Gaza: eight Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, including a four-year-old child

According to Al Jazeera, at least eight Palestinians have been killed in Israeli drone attacks carried out across the Gaza Strip. Among the dead is a four-year-old child. The dispatch, brief as it is, does not specify the identity of the other victims or the justifications put forward by the Israeli army. We will not invent them. What we know fits in a sentence: people died under drones, and a four-year-old child did not have time to become anything other than a child.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The phrase "strikes across Gaza" has taken on the tone of routine. That is already a symptom. When the death of eight people becomes a news-in-brief, it means the established order has succeeded in making the thing seem normal. Gramsci called this hegemony: a power that holds not only through force, but because its narrative ends up passing for common sense. Diplomatic vocabulary contributes, with its "tensions", "incidents" and "violations" that answer one another without anyone ever being held responsible.

Let us ask the awkward question: who benefits? Not the people of Gaza, obviously. Nor, in the long run, the soldiers or Israeli civilians, who are sold a security that never comes. It benefits a state apparatus that makes permanent war its mode of government, and those who arm it, finance it and shield it politically. On this last point the dispatch is silent: it says nothing about arms suppliers or diplomatic backers. This will need documenting. But the structure is well known.

Lenin reminded us that the state is not a neutral arbiter: it is the instrument of a class and, in the imperialist era, of a bloc of powers competing for spheres of influence. The Middle East is one of these spaces: trade routes, hydrocarbons, arms markets, military alliances. Contracts and security guarantees are its political shell. In this logic, an occupied territory and a people without sovereignty are not an accident of history, but a strategic position managed at a distance by patrons who readily speak of a "rules-based order", so long as the rules do not apply to them.

It will be objected that this is too schematic. Be it so. But the schema has one advantage over communiqués: it explains why this goes on. A conflict that pays off for arms manufacturers and serves the cohesion of a power has no spontaneous reason to stop. Calls for "restraint", repeated from capitals that go on delivering weapons, carry the value of a pious wish.

What remains essential, which neither theory nor sarcasm can replace: eight dead, a four-year-old child, families. We will follow the tallies as sources refine them, and we will say what we do not yet know.