Israel unilaterally ended the ceasefire accord and resumed its deadly assault on Gaza, knowing that the world would not intervene to halt it. The global community has historically been apathetic to Israel’s violations of previous ceasefires and its killings of Palestinians since 1948. Israel has consistently defied international law with impunity.
The latest ceasefire was not breached because Israel suspected the Palestinians of violating it first or because they wanted to secure their remaining prisoners. Those were not the reasons.
Israel shattered the ceasefire to impede the reconstruction of Gaza and to thwart Palestinians’ efforts to rebuild their destroyed homeland. The goal was to strip Palestinians in Gaza of any hope for the future.
The conclusion of the temporary truce signaled the start of another phase of displacement, loss, and fear for Gaza’s long-suffering population. In the opening night of the revived conflict, Israel bombed the entirety of the Gaza Strip just before dawn. Over 400 civilians, who were preparing for Sahoor in their tents, lost their lives in the most horrendous ways. Many of the deceased were children who died hungry, scared, and cold. This massacre, evidently endorsed by the Americans, wounded hundreds more, who filled Gaza’s dwindling hospital beds.
Since then, the bombings, threats, and killings have not ceased.
In the midst of the renewed genocide, a taunting sound reverberates: empty slogans, devoid of empathy, are echoed by people worldwide who wish to assuage their conscience about Gaza. The trauma and pain of Gaza’s weary people have been diminished to an insubstantial commendation of their “legendary resilience.” The people of Gaza are deprived of their humanity and are portrayed as heroes who neither mourn nor weary.
These slogans resonating globally are futile in easing the suffering in Gaza. On the contrary, they hinder Palestinians from expressing their emotions — their fear, their love, and their aspirations for a dignified life free from war and loss, free from waking to the sound of missiles. The world expects them to die silently as heroes.
Following Israel’s resurgence of genocide, governments and institutions have done nothing to feed a starving child or to shield a family from the missiles of the occupation. They only issued hollow statements; they “condemned” and they “denounced.” But they did nothing to effect change.
Palestinians knew the world’s response would not surpass words, and that these words — regardless of their veracity — would yield no tangible results. From the inception of their oppression, they have repeatedly witnessed how such statements, condemnations, human rights reports, and even judicial rulings fail to alleviate their suffering. Now, they are well aware that the international community is callous to the sound of its own conscience concerning Palestine.
For years, Palestinians have fought not only for survival but to retrieve their humanity in the eyes of the world. They have spoken out through protests, art, cinema, and journalism — desperate to transcend the global apathy that reduces them to news snippets and data.
Initiatives like We Are Not Numbers — which I have been a part of — were designed as a retort to this dehumanization. Their stories have been shared to remind the world that they are not mere news items or casualty figures, but human beings with names, histories, emotions, and above all, dreams.
They have written about the friends they have lost, their homes reduced to rubble, the injustices inflicted upon their people, and their lives irrevocably changed by Israel’s occupation and maltreatment — hoping that by sharing their truths, they could compel the world to recognize them.
Yet, Palestinians remain mere numbers. When a family is annihilated in an airstrike, the headlines tally the dead, but do not name them. They do not say who they were: the child with a love for football, the teenager who dreamed of high grades to honor their family, the mother who embraced her children in the final moments.
And yet, when Israel claims responsibility for targeting a “high-profile militant,” the world’s attention instantaneously shifts — not to the dozens of innocent bystanders who died in the strike, but to the so-called success or failure of the assassination. The world mourns in the abstract, disconnected from the lives lost. Thus, the murder persists.
Even after months of documented war crimes, after campaigns like We Are Not Numbers, after all the condemnations and denouncements, there are still children in Gaza who go hungry and have no respite from the torment of an empty stomach and the fear of bombs.
This indicates that our world has let down Palestinians. It means that all the institutions we’ve created to support justice have failed, and our constitutions have become meaningless. It means that international law and human rights are ineffective. It means that all our armies, supposedly assembled to protect the innocent, stand helpless.
All the safeguards, safety nets, promises, and guarantees seem to have buckled under the weight of Israel’s colonial immunity.
But why? What are the nations afraid of? American armaments? Israeli retribution?
Why are they sacrificing so much to indulge Israel’s appetite for destruction and control?
I am perplexed as to why the world demands that Gaza’s children show courage in the face of death, patience amid loss, and resilience amidst hunger. Why should a malnourished child display more fortitude than the leaders of what is referred to as the “free world”?
Silence is not just complicity; it is acquiescence. Consequently, the strikes persist, and Palestinians remain what the world has permitted them to become: numbers. Death continues to befall them, and somewhere beneath the debris, a child wonders what wrong they committed to be born into this reality.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of Al Jazeera.
