Even as it continues to bomb the Palestinian civilians it is starving, Israel is pushing ahead with what may be its ultimate - or perhaps penultimate - vision for Gaza: the physical confinement of survivors in a guarded zone on Rafah’s rubble - an actual concentration camp.
If it is not stopped, pathogens could yet become Israel’s deadliest weapon in Gaza.
Disease is often not merely a side effect but a major agent in genocides, from smallpox that devastated the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to the barracks of Auschwitz. Concentration camps in particular have a long and ghastly history as places where, by design or otherwise, disease kills as many as - or even more than - those directly killed by the genocidal regime that confines them.
Disease has been a tool of colonialism and genocide since at least when colonizers attacked natives with smallpox. Nothing new. Still disgusting.