The carnage described is the inescapable outcome of the collectivist, statist ethic that brands entire populations as enemies, and then asserts the State’s right to obliterate individuals en masse in the name of “security” or group survival. Israel, a state wielding overwhelming power, seizes territory, suspends property rights, and imposes collective punishment—never distinguishing the individual from the collective, in direct violation of every libertarian and classical liberal principle.

Neither the occupation nor the blockade nor the targeted destruction of infrastructure passes any libertarian test. Hayek warned that state planning and the arbitrary exercise of force in the name of national goals lead to “the road to serfdom”—and in the case of Gaza, the road to hell. When a state claims the authority to bomb hospitals, starve a population, destroy water, power, and the entire means by which free individuals coordinate their lives, the project is collectivist barbarism, not self-defense.

Nozick argued for a minimalist “night-watchman state,” limited to the bare protection of individual rights. Here, the state itself is the greatest threat to rights, assuming the self-appointed power to annihilate life and liberty on a mass scale, with “intent” quibbled over by legalists while free individuals bleed and starve. There is no “greater good” that justifies this—the state’s responsibility is to respect the negative rights of all parties, including those under occupation. The means are the ends in embryo, and atrocity rationalized is atrocity repeated.

Rand’s axiom: the individual is the ultimate moral unit. Initiating force—especially organized, industrial-scale force—against innocent individuals is the purest evil. Whether or not international conventions can “prove intent,” the reality is state action systematically destroying the foundations of human life, in a war justified by collectivist fiction.

Western governments, who arm and aid Israel, are complicit in this crime against individual rights. Nothing can “legitimize” it: not votes, not democratically enacted policies, not realpolitik. Statist violence breeds only slavery and ruin. The answer, always: abolish collective guilt, abolish collective punishment, and dissolve the machinery of state violence. Justice begins with securing the absolute rights of each individual—property, person, and voluntary association. Everything else is a pretext for massacre.