The Israeli military is bombing Gaza at a never-before-seen scale and is preparing for a ground invasion. Hospitals, medical centers and ambulances, schools, residential and office buildings, a mosque, and a refugee camp have been turned to rubble. Israel has already killed nearly two thousand people, including at least 500 children. The death toll is only rising.

Alongside the bombings, Israel has shut off Gaza’s access to electricity, food, and fuel in an act of collective punishment. Hospitals will lose energy and transform into, in the words of Dr Muhammad Abu Salima, the director of the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza, “mass graves.” Over 350,000 Palestinians have been displaced, and entire towns in the Gaza Strip have been razed to the ground.

Ending the seemingly endless cycle of violence that has taken the lives of so many Palestinian and Israeli civilians requires opposing the system of Israeli apartheid — the root cause of this violence — not “standing with Israel” in its efforts to level Gaza and massacre Palestinians. We must demand that the United States stop propping up the Israeli state and funding its crimes.