Editor’s Note: The following submission contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault that may be disturbing to some readers.

The genocide in Gaza has entered a new phase.

Since unilaterally ending the ceasefire agreement March 18, the Israeli government has made clear that its aim is the complete ethnic cleansing and annexation of Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “We will implement the Trump Plan, the voluntary migration plan.”

He announced May 21 that “all the territory of Gaza will be under Israeli security control” and that the implementation of the “Trump plan” was a new condition for ending the “war.”

The Israeli military announced May 25 that it will attempt to take over some 75% of Gaza, up from its current 40%, and push the entire population into three small zones.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described the aims of this operation.

“Within a few months, … Gaza will be totally destroyed,” he said. “The population of Gaza will be concentrated from the Morag Corridor southwards. The rest of the Strip will be empty.”

For nearly 20 months, Israel has bombed hospitals, schools and refugee camps; directly targeted medical workers, patients, journalists, intellectuals, children and the elderly; executed paramedics and rescue workers; disappeared thousands into prisons where they are subjected to systematic torture and sexual assault; systematically destroyed civilian infrastructure; and committed countless other war crimes.

Over 50,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed and over 100,000 injured, though when the effects of disease, prolonged starvation, the complete destruction of the medical system and the inability to count all the dead are taken into account, the total is surely much higher.

Almost the entire population has been displaced and is suffering from extreme hunger and lack of water; tens of thousands have likely died of starvation, which is especially deadly for children and which Israel is using as a method of war.

Israel began blocking any food, water, fuel or medicine from entering Gaza on March 2. According to a May 12 UN-backed report, the entire population is at “critical risk of Famine” with “half a million people (one in five) facing starvation.”

Tens of thousands of children have been killed at a rate “unprecedented in the history of modern wars,” and thousands of children have had limbs amputated, most without anesthesia.

“Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest,” trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa wrote in an article published by the New York Times.

For 20 months, Israeli government officials, generals and public figures shamelessly broadcasted their genocidal intent to the world: “Erase Gaza,” “Burn Gaza now,” “Erase all of Gaza off the face of the earth,” “Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!,” “Those are animals, they have no right to exist. … They need to be exterminated,” “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”

And these have been matched by statements by major United States politicians: “We should kill ‘em all,” “Finish them,” “Goodbye to Palestine,” “May the streets of Gaza overflow with blood,” “Stop the trucks. Let them eat rockets,” “THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY.”

Mass slaughter on this scale would not be possible without the tens of billions of dollars of military aid supplied by the U.S. government.

U.S. arms companies are making billions of dollars off mass murder and reaping skyrocketing stock valuations, while U.S. tech giants have helped develop artificial intelligence systems to automate genocide, including the perversely named “Where’s Daddy?”, which tracks targets back to their homes to kill them with their families, according to media reports.

Professor Nizam Mamode, a surgeon, described the use of sniper drones in Gaza in a hearing held by a committee of the British Parliament.

“The drones would come down and pick off civilians – children,” Mamode said.

Graduate students at UCLA have recently produced a white paper detailing some of the UC’s investments in war profiteers, which is available at Unmasking UCLA at the UC People’s Tribunal for Palestine.

As U.S. oligarchs finance and co-direct a genocide abroad, they are attempting to impose a dictatorship at home. Trump is carrying out Project 2025, which aims to destroy trade unions, dismantle and privatize public services and overturn fundamental democratic rights.

As part of this drive toward dictatorship, the Trump regime has begun a campaign of intimidation, expulsions and firings at universities, as well as the unlawful abduction and detention of students, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk.

Students are cynically labeled “foreign agents” or “terrorist sympathizers” and “part of a global Hamas Support Network.” Sixty universities, including four UCs, are currently being subjected to fraudulent McCarthyite “investigations.”

University administrators are falling in line. Not only did Columbia University facilitate the kidnapping of Khalil through complacency, but the university also capitulated to all of Trump’s demands, including mass expulsions, increased policing, a mask ban, placing departments under thought-police “receiverships” and adopting a formal policy labeling opposition to Zionism as antisemitism.

Universities and noncitizen students are being targeted as a first step toward worse political repression. The measures being normalized today to suppress pro-Palestine speech will be used to target anyone who opposes Trump’s anti-democratic agenda, whom he calls “scum” and “the enemy within.”

Following Columbia’s lead, on March 10, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk announced a so-called “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism” only five days after the Department of Justice announced it was opening an investigation on antisemitism at the UC.

In March, UCLA’s Office of Student Conduct announced its recommendation that the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which was suspended in February, be banned indefinitely from campus.

Since then, the administration has escalated its violent repression on campus, including sending riot police to forcibly clear an SJP film screening, dispersing a May 15 rally to commemorate Nakba Day and arresting a protester for using amplified sound. The UC administration has attempted to justify this police repression by repeatedly smearing student protesters and falsely accusing them of “violence.”

The UC is also seemingly doing nothing to protect students from visa revocations and has cooperated with a federal witch hunt against UC faculty.

The reality is that the unelected corporate executives and political careerists who make up the UC Board of Regents are not members of the “UC community.” Rather, they are members of the same corporate oligarchy that is attempting to overturn hardwon democratic rights.

Trump wants to go to war with public unions – the UC has already been at war with its workers and unions for years.

Trump wants to crack down on universities – the UC has already retaliated against students, staff, faculty and ethnic studies departments.

Trump wants to deport anti-genocide protesters – the UC administrators have already built up a police apparatus and normalized its use against students and legally picketing workers and provided the smears that will be used to justify a worse stage of repression.

However, a mass movement is developing in this country, and Trump’s attacks on millions of working people will not go unanswered.

Our unions should begin a national campaign against the attacks on international students at Harvard, Columbia and elsewhere. When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement comes onto our campus or members of our community come under attack, we must be ready to mobilize mass protests of students and workers and prepare for united strike action across the state.

Peter Racioppo is a graduate student in the Department of Statistics and a member of Rank and File for a Democratic Union, a caucus in the UCLA chapter of United Auto Workers Local 4811.