Far from abating or slowing down, the mass slaughter, displacement and engineered starvation of the besieged Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip has continued at full throttle since Israel began attacking Iran two weeks ago.
But instead of this issue taking centre stage – even as we witnessed, for the first time in our lives, Israeli cities and towns coming under bombardment – the deliberate destruction of Gaza has been reduced, at best, to a passing statistic tallying daily deaths. At worst, it has been ignored altogether.
Overnight on Tuesday, US President Donald Trump announced that Iran and Israel have agreed to a ceasefire, following the former’s pre-coordinated strikes on the evacuated US air base Al Udaid on Qatari territory. Before noon on the same day, 71 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip, the day before, 50, and in 48 hours before that 200 more.
The world’s first televised genocide continues under the theme of abject dehumanisation and a truth universally acknowledged: that Palestinians are expected to die, and that they should do so in silence, despite the unique barbarity of Israel’s western-backed slaughter.
Over the weekend, Palestinian journalist Amin Hamdan, along with his wife and their two young daughters, were killed in an Israeli attack. Palestinian civil defence officer Mohammad Ghorab – whose father, also a member of the civil defence, was killed during the 2018 Great March of Return – and his son were fatally hit in an Israeli strike on Nuseirat refugee camp. Three boys collecting firewood in Shujaiya were also killed.
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Ahmad al-Farra, the head of paediatrics and obstetrics at Nasser hospital, warned that babies in neonatal intensive care were at risk of dying within 24 to 48 hours due to a shortage of premature formula milk – a direct result of Israel’s siege.
An Israeli Knesset member recently boasted that if 100 Palestinians get killed in a single night, “no one cares”.
When I think of trigger-happy Israeli soldiers luring desperate, starving people to a site with the promise of food, only to gun them down with sniper bullets and artillery shelling – not discriminating between men, women and children – I think of the limitations of the English language when it comes to describing such evil acts.
‘There’s no food’
Organised by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an Orwellian Newspeak term if there ever was one, these “aid centres” are essentially death traps that have killed more than 450 Palestinians since they began doling out meagre supplies a month ago.
Before 7 October 2023, the glory days of the Israeli-Egyptian blockade on Gaza saw an average of 500 trucks entering the territory daily. But after Israel imposed a complete blockade on Gaza on 2 March, with no food or humanitarian aid entering at all, the GHF has become the only means for delivering lifesaving assistance.
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Israel’s genocide has killed thousands of children, who comprise half of the Gaza Strip’s population. It has robbed them of a future, denying them education and a dignified life, including the safety of a home and the security of a family. It has created the largest cohort of child amputees in recent history.
According to the United Nations, the number of children under five suffering from acute malnutrition in Gaza increased almost threefold in the second half of May when compared with three months earlier.
This large-scale engineered starvation drives people, their bodies wasting away, to the GHF centres – where if they’re lucky, they can access a bag of flour. Otherwise, they might face death, or go home with nothing after enduring the hours-long journey on an empty stomach.
‘People have become ghosts. Everyone lives in terrible anxiety, horrified by the realisation that the genocide will continue endlessly’
– Gaza writer Meqdad Jameel
Mohammad al-Darbi, a 12-year-old boy who, after walking for eight hours obtained two kilogrammes of flour – only for thieves to then rob him – pleaded with a complicit world to have mercy, and stuffed his mouth with sand. “There’s no food, no food at all,” he sobbed.
A few days earlier, the lifeless body of 20-year-old Mohammad Yousef al-Zaanin was carried through a crowd atop a wooden pallet, his clothes streaked with flour. The young man was from Beit Hanoun, a northern town largely destroyed, and had set out in hopes of bringing back a sack of flour for his displaced and hungry mother and seven sisters. But his story, his life and his death, has been largely ignored.
The day afterwards, an Israeli attack on the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City severely injured Inas Farhat and killed her seven children. In May, the husband and nine children of a paediatrician were killed in an air strike on their home, some of their bodies charred beyond recognition and in pieces. The sadistic normalisation of killing entire families is repeated over and over again.
“The suffering here is immense,” wrote Fadel Naim, an orthopaedic surgeon in Gaza, who says the barely operating hospitals receive hundreds of wounded people daily. “Families are torn apart not just by bombs, but by hunger, fear, and despair. And yet, the world remains largely silent.”
Perfect bogeyman
Amid this backdrop, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been gunning for a regional war, aiming to save his political career and restore the deterrence paradigm that was shattered after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.
Even with the support of Arab puppet regimes – mainly Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates – and the full backing of most western countries, the optics of carrying out an almost two-year genocide inevitably cause some blowback. Iran and the easily debunked allegation of its imminent attainment of a nuclear bomb (think: Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction) was the perfect bogeyman, one that has been years in the making.
Iran’s missile and drone attacks on Tel Aviv and other areas in Israel has no doubt invited some feelings of schadenfreude, after many months of Israelis wholeheartedly backing the collective punishment and extermination of two million blockaded Palestinians.
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Their victimhood propaganda, including the flurry of hypocritical condemnations and accusations of “war crimes” after an Israeli hospital was hit in a blast, fools no one. At the same time, since 12 June, Israel has killed more than 430 people in Iran and wounded 3,500. The death toll includes not just military figures and nuclear scientists, but also poets, athletes and children.
Meanwhile, Israel continues to drop US-made bombs on “safe zones” in Gaza, where tents are the only shelter for displaced Palestinians, most of whom have lost their homes and been forced to flee from one place to another repeatedly over the past 20 months.
Bombing such densely crowded spaces wipes out entire families. Among those recently killed were Mahmoud Rasras and his children, Nidal and Ward. Pillars of the community, such as beloved comedian and charity worker Mahmoud Shurrab, are killed inside their tents – because Israel’s security apparently depends on bombing tents, starving families, and burning and burying children alive under the rubble.
Even the theatrics of Israel mulling a ceasefire have disappeared from the news, with no word of negotiations or delegations shuffling from Cairo to Doha. No one speaks for the Palestinians in Gaza – not the collaborationist Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank, nor even their own compatriots, who seem to regard the effective boycotts, protests and civil disobedience of the First Intifada as a relic of the past.
As Meqdad Jameel, a writer and researcher from the Gaza Strip, put it: “People have become ghosts. Everyone lives in terrible anxiety, horrified by the realisation that the genocide will continue endlessly, with no thought of how to stop it.”
And these exhausted, deeply traumatised people continue to be reduced to statistics, instead of receiving the world’s attention, which they deserve. Keep your eyes on Gaza. We’ve already drastically failed them; the least we can do is to keep talking, keep making noise, and keep amplifying their narratives.
We need to end the normalisation of the daily slaughter of dozens of Palestinians.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
