We know that Israel has, since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, claimed that its actions in Gaza were about self-defence. The facts do not bear this out, not at all, but despite this, the West has pledged its support of Israel, and some of its most powerful nations have contributed significantly to its military campaign. Those that have are knowingly sponsoring a genocide, while most others - even Ireland, which is among the more supportive of Palestine - have not done enough. In Catastrophe - Nakba II, I ask that anyone who believes Israel had a right to act as it did in light of the brutal attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, would stop and consider the conditions Palestinians endured right up to the day before, on October 6, 2023. The Hamas attack was not the cause of anything; to suggest otherwise is to accept the furrowed brow of Israeli officials who look into the camera in disbelief at any suggestion it is an aggressor. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming; Israel is not a democracy, it is not ‘western’ (if that is even a thing?), and its army is most certainly not, as it claims to be, ‘the most moral army in the world’. To fully understand how successive Israeli governments have, for decades, been committed to the oppression of the Palestinian people, it’s essential to know that it not only steals their land but also terrorises them in the process. One means of doing this is the abuse of its laws and those of the international community in the incarceration of Palestinians and in how they’re managed in detention. We know the scale of this through the work of both global and Israeli NGOS that provide independent accounts. In its grim but important report, of August 2024, Welcome to Hell, B’Tselem, one of Israel’s most respected human rights organisations, warns that the impact of the state’s long-established detention policy should never be underestimated. The current situation, horrifying as it is, cannot be fully understood without examining the key role of this project in the social and political oppression of the Palestinian collective over the years. The prison system is one of the most violent and oppressive state mechanisms that the Israeli regime uses to uphold Jewish supremacy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel has incarcerated hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from all walks of life over decades, as a way of undermining and unravelling the social and political fabric of the Palestinian population. The numbers detained have more than doubled since October 7, 2023, at least 6,120 of whom were, according to another Israeli NGO, HaMoked, being held without trial, with no effort being made to present them with the nature of the allegations against them. It follows that they had no access to any basis for or any means to a defence. The NGOS also pointed to the policy of detaining children without trial - HaMoked reported, "at least 880 detained by the IDF in the year before the Hamas attack". The international NGO, Save the Children, said that 86% of detained Palestinian children were beaten, 69% were strip-searched, 68% were denied healthcare, and 60% spent time in solitary confinement. Western media regularly reports on just such policies in places like Russia, China and Iran, but rarely on the use of unlawful imprisonment in Israel. Save the Children Director Jason Lee said: "Palestinian children are the only ones in the world to experience systematic prosecution in military courts". Israel is so sure of the rightness of its Zionist mission that it has made no effort to hide its use of the prison system toward that end. Even before the infamous Hamas attack, minister of national security Itamar Ben-Gvir tasked the Israel Prison Service with making changes to help with the destruction of the Palestinian cause. The brutal destruction of Gaza, the complete levelling of place that accompanied the shredding of human beings by an army and a government that made no distinction between flesh and stone or concrete, was sponsored by Western democracies, including the United States. We know all this, it has played out, not on our TVs or newspapers but on our laptops and our phones; the evidence is completely undeniable, as is the direct involvement of other nations. What may be less clear is how the fast-developing famine conditions were also known to Western powers; starvation is another means by which the state of Israel is pursuing the people of Palestine. In the book, I show how, just as with the use of the prison service and mass detention, the deliberate creation of famine conditions was and is strategic. One part of the IDF’s campaign was to augment the direct killing of Palestinians with the planned destruction of its agricultural capacity and the gradual restriction of aid. London-based Forensic Architecture monitored this and reported that, by the end of June 2024, "about 83% of all plant life in Gaza had been destroyed … more than 104 sq. kilometres of the 150 were destroyed as were 45% (3,700) of its productive greenhouses". Forensic Architecture’s month-by-month analysis, which included detailed consideration of satellite imagery, eyewitness accounts and even material made public by the IDF, showed "a correlation between the destruction of agricultural lands and infrastructure, and the Israeli military’s ground position. The destruction of farm lands and infrastructure was cumulative and repeated. Agriculture and water resources were destroyed using military equipment and weapons." By the summer of 2024, all reputable international sources, including agencies working on the ground in Gaza, were clear that Israel was directly responsible for what the US Famine Review Committee had highlighted months before, "the Famine threshold for acute food insecurity has already been far exceeded … The FRC expects the upward trend in non-trauma mortality to accelerate and for all Famine thresholds to be passed imminently." That was in March. In April 2024, Oxfam reported that Gazans were surviving on an average of 245 calories a day or 11% of the recommended minimum requirement set by the Israeli government itself as the average for people in Gaza to survive. The reason famine conditions prevailed was twofold: Israel had purposefully disabled Gaza’s agricultural capacity, and it had very deliberately limited the supply of emergency aid. In May 2024, USAID (US Agency for International Development) said in a memo to secretary of state Anthony Blinken that the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s "arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of US humanitarian assistance". The damning memorandum delivered to president Joe Biden was ignored as the US administration doubled down on its support of Israel. One year later and more than 20 months after the brutal Hamas attack on Israeli soil, the profound trauma being experienced by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank continues unchallenged by most of the West. An apocalyptic famine looms; as with every other feature of this immense tragedy, no one can ever say that they didn’t know; that they would have acted if only they had realised what was in train. In the book, I refer to an interview with a director of UNRWA, Juliette Tuomo, in Jordan last summer, when she asked me: "Where is the outrage?" Particularly with those Gazans who have survived the military onslaught only to now face the threat of starvation, it is the right question, where indeed?! Catastrophe - Nakba II by Fintan Drury, published by Merrion Press, is in bookstores nationwide