking water had been restored. Shocked by the scale of the devastation, he said: “I could not find any trace of the building where I had an apartment, not even the rubble… Everything is gone.” For Abu Ghanem, the return to Gaza City was equally traumatic. Entire neighbourhoods no longer existed. Everything familiar—including the people—had vanished. “There was no one at all around,” she said. “There were no services, no water or electricity, and, of course, no markets to buy food.”
Twenty‑seven‑year‑old Fatima Abu Steita and her husband, Abdallah Abu, returned to Gaza City to search for their home in the Zeitoun neighbourhood, but it was “completely erased… Everything around that neighbourhood is flat ground… It’s a return to nothing. But it’s also saying: ‘We are still here.’” On 17 October, The Guardian reported another Gaza City resident saying: “I had hoped to return and find my home standing, but what I found was quite the opposite. I couldn’t even recognise the area. Everything was levelled to the ground.” Reaching the Sheikh Radwan district on the north side of Gaza City, fifty‑year‑old Suhair al‑Absi said: “I couldn’t identify the remains of my house because the rubble of everyone’s homes is all mixed together. The destruction here is beyond imagination, something the mind cannot grasp.”
A few days earlier, on 11 October, the BBC reported on residents attempting to return to their neighbourhoods, with one elderly man saying: “This is the last area we can reach. The Israeli army is still nearby. Look at the scale of destruction—they’ve destroyed everything.” The scale of destruction throughout Gaza—and the sustained, indiscriminate assault on its people—has been such that numerous academics, leading human rights advocates, and humanitarian organisations have accused Israel of genocide. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, noted in her 2025 report Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime that: “The level of destruction in Gaza is so extensive and systematic that it reveals an intent to destroy the population’s ability to survive.”
The scale of destruction across Gaza—homes, schools, hospitals, agricultural land, and infrastructure—has been so extensive that it has led many observers to conclude that the conditions of life themselves have been targeted. The cumulative effect is not simply humanitarian crisis, but the creation of a space in which survival becomes nearly impossible.
Gaza thus emerges as a contemporary sacrifice zone in its most developed form: a territory subjected to sustained assault, its population displaced, its infrastructure dismantled, its ecological base destroyed, and its future viability undermined.
This destruction extends across every dimension of life. Educational institutions, healthcare systems, cultural sites, and economic networks have been devastated. Agricultural collapse and restrictions on aid have contributed to widespread deprivation. The loss of professionals, workers, and community leaders has further weakened the social fabric. Killing has taken multiple, overreaching forms: urbicide, ecocide, sociocide, and, as many argue, genocide.
Yet despite this, Palestinians continue to return, rebuild, and resist. Their persistence exposes a fundamental contradiction at the heart of sacrifice zones: even under extreme conditions, people refuse to disappear. The designation of a population as expendable does not guarantee its erasure.
The future: from Gaza to a world of sacrifice zones
The notion of sacrifice zones has historically been associated with marginalised regions—polluted industrial areas or colonised peripheries. Today, however, it is becoming a broader organising articulation of brute power. Entire populations may be deemed expendable in the context of climate catastrophe, resource scarcity, and geopolitical competition. This expendability is articulated increasingly through various practices of exclusion and the creation of fortes states in which the lines of ethnonationalist “security” are hardened against those deemed a threat.
Gaza, in this sense, functions as both symbol and warning. It reveals the extent to which a determined state can reshape a territory and its population with impunity, irrespective of international law and enabled by the complicity of unprincipled allies and a wanton military superpower.
The genocide in Gaza shows how sacrifice zones arise, and how they become normalised. It demonstrates too how entire populations can be confined, deprived, and rendered invisible to those with the power to intervene. And it raises the possibility that such zones will expand in number and scale in the years ahead.
Gaza, like Warsaw before it, forces a reckoning. It asks what it means to live in a world where the destruction of a people can unfold in full view, and where that destruction is justified, denied, or ignored.
In a geopolitical environment now increasingly shaped by the “rupture” of the so-called ‘rules-based order’, the emergence of ethnonationalist, authoritarian states where might be right, and where impunity occurs without accountability (given the weakness of international institutions and de facto complicity of various nations) the capacity of rogue states to wage war, suppress populations, steal resources and so forth becomes ever more likely. The latest assaults on Iran and Lebanon are examples of extreme predatory violence long present in the Middle East as well as other parts of the world. Illegality and impunity are key aspects of a well-established imperial project, as Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela and now Iran and Lebanon testify.
Yet so extreme has this violence become, so brazen its breaches of international law and human rights, and so lacking in terms of international response – with one European Union representative saying that Israel has been “given a permission slip for endless war crimes” – that the world’s most powerful military and the Middle East’s most belligerent state can, without fear of retribution, impose their will. Indeed, the mass slaughter of innocents has been enabled by the silence of supposedly law-abiding nations.
The refusal to act against Israel has a long, disturbing history – not only in relation to Gaza. The consistent and egregious violations of UN resolutions on West Bank settlements are legion, with more than 200 such resolutions ignored since 1948, indicating an entrenched pattern of illegality. Alarmingly, the violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank has increased markedly over recent years, with over 1,800 incidents – roughly four attacks per day on average since October 2023 (up to 31 December 2024). Repeated attempts to rein in Israel’s actions in the occupied Palestinian territories through binding UN Security Council resolutions calling for an end to settlement construction and compliance with international law, hundreds of General Assembly resolutions condemning occupation practices, legal findings from the International Court of Justice declaring settlements, occupation and the separation barrier unlawful, ongoing investigations and arrest‑warrant applications by the International Criminal Court, targeted sanctions and arms restrictions by individual states, and sustained civil‑society campaigns focused on accountability and corporate responsibility have not put an end to Israel’s settlement expansionism.
In Gaza, the failure to prevent mass destruction and slaughter has been even more marked, with the UN Human Rights Council and its Independent International Commission of Inquiry noting clear evidence that war crimes may have been committed by Israel, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian objects, disproportionate strikes in densely populated areas, attacks on residential buildings and refugee camps, assaults on civilians attempting to evacuate along Israeli‑designated routes, siege tactics that cut water, electricity and fuel to the population, obstruction of humanitarian access, and conduct that may amount to starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.
While the International Court of Justice, leading legal scholars and various countries have asserted that the above actions are tantamount to genocide, the killing and destruction in Gaza continues. The impunity exercised by Israel in what has become one of the bloodiest sacrifice zones of the modern era has now extended into Lebanon and Iran, with military campaigns described as wars of annihilation — operations that, as UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has argued in relation to Gaza, are designed to destroy a population’s “ability to sustain life.”
Coda
As with the erasure of Warsaw’s Jewish district in the 1940s, the objective is not merely to defeat an enemy but to consign a people and a place to oblivion in the name of domination and “security.” Yet ultimately, such projects are destined to fail: the memory of the Jewish community of Warsaw endures, as does the legacy of its resistance fighters, refusing the oblivion that was intended for them. The same applies to the people of Gaza, and beyond.
For Israel, a supremacist state created largely by non-semitic northern Europeans, the war of annihilation against the people of Gaza, and now Lebanon and Iran have many of the hallmarks of erasure exhibited over 80 years ago in the Warsaw ghetto.
As Jewish American scholar, Professor Bertell Ollman of New York University has remarked: “For obvious reasons, the Zionists are very sensitive about being compared to the Nazis… Yet the facts on the ground, when not obscured by one or another rationalization, show that the Zionists are the worst anti‑Semites in the world today, oppressing a Semitic people as no nation has done since the Nazis.”
*This is a much shorter version of a lengthy article by Dr Richard Hil and Dr Gideon Polya, “US-Israel-imposed Gaza Holocaust & Nazi-imposed Warsaw Ghetto: Intolerable Evil Demanding Exposure & Justice”, Countercurrents, 31 March 2026: https://countercurrents.org/2026/03/us-israel-imposed-gaza-holocaust-nazi-imposed-warsaw-ghetto-intolerable-evil-demanding-exposure-justice/ .
The Fallacy of Analogy: Gaza, Nazis and the Problem of Historical Comparisons
“Referencing Nazism to criticize Israel’s conduct in Gaza is problematic for both pragmatic and moral reasons, particularly if one accepts that what happens in Gaza amounts to an attempted genocide”.
Comments
Thank you, mate – your old friend, Stuart Hill.
Ohhh … Almost too painful, almost beyond my everyday comprehension, and yet also obvious that this is happening and also the motives behind it. My appreciation Richard and Gideon for the determination and hard work needed to bring these dark deeds to the light of day.
Thank you deeply, Richard and Gideon, for such an important article and the extended version. It needs to be widely read as we continue to allow ‘sacrifice zones’ and ‘haunting shadow lands’ to be created. Apart from your excellent geopolitical, human rights, international law, historical and statistical analyses, it really resonated about why storytelling is imperative as survivors’ memories are all that remain.