A Palestinian child peers through the window of the morgue at the hospital in Deir Al-Balah in Gaza. (Hatem Omar, Maan Images)

Recent developments in Gaza should be troubling to anyone with a common sense of humanity. It is particularly anguishing to me as an American Jew that the prolonged, systematic, and cruel abuse of Palestinians in Gaza risks becoming the world’s latest holocaust.

I say this with an awareness of the deservedly special status that the Nazi Holocaust has in our moral imagination, due to its unconcealed genocidal intent, systematic and sustained cruelty, as well as its reliance on the mentality and instruments of modernity.

Recent developments in Gaza vividly express Israel's deliberate intention to subject an entire captive population to life endangering conditions. I do not make this comparison lightly, but as an appeal to the international community to act urgently to halt an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.

There were strong advance signals in 1994 of a genocide-to-come in Rwanda; yet nothing was done to stop it. The world watched while the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims took place. There have been repeated allegations of genocidal conduct in Darfur, and hardly an international finger has been raised.

Why should we single out Gaza when mass death on this scale has not yet resulted? The international community is not merely watching this tragic spectacle unfold. Some of its influential members are actively assisting Israel’s continuing collective punishment of Gaza as a whole.

Israel's 38-year military occupation turned Gaza into a cauldron of pain for the entire population. With great fanfare, Israel supposedly "left" Gaza in 2005. Yet Israel continues to maintain full control over Gaza's borders, air space and offshore seas, caging in the people in oppressive conditions, and frequently intervening with lethal force.

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When Hamas prevailed in the January 2006 Palestinian elections, the civilian population was subjected to a brutal economic boycott. Indeed, Sharon and Olmert advisor Dov Weisglass summarized Israel's chilling plans for Palestinian children, women and men with the euphemistic: "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet."

Hamas had been encouraged, including by the Bush Administration, to participate in elections - only to be punished later for winning. Rather then respecting the Palestinians' democratic choice, Hamas was castigated as a terrorist organization.

Almost immediately after forming a government, Hamas indicated its desire to work with other Palestinian groups, like Fatah. Hamas declared a willingness to recognize Israel within its pre-1967 borders. Hamas proposed a ten-year truce with Israel, and upheld a unilateral ceasefire for eighteen months, broken only infrequently in response to frequent Israeli military attacks.

Instead of using diplomacy, Israel and its supporters were determined to make Hamas fail. The U.S. appointed a special envoy, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, to work with Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas and his forces, unlawfully channeling $40 million to Abbas' Presidential Guard.

After more than a year, the Israel/US game succeeded. Hamas and Fatah forces fought each other. Hamas now controls Gaza and Fatah the West Bank. Despite Hamas' renewed call for a unity government, Israel seems determined to foment civil war, to make Gazans suffer, and to separate Gaza and the West Bank permanently.

Why would Israel instigate such suffering, while simultaneously insisting that it desires peace, if only it had a "reasonable Palestinian negotiating partner"? Sharon humiliated and discredited Arafat as incapable of negotiating. Later, Abbas was dismissed as too weak to negotiate.

Perhaps this disparity between Israel's words and its actions is explained by the fact that peace would depend on compromises Israel is unwilling to make. There is widespread recognition that peace would require Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders, to establish a Palestinian state with full sovereignty on the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as capital, and to ensure sufficient financial assistance to achieve economic viability for a sovereign Palestine.

Israel instead appears intent on isolating Gaza and cantonizing the West Bank, leaving Jewish settlements intact, and appropriating all of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Even during the Oslo peace years, the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank doubled, huge sums were invested in Jewish-only settlement roads linked to Israel, and Palestinians from East Jerusalem were steadily replaced with Jews.

In addition, Israel has built an illegal wall on Palestinian land and stiffened the economic boycott that is bringing Gaza's 1.4 million people to the brink of collective starvation.

Dare we compare gas chambers to the four decades of oppressive occupation? The measures and scale differ, as do the justifications and cover-up tactics. But both are deliberate in their attempt to punish and destroy an "unwanted" population.

Should crimes against humanity even be compared? When does criminality cross the line and become genocidal? For Israel to persist with its policies risks the material and psychological destruction of an entire Palestinian community that is an integral part of an ethnic whole. It is this growing danger that makes it responsible to warn of a uniquely Palestinian holocaust-in-the-making. It has become urgent to heed to post-Nazi pledge of 'never again.'

Richard Falk is Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.