Three years of genocide, and Palestine still resists

London – Three years since 7 October, as the people of Gaza continue to endure genocide in full view of the world, thousands of Palestinians are enduring it out of sight, in Israel's prisons and detention camps. It is estimated about 30,000 Palestinians have been seized since October 2023, thousands of them held without charge or trial under administrative detention and the Unlawful Combatants Law. Those who survived Sde Teiman, Ofer and Ketziot describe beatings, starvation, sexual violence, the denial of medical care and the deliberate humiliation of men, women and children, a system documented in detail by human rights organisations including Israel's own B'Tselem. 

What emerges from these prisons is not only suffering, but extraordinary patience, steadfastness and sacrifice. Freed prisoners have walked out of their cells into a homeland reduced to rubble, many only then learning that their families had been killed, and still they speak, organise and refuse to be broken. They are the witnesses of this genocide and among the heroes of the Palestinian struggle, and it is their voices that must shape how these three years are remembered.

This genocide has been enabled by a counter-terrorism architecture that renders an entire people a threat and their deaths unremarkable. The language of terrorism and dehumanisation has been openly used to justify the bombing of hospitals, the starvation of a population and the mass detention of its people, and to teach the world to look away. That same architecture operates here in Britain. Under section 12 of the Terrorism Act, over 3000 people have been arrested for nothing more than opposing genocide, while organisations such as the Board of Deputies and the Community Security Trust push for ever greater securitisation, targeting hard-won freedoms of protest and expression in order to shield a settler-colonial state. These laws have always existed for such purposes. 

The political consensus that protected Israel for decades has collapsed. Politicians who armed Israel, defended its conduct and smeared those who opposed it are now attempting to extricate themselves, offering symbolic gestures designed to placate the movement for Palestine, drain its momentum and divert it from the question of accountability. As said by author Omar El Akkad, “One day, everyone will have been against this”. Every minister and MP who approved arms exports, shared intelligence or provided diplomatic cover while Gaza was destroyed bears responsibility, and must be held directly and personally to account.

Zionism is in terminal crisis. Having lost the argument across much of the world and increasingly in the West, it has turned to extreme violence, intimidation and terror to sustain itself, against Palestinians, across the region and against those abroad who dare to speak out. This is not the conduct of a project confident in its future, but of one that knows its support is collapsing. Throughout this, they continue to chip away at their greater Israel project, in Palestine, Lebanon, and other countries throughout the world.

As that support collapses, Palestinian resistance is increasingly painted as a global threat, a narrative used to justify genocide in Gaza and repression at home. A people living under occupation and siege retain the right, affirmed in international law, to resist, and to criminalise that resistance is to erase the distinction between occupier and occupied. Demands that Palestinians disarm while occupation, siege and killing continue are not a path to peace but a demand for surrender, one that would leave a people defenceless before those who have spent nearly 80 years trying to destroy them. So too must the misinformation of the past three years be confronted, including specific atrocity claims later withdrawn or never substantiated, which played a central role in manufacturing consent for genocide and whose authors have never been held to account.

Anas Mustapha, Head of Public Advocacy at CAGE International, said: 

"Three years on, the movement for Palestine stands at a turning point. Solidarity that rises with the news cycle and fades when the cameras leave has never been enough. What this moment demands is sustained, collective resistance against the genocide, against the laws that sustain it and against the politicians complicit in it, until Palestine is free."