Juan Cole
Informed Comment / July 4, 2026
Here is my recent interview on 1000 days of the Gaza War with TRT World News
Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He joins us now from Ann Arbor in Michigan.
Welcome to the program, Professor. 1,000 days on, the latest figures from authorities in Gaza describe extraordinary levels of destruction, with much of the territory in ruins and the vast majority of the population displaced. How does the scale of this devastation compare with other modern conflicts in the Middle East ?
It’s enormous. 80% of the buildings have been destroyed and, as you say, 1.7 million people displaced. There were only two million people in Gaza. So it’s almost everybody that has been displaced. And people are living in tents. Most important medicines are not available. There’s high mortality not only from people having been bombed to death but also from disease, from malnutrition, and from inadequate health care, because most of the hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. The children are not in school except informally, because the schools have been destroyed. There are no schools or universities standing.
So this is a world historical event. We have seen many genocides in the last century. We saw Rwanda and Cambodia and so forth. But if we look at this proportionally — it’s a small place, with the 2 million population — then the proportion of people devastated by this particular military campaign, which I think is a genocide, is unprecedented.
The ceasefire framework and reconstruction mechanism that was established earlier this year appear to be struggling, with continued fighting and aid shortfalls. Why has diplomacy failed to translate into lasting changes on the ground in Gaza ?
It’s not turned into lasting changes because the Israeli government is not interested in having lasting changes. The Israeli government has announced that it plans to expel all of the people in Gaza from Gaza. They want a genocide, if not in the form of more mass killing, in the form of destroying a people’s lifeways, of making it impossible for them to continue to be Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli government has taken something like 70% of the territory. It has gone on destroying buildings behind its lines. It has a poorly defined border with the rest of Gaza, into which it has crowded these two million people.
So Israel has impunity in world councils. It has impunity in Washington, D.C. It has impunity in Brussels. It may do as it pleases to the Palestinians, apparently including exterminating them if it so desires. And as long as that impunity is in place, it’s very difficult to see how diplomacy can work.
And it should be said that the Hamas organization did commit atrocities on October 7th. It is a problem for the strip to be governed, from an Israeli point of view, by Hamas. But then bring in the PLO, bring in some other legitimate government. But you can’t just have the weight of this diplomacy fall on ordinary people this way.
Looking beyond the immediate conflict, what impact has this war had on the broader Middle East, particularly on regional alliances, Arab government positions, and the prospects for wider stability ?
It hasn’t really had much effect in the region. As far as I can tell, the Egyptian government hasn’t exercised itself in any significant way about these events. Neither has Jordan. And the new Syrian revolutionary government seems to be skittish about taking on Israel. The opposition to Israel’s wars of atrocity have come from relatively unsavoury quarters — the Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has committed terrorism itself, and from Iran, which has a terrible human rights record in its own right and which has attacked its Arab neighbours. So the Gaza situation is an orphan. Gaza is without any support anywhere. And that’s why the Israelis may do to it what they please.
Okay, Professor Juan Cole, we’ll have to leave it there. Really good to get your thoughts on this issue. Thank you.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Distinguished University Professor in the History Department at the University of Michigan
