»In 10/23, a satellite passed over Rafah and photographed the city. The image showed a large city, a dense mosaic of buildings, solar panels, domes of mosques, roads, public squares, farmland and orchards.

[Today:] Hardly anything remains. The current image shows a two-dimensional gray surface strewn with rubble. The overwhelming majority of the buildings have been destroyed and leveled. The roads are plowed up. The many greenhouses and orchards have disappeared as though they never existed.«

»On the eve of the war, the Rafah metropolitan area had a population of 275,000, like that of Haifa.
There were 56,000 people living in Jabalya camp, similar to Yavneh.
Beit Lahia had 108,000 residents, like Herzliya,
and Beit Hanoun had 62,000, like Givatayim.
Almost 30,000 people, equivalent to Arad, lived in Abasan al-Kabira, a suburb of Khan Yunis that no longer exists.
An adjacent suburb, Bani Suheila, had a population of 46,000, like Carmiel.

All are now erased.«

»In the meantime, more than a million people are huddling in the immense tent cities that have sprung up in the Muwasi area on the coast, and in the western section of Gaza City.«

»Gazans streamed into the already densely crowded area, to the point where tents are now being erected on the Gaza City's piers, in garbage dumps and on the rubble.«

»The IDFs obliteration of the Strip can be divided into 5 waves. The first wave took place immediately after Oct7 & was the work of the air force. During the war's first week, the airforce dropped 6,000 bombs in a campaign compared to which the US militarys assault on ISIS in 2017 pales.«

»"I can't get to sleep at night if I haven't seen houses collapsing in Gaza," Ch14's Shimon Riklin said Dec23. "What can I do – more, more, more, more houses, more towers, so they have no place to return to."«

»The starting gun was fired on February 4, when U.S. President Donald Trump stated in a press conference that, "The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip… We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons."

From that moment the fantasy became a working plan. «

»One reason that some legal experts and historians believe that Israel's actions in Gaza amount to genocide, is the vast scale of destruction. They include the Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, the Dean's Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.

Bartov maintains that, "this is not a war, that is a false representation."

All the signs, he says, show that Israel is acting "to destroy completely Palestinian existence in Gaza and to render the Strip uninhabitable."«

and false flag attacks to create chaos and justify intervention. Hundreds died in the streets of Tehran as the Shah—an autocratic monarch—was reinstalled with #American and British backing.

(3/11)

still being felt, not only in Iran, but across the entire Middle East.

Yet, in the American imagination, #history often starts with the hostage crisis, or with the latest missile launch, or with the rhetoric of “rogue states.” We’re taught to see Iran as an irrational enemy, a threat to “our” interests, never as a nation whose modern history was violently derailed by foreign powers seeking oil and geopolitical dominance. The coup became a blueprint for U.S. and British interventions (5/11)

around the world, fueling a legacy of distrust, blowback, and endless war.

This is not ancient #history. The U.S. government only formally admitted its role in the coup in 2013, after decades of denial and the destruction of key documents. The British government’s involvement was only acknowledged even more recently. The details are staggering: CIA operatives posing as communists bombing mosques to stir up religious opposition, paying mobsters to riot in the streets, and bribing editors (6/11)

to print fake news-long before “fake news” became a household phrase.

So when Americans beat the drums of war with Iran, or wonder aloud “why do they hate us?”, we have to reckon with the fact that the U.S. and U.K. destroyed Iran’s best chance at democracy for the sake of oil profits and imperial power.

(7/11)

Imagine if a foreign power overthrew your #government, installed a dictator, and then lectured you for decades about freedom and democracy. Imagine if, every time you tried to chart your own course, you were met with sanctions, threats, and military intervention.

(8/11)

The story of Iran is not unique. It’s a microcosm of the broader pattern of Western interventionism: democracy is celebrated only when it aligns with the interests of empire. When democracy threatens those interests—when a nation dares to control its own resources, or refuses to play by the rules of the global order—it is crushed, and the consequences are borne by ordinary people for generations.

(9/11)