Mourners carry bodybags shrouded with Palestinian flags through the streets. Within them are the scant remains of 50 victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Among the grieving and the deceased are many children.

One mourner angles a flag-draped body bag towards a reporter’s camera. On it rests a photograph of a little girl, smiling and playfully unfurling a keffiyeh over her head. She couldn’t have been more than eight years old.

From how effortlessly he lifts the funerary pall, one can’t help but notice how light the bundle containing her desiccated little body must be. She was killed by an Israeli airstrike on the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City in November 2023. The elements have been consuming her rubble-hidden remains for nearly three years.

With a firm, loud voice, the man ferrying her to her final resting place declares: “The world must know that this child deserved to live.”

“What heart can bear this pain?”

This scene played out on August 20. It was one of two mass funerals held that month for victims recovered from the remains of Gaza. Of the 112 bodies in the first procession, 40 were children. Attendees described it as an “extraordinary and painful scene” where “massacre statistics became coffins and shrouds.”

October 7 marks the three-year anniversary of the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. Since the October 2025 “ceasefire,” Gazans have been searching for victims under an estimated 67 million tons of rubble—20 times more than all the debris caused by every other global conflict since 2008 combined.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, 74,000 people were killed from October 2023 to October 2025. 20,000 were children.

These are vast underestimates. Three years of murderous attrition have decimated the ministry’s ability to keep accurate records. More are being added to these grim ranks every day. Israel has violated the ceasefire daily, killing at least 1,344 since last October.

As many as 14,000 bodies are yet to be discovered under the rubble. In one year of searching, only about 800 have been recovered. “Gaza is extracting the bodies of its children from under the rubble after three years of genocide,” said Mahmoud Hamed al-Aila, a Palestinian researcher quoted by Al Jazeera. “What heart can bear this pain?”

This horror isn’t the result of an “act of God.” No earthquake, hurricane, or flood caused this carnage. The perpetrator is a capitalist state run by Zionist criminals whose overriding goal for over 80 years has been the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

They are backed by US imperialism—the most depraved and reactionary force on earth. Zionism would be powerless without the American ruling class’s support. US-made weapons account for 68% of Israel’s arms imports.

Changing consciousness

For three long years, the capitalist press moved might and main to whitewash the atrocities of its ally.

Joe Biden embraced Netanyahu while airstrikes devastated schools, hospitals, and homes. Countless images of dead and maimed children, of mothers’ faces stretched in grief while cradling their mutilated babies, of malnourished kids screaming while holding out empty pans. All this was brushed aside by the ruling class and their media with the infamous mantra: “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Channel surfing offered no reprieve. From Fox News to CNN, from the New York Post to The New York Times, the same Zionist apologia was regurgitated day after day. But every lie was so contrary to reality, so obviously amoral, that millions outright rejected the entire fabrication.

Google searches for the term “Nakba” increased by 550% from 2021 to 2026. An entire generation learned the truth about Zionism. In 2022, 55% of Americans had a favorable view of Israel. Today, just 37% hold the same opinion. A 62% majority has an unfavorable view of the Israeli government. Meanwhile, sympathy for the Palestinians has risen from 26% in 2022 to 41% in 2026.

To put it another way: in just three years, Israel has lost the sympathy of 49 million Americans, while 111 million now hold pro-Palestine views. Among the youth this trend is even starker. Those under 30 are far more likely to be sympathetic to the Palestinian people (53%) than they are to the Israeli government (18%). This is a sea change in what was once the most pro-Israel country outside of Israel itself.

Millions fight back

The brutality of this live-streamed mass murder shaped the consciousness of an entire generation. Millions participated in over 12,400 pro-Palestine protests nationwide in the nine months following October 7.

In the spring of 2024, the encampment movement sparked at Columbia University spread nationally and internationally. In the US, hundreds of thousands of students camped out in their quads, demanding universities cut ties with the Zionist regime.

Faculty unions began to declare support for the students. In California, UAW Local 4811 declared a political strike in response to attacks by police and Zionist thugs against student protesters.

Terrified of anger spilling over from the campuses to the wider working class, the ruling class brutally repressed the movement. Zionist goons and local cops beat students and broke up the encampments in scenes reminiscent of the late 1960s. At least 3,645 were arrested.

In a press conference that May, Biden rebuked pro-Palestine students: “Shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations—none of this is a peaceful protest.”

Batons and metal rods split open the heads of peaceful protestors as bombs rained down over the helpless people of Gaza. During the two months of the encampments, nearly 4,000 more Palestinians were killed. But Genocide Joe accused the students of being violent.

A period of heightened censorship and repression in the universities followed, as administrators did their best to extinguish the embers of student unrest. Among the first targets of Trump’s deportation campaign were pro-Palestine international students. This is how the ruling class responded to young people protesting a genocide. It is not a lesson the youth will soon forget.

Where has the anger gone?

Indignation at Israel’s crimes still burns in the hearts of millions. The victories of Zohran Mamdani and other DSA-endorsed pro-Palestine candidates are expressions of this anger. Even reactionaries like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson now cynically pander to anti-Zionist sentiment.

Gaza became a lightning rod for all of the accumulated discontent in society. The same class attacking workers through layoffs, inflation, and political persecution also spends billions of dollars on war. The same pedophiles that kidnap and rape children on Epstein islands also bomb the children of Gaza.

Despite the massive exertion of energy by students and young people, the snuffing out of Palestinian lives continues. In September, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said, “There is no real solution for Gaza” that doesn’t involve depopulating the territory. Trump bragged about turning the strip into a “Riviera of the Middle East.”

The Zionist regime is making land grabs in South Lebanon and Syria, displacing hundreds of thousands more. In the West Bank, at least 43,000 Palestinians have been displaced since 2023. The attacks of the settlers are growing in frequency and intensity.

This patchwork of Palestinian towns and villages is a powder keg under immense pressure. One provocation too many, and Zionism could drive three million Palestinians in the West Bank into open revolt. This could be a catalyst re-sparking the intense anger lurking beneath the surface in countries all over the world.

Italian workers show the way

Last fall, the Italian working class gave the world a taste of what militant anti-imperialist struggle looks like. In September 2025, a small dockworkers’ union in Genoa refused to handle cargo heading to or from Israel.

Following the lead of the dockers, workers throughout the country began to pressure the union leaders to call for a general strike, under the slogan of “Blocchiamo Tutto,” or “block everything.” The union bureaucrats had no choice but to submit to the call.

On October 3, the general strike brought Italy to a standstill. Two million workers came onto the street demanding an end to the genocide.

The ruling class was caught off guard. The movement was the first example of workers exerting their power as workers to put a stop to the mass killing. The slogan of “block everything” showed an instinctive recognition that only mass working-class action can force the hand of the imperialists.

The ruling classes of the Western world, terrified that the movement would spread, pressured Netanyahu to sign the October 2025 “ceasefire.”

Here in the US, there is no shortage of working-class anger. Millions will forever associate the word “Gaza” with imperialist butchery. As the US imperialists and their local stooges ramp up their efforts to maintain their spheres of influence, there will be new lightning rods for the accumulated rage in society. In January, the “ICE Out!” general strike in Minneapolis showed that American workers are also capable of waging mass political struggles.

What is missing is a working-class party to catalyze this elemental fury and give it direction. Any serious revolutionary looking to end imperialism must help to build a communist party in the belly of the imperialist beast.

A mass revolutionary party in the US would be a source of inspiration for billions around the world. They would see that within the most reactionary imperialist power on the planet, there are communists actively fighting to wipe imperialism and Zionism from the face of the Earth.