One year on from the start of the genocide in Gaza, Israeli forces have killed over 45,000 Palestinians — and, by some counts, many times more. Around half the victims are children.

Gaza has been decimated. Its infrastructure has been damaged beyond repair. Most of its hospitals are inoperational and all its universities are destroyed. Much of the population has been forced into a tiny parcel of land where they are regularly bombarded by Israeli warplanes.

Amid this genocide, the Israeli regime has now launched a series of violent escalations that threaten to plunge the entire region into war.

In Lebanon, Israeli forces have launched a relentless bombing campaign. Within days, they massacred hundreds, displaced over a million, buried entire communities under rubble, and assassinated leaders of the regional resistance. Since then, they have begun a ground invasion into Lebanon — the fourth such invasion in less than 50 years.

All together, the Israeli regime is now waging war on five separate fronts — in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen — adding to the instruments of economic warfare set against their peoples. All the while, Western politicians and their stenographers strain to sustain the lie that it is acting merely in “self-defence.”

The Israeli regime is thus not acting alone. It has the full backing of Washington, which recently sent a $8.7 billion military aid package to Tel Aviv. European countries are also continuing to export arms to Israel, aiding and abetting war crimes whole ignoring their responsibilities under international law to prevent genocide.

The Israeli regime’s brutal violence recalls those of apartheid South Africa, which escalated its war against Angola, Mozambique and Namibia through the 1980s. Then, as now, international solidarity was critical in dismantling apartheid. It was with the support of Cuban soldiers — and Soviet arms — that South Africa was defeated in Angola, accelerating apartheid’s demise.

The Israeli regime’s reckless escalation is not a show of strength. It is a sign of weakness. But it is also a grave portent of further violence on the horizon.

It is clear, now more than ever, that liberation is the only path to peace. The task of progressive forces today is to internationalize the resistance to the Israeli regime, to break the chains of complicity that sustain it, and to accelerate the global struggle for Palestinian liberation. Nothing less can secure peace for all the peoples of the region.