The Queue for Death: Israel's Genocide and Western Complicity
The Massacre at the Aid Line
On 20 July 2025, at least 67 Palestinians were killed in northern Gaza while queueing for humanitarian aid; dozens more were injured (Haaretz, 2025).
They were shot as they waited for food.
Most of them were displaced civilians: hungry, exhausted, many of them children desperate for the flour and water being distributed in al-Sudaniya. Witnesses say Israeli forces opened fire without warning. Gaza's health authorities called it a massacre. In the West, it barely registered.
Yet his is not the first time. It follows a brutal pattern of killings at aid sites over the past month: 20 crushed to death in a stampede just days before (BBC News, 2025a), and over 30 more reportedly shot near another distribution point (NPR, 2025). By July 2025, over 875 Palestinians had been killed while seeking food aid, with 674 of these deaths occurring near Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) sites according to UN documentation (UN News, 2025a). It's become clear that what began as a war has turned into something far more chilling: a siege, where starvation is weaponised and survival itself is treated as a provocation.
Witness accounts from multiple incidents paint a consistent picture of deliberate targeting. "We were told to come early for the food truck. I saw people waving white cloths. Then I heard the shots. People were falling around me," one survivor told reporters after a July incident (CNN, 2025). This testimony is echoed across multiple reports and videos shared from the scene, some too graphic for broadcast. The queue for food has become a queue for death.
Still, Western governments continue to repeat the same line: that Israel has a right to defend itself.
But what, exactly, is being defended when unarmed civilians are shot at bread lines? What security is protected when people are executed for reaching out their hands? These are not isolated incidents. They are the logical outcome of a policy that has turned Gaza into a mass grave, and the people in it into the disposable remnants of a dehumanised war.
This is also the natural outcome of what happens when Israel - and its supporters, including us in the West - sanction and sustain the dehumanisation of the victims. When people are no longer seen as human, their deaths require no justification; at most a passing comment about how this is a brutal war. When Palestinians are framed not as civilians but as collateral, then mass death is not only tolerated, but expected.
Let us be clear: this is not a conflict.
It is a genocide.
Who Created the Conditions?
The daily horror in Gaza is the result of deliberate choices. What we are witnessing is the collapse of the international humanitarian framework itself, dismantled and replaced with something far more brutal.
For decades, when Palestinians in Gaza needed food, medical care, or education, they turned to UNRWA - the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. It wasn't perfect, but it was neutral. It answered to the international community, and not to any single government. It had systems, protocols, and accountability. Most importantly, it kept people alive.
Then Israel decided UNRWA had to go.
At the centre of this collapse is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) - a private American company, registered in Delaware like any other corporation, established in February 2025 (Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, 2025). It was funded and backed by the United States and Israel, created to take over aid deliveries in Gaza after Israel moved to destroy UNRWA. The UN agency was gutted following Israeli allegations that some staff had ties to Hamas. These claims remain under investigation and dispute, but provide the perfect excuse to dismantle an institution that had served Palestinian refugees for over 70 years.
Into the vacuum stepped GHF: a body with no independent mandate, no international oversight, and no meaningful ties to the communities it claims to serve. Think of it this way - imagine if your local food bank was suddenly replaced by a private security company that decided when, where, and how you could eat. That's what happened in Gaza.
Aid is now distributed through militarised zones, often under the direct watch or control of Israeli forces. There are no proper queues, no protection systems, no structured distribution, just thousands of desperate people scrambling for food while soldiers watch through rifle scopes. When chaos breaks out, and it always does, the response is bullets, not crowd control.
Here's how it works in practice: GHF schedules a food delivery, often without telling local leaders or other aid groups. Sometimes they don't even announce the location until the last minute, sending GPS coordinates by text message to a few people who then spread the word. Imagine getting a text that says "Food truck at these coordinates in 30 minutes", and you haven't eaten in days. What happens next is predictable: thousands of people rush to the same spot, creating exactly the kind of chaos that justifies violence.
Take the Tal al-Hawa incident in early July (Middle East Eye, 2025). Word spread that trucks were arriving in the district. Over 10,000 people swarmed the area; mothers carrying babies, elderly men with walking sticks, teenagers who hadn't seen proper food in weeks. There was no plan for distribution, no barriers to manage the crowd, no officials to maintain order. Within minutes, people were being crushed. Then Israeli forces opened fire. At least 22 were killed, including two infants. Local rescue workers described the scene as "a planned trap" (Gaza Health Ministry, 2025).
Israel has repeatedly claimed that it is facilitating humanitarian aid. But consider what ‘facilitation’ means when you control every aspect of the process: how much food enters Gaza, where it goes, who can access it, and who provides ‘security’ at distribution sites. These are state-managed spectacles of control, dressed up as charity.
And the West has accepted and championed this new system. British, EU, and American officials have praised GHF as a more "secure" and "coordinated" mechanism for aid delivery. In June 2025, the United States approved $30 million in direct funding for the organisation (Al Jazeera, 2025b). Think about that: American taxpayers are funding a private company to distribute aid under Israeli military supervision to people being starved by an Israeli siege.
The message is clear: if you want to eat, you must submit to Israeli control. If you want to live, you must accept that your survival depends on the goodwill of the very forces that are trying to annihilate you. And if you gather in large numbers to collect food… well, that's a security threat that justifies lethal force.
This is the transformation of humanitarian assistance into a tool of population control. Behind it stands a chain of approval that leads not just to Tel Aviv, but to London, Brussels, and Washington.
The architects of this system know exactly what they have created. They have replaced an international institution with a private company. They have replaced neutral aid distribution with militarised control. They have replaced humanitarian law with the logic of siege warfare. And they have done it all while claiming to help the very people they are destroying.
This is genocide by bureaucracy. The slow, methodical replacement of life-sustaining systems with death-dealing ones. The transformation of aid into a weapon. The conversion of survival into submission.
And every Western government that fund, supports, or defends this system is complicit in its design.
Horror as Routine
What is happening in Gaza has become a routine. The dead arrive in waves: shot, starved, or crushed after every so-called humanitarian delivery. Each incident is met with the same theatre of response - Israel blames Hamas; the West offers muted concern; and the trucks keep rolling in under armed watch, bringing flour, chaos, and more corpses.
Aid trucks have become death magnets. In one widely circulated video clip, filmed just moments before gunfire erupted, civilians are seen waving white flags, some holding up their children to signal they pose no threat. Seconds later, shots ring out. Another clip shows the aftermath: a toppled flour truck, twisted bodies in the dust, and a woman screaming as she kneels beside her son's body. "He was fourteen," she sobs, "he just came for food" (Al Jazeera, 2025a).
This is a deliberate political substitution, where neutral, multilateral institutions have been replaced with partisan ones. The GHF operates with minimal oversight, no crowd control infrastructure, and often with Israeli military protection or surveillance.
There is an emerging pattern: aid is dropped, people gather, chaos breaks out, and Israeli forces shoot. Sometimes, the trucks themselves run over civilians in the confusion. Sometimes, the victims are labelled looters. The underlying message is always the same: even the act of survival is punishable.
And still, Western leaders continue to speak of this carnage in the passive voice. Aid is "interrupted" (CNN, 2025). Civilians are "caught in crossfire" (Doctors Without Borders, 2025). The "suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths" (CNN, 2025). But these are not collateral tragedies. They are predictable outcomes of a system designed not to feed people, but to manage their disappearance.
This is the routinisation of horror. A population already starved and shelled is now being herded toward controlled kill zones under the guise of humanitarian relief. It is a spectacle; an engineered convergence of death and denial, where the tools of survival become the machinery of execution.
But this horror did not emerge from nowhere. It was designed. Understanding this system reveals how it creates this routine of death.
Western Moral Failure: From Holocaust Memory to Gaza Denial
In January 2025, leaders from across Europe and North America gathered for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Speeches were made. Candles were lit. Promises were repeated and "Never Again" echoed through parliaments and plazas. But even as dignitaries honoured the memory of the Holocaust, they turned away from its clearest moral lessons.
As they spoke those words, the conditions for genocide were continuing to unfold in Gaza. And not in secret.
Hospitals were being bombed. Aid lines were being shelled. Entire families were wiped out. Starvation was used as a method of warfare. And the international response from those very same leaders was denial - not of the facts, but of their implications.
What we witnessed was not a failure to know. It was a refusal to acknowledge what was known.
Every bullet fired into a crowd at an aid truck is enabled not just by soldiers, but by governments that fund the weapons, maintain the siege, and then call the massacre something else.
Western leaders often frame their support for Israel in terms of shared democratic values and a vision of stability. But in Gaza, those values lie in ashes. What remains is strategic loyalty, placing alliances over accountability and justifying mass suffering as a consequence of war.
In February 2025, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy stated in Parliament that while the UK "supports Israel's right to security," it also believes "the blockade and the scale of civilian harm in Gaza may amount to breaches of international law" (UK Parliament, 2025). Yet no concrete consequences followed. Similarly, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reiterated in a press briefing that "no other military in the world does more to avoid civilian casualties" (White House, 2024), even as Israeli forces were implicated in strikes on aid convoys and medical facilities.
The contrast with Western responses to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is stark. When a Russian missile hit a maternity hospital in Mariupol in 2022, it drew immediate condemnation and accusations of war crimes from leaders across Europe and North America. In Gaza, however, when similar atrocities occur - bombing of hospitals, refugee camps, or food lines - they are met with expressions of ‘regret,’ calls for ‘de-escalation,’ and the repeated mantra: ‘Israel has the right to defend itself.’
The scope of Western material support makes this more than rhetorical complicity. From 2019 to 2023, Israel received approximately $3.8 billion annually in military aid from the United States. This figure was dramatically increased in late 2023 when Congress passed an emergency military package worth $14 billion (U.S. Congressional Research Service, 2024). In the UK, arms export licences to Israel remained active throughout the bombing campaigns of 2024 and 2025. An investigation by The Guardian revealed that British-made components were used in smart bombs that killed civilians, including children (Beaumont and Sabbagh, 2025).
Meanwhile, the European arms consortium MBDA continued to sell weapons components to Israel throughout the conflict, including guidance kits and fuses linked to munitions that killed dozens in densely populated areas (Booth, 2025).
Domestically, expressions of support for Gaza are increasingly repressed. In the UK, Palestine Action have recently been proscribed as a terrorist organisation. We now have the ludicrous spectacle of peaceful protestors being arrested for supporting a ‘terrorist’ organisation, viewed in the same vein as ISIS. Students have faced disciplinary measures for organising pro-Palestinian events, while some universities have banned protests citing "community cohesion" (Elgot, 2025). In the United States, major donors and political figures have pressured institutions to disband Palestine solidarity groups, creating a chilling effect on free expression.
This repression serves a purpose: to strip the victims of their humanity in the public sphere, to neutralise dissent, and to preserve the illusion of Western moral superiority.
Language becomes the final layer of complicity. Terms like "deconfliction zone," "surgical strike," or "safe corridor" function not to clarify, but to obscure. They suggest order and proportionality where there is chaos and disproportionate force.
As the legal scholar Raz Segal, himself a Holocaust historian, noted in early 2024, "This is a textbook case of genocide… unfolding in real time" (Segal, 2024). Human rights experts from the UN and scholars of international law echoed the warning, citing Israel's intent, language, and conduct. In December 2023, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, stated that the actions in Gaza "could amount to genocide" (UN OHCHR, 2025).
And yet, the term "genocide" remains unspeakable in most Western capitals.
Instead, political leaders adopt a strategy of phased moral retreat. First, they dispute the truth. Then, when facts can no longer be denied - due to satellite imagery, forensic evidence, and UN reports - they reframe these truths. Civilian deaths became "tragic accidents." Bombed hospitals are said to be near "militant sites." Starving children are not evidence of engineered famine but of a "complex operating environment" (UNRWA, 2024). When forced to acknowledge mass casualties, officials express "deep regret" for what they term "mistakes" (Haaretz, 2025), while military spokesmen admitted to "extensive collateral damage" and "regret for harm to uninvolved individuals" (BBC News, 2023).
The final stage of this retreat is performative condemnation without consequence. In July 2025, as the death toll from aid killings reached over 800, twenty-six countries issued a joint statement condemning the "horrifying" killing of Palestinians seeking food, declaring that "suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths" (BBC News, 2025). Yet these same nations continue to sell arms to Israel, refuse to impose sanctions, and maintain diplomatic cover for the very operations they claim to condemn. The statement becomes a moral alibi, allowing governments to express concern while maintaining material complicity.
What began as silence transformed into denial. And what began as denial morphed into something more familiar: the reassertion of Israeli victimhood.
Statements from European leaders stressed the trauma of 7 October 2023. They described Hamas's massacre in terms of a civilisational threat. European Commission officials called it "the most lethal assault against the Jewish people since the Holocaust" and described it as a "barbaric attack" that posed threats to European civilisation (European Commission, 2023). Some officials even suggested that Israel was fighting "a second Holocaust" - a narrative that not only appropriated the language of past atrocity but weaponised it to obscure the reality of present ones (EU Reporter, 2024).
This framing is extremely dangerous.
It is dangerous because it shields power from accountability. Significantly, it undermines the moral authority of Holocaust remembrance itself. It also reinforces a hierarchy of suffering, where some histories are elevated to sacred status while others are rendered invisible, even as they repeat in real time.
We must be clear: to remember the Holocaust is not merely to mourn its victims. It is to remain vigilant against the machinery of genocide wherever it emerges. If "Never Again" does not include Palestinians, it is not a principle. It is a performance.
In turning their backs on Gaza while invoking Auschwitz, Western leaders have revealed the hollowness of their commemorations. And in doing so, they have moved beyond silence. They have entered the realm of denial.
When Western governments continue to fund, defend, and excuse these actions, then they are not bystanders. They are participants.
We must stop pretending that the West stands for universal values when those values are applied selectively. This becomes complicity. And complicit silence in the face of mass death becomes something darker: the quiet normalisation of genocide.
The Human Cost: Psychological and Physical Toll
For many in Gaza, the assault is psychological as well as physical. This war is being waged on the human psyche as much as on human bodies. It is being fought in the minds of survivors, children, parents, and entire families who have lost everything but are expected to go on living. The devastation is total: homes gone, schools flattened, bodies unrecovered, names erased.
But it is the aid line massacres that represent a particular form of psychological torture. They force people to choose between starvation and death. They turn food, one of the most basic human needs, into a death trap.
Consider what this means for a mother in Gaza. Your children are hungry. They cry at night because their stomachs hurt. You hear about food distribution, and you know the risks - you've seen the videos, heard the stories, counted the bodies. But what choice do you have? You can watch your children waste away, or you can take them to a place where they might be shot. This is the choice that Israel and its Western backers have created: die slowly or die quickly.
Palestinian psychologist Dr Samah Jabr, a leading voice on mental health under occupation, has described the current moment as "the collapse of the soul." In a recent interview, she stated, "People are expected to survive, to function, to keep walking across rubble. But there is no space left in their minds for hope. What they are experiencing is beyond trauma. It is cumulative grief that becomes cellular. It is passed on in the silence between generations" (XCity Magazine, 2025).
The numbers tell part of the story. According to the UN, over 80% of Gaza's population has been forced from their homes, many multiple times (UN News, 2025b). Children who have lived through five, six, seven displacements, each time losing what little they had managed to rebuild.
But numbers cannot capture what it must mean for a seven-year-old child to learn that safety is an illusion, that adults cannot protect you, and that the world wants you dead.
Medical professionals working in Gaza describe unprecedented levels of psychological breakdown. Children who no longer speak - not because they cannot, but because they have learned that words are useless. Adults who cannot sleep without the sound of bombing because silence has become more terrifying than explosions. Families who have lost the capacity to hope because hope has become a form of torture.
Dr. Yara Asi, a Palestinian-American health researcher, documented what she calls "anticipatory grief" - the psychological state of mourning people who are still alive because you know they will soon be dead. "Mothers in Gaza are grieving their children while they still hold them," she wrote. "They are saying goodbye in advance because they know that tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, the goodbye will be final" (Wilson Center, 2024).
The aid line killings add another layer to this psychological warfare. They weaponise hope itself. Every announcement of food distribution becomes a test: How desperate are you? How much are you willing to risk? How far will you go to keep your family alive? And when people make that desperate choice - when they decide that the risk of death is worth the chance of food - they are punished for it.
This is not collateral damage. This is the deliberate destruction of a people's capacity to imagine a future. It is the weaponisation of despair.
The mental health infrastructure that might address this trauma has been systematically destroyed. Gaza's main psychiatric hospital was bombed in November 2023 (UN News, 2025b). The community mental health centres that served children with PTSD were targeted and destroyed. The psychologists and social workers who might help people process their trauma have themselves been killed, displaced, or are too traumatised to function.
But the psychological warfare goes deeper than individual trauma. It targets the very idea of Palestinian identity, Palestinian existence, Palestinian futurity. When Israeli officials call Palestinians "human animals" (Times of Israel, 2023), when they speak of "mowing the grass" (Washington Post, 2021), when they describe the goal as making Gaza "uninhabitable" (The Guardian, 2025), they are not just describing military strategy. They are describing psychological warfare aimed at convincing Palestinians that they have no right to exist.
And it is working. Studies of genocide and prolonged military occupation show that systematic dehumanisation corrodes not only the oppressor's morality, but also the emotional resilience of the oppressed. In Rwanda, Bosnia, and Myanmar, we saw how civilians stripped of dignity begin to internalise the logic of survival at any cost. The language of "vermin," "human animals," and "terrorists" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - not in behaviour, but in psychological harm. It damages how people see themselves, and how they imagine the possibility of a future.
When the world denies your humanity, when Western officials say nothing or worse, when journalists ask if you are "using your children as shields," when they talk about your community as a problem to be managed, how long before you internalise that message? How long before you begin to believe that maybe your life really doesn't matter?
The silence of the international community deepens this wound. When civilians are killed en masse and the world responds with polite statements or procedural dithering, it tells Palestinians that their lives are worth less; that their suffering must be negotiated, not condemned. It tells them that the world is watching their extermination and choosing to do nothing.
This is what psychological warfare looks like. Not just propaganda and fear, but the slow, grinding erasure of the idea that your life matters. The methodical destruction of hope. The weaponisation of the most basic human needs - food, safety, dignity - to break not just bodies but souls.
Children in Gaza are learning lessons that no child should learn. They are learning that the world is divided into those who matter and those who don't. That some people are considered human and others are not. That justice is a lie, that international law is a joke, that the powerful can kill the powerless with impunity.
These are the children who will grow up - if they grow up at all - in a world that has shown them nothing but cruelty. These are the minds being shaped by genocide. These are the souls being forged in the fires of dehumanisation.
And if those children become adults, when they look back on what was done to them and their families, when they remember the aid lines where their parents were shot for trying to feed them: what will they think of the world that watched and did nothing?
This is the human cost of genocide. Not just the bodies in the rubble, but the minds that are broken, the souls that are crushed, the futures that are stolen. It is the deliberate destruction of a people's capacity to believe in their own humanity.
And it is being carried out with the full knowledge and support of the Western powers who claim to champion human dignity and the sanctity of life.
The Broader Project: Ethnic Cleansing Disguised as Security
What is happening in Gaza cannot be explained solely as military excess or policy failure. It is part of a broader ideological project; one that uses the language of security to advance a strategy of long-term dispossession. The massacres at food lines, the starvation of civilians, the targeting of infrastructure - all of it follows a dark but coherent logic: to make Gaza unliveable.
But we must be clear: this horror did not start on 7 October 2023. It intensified.
Gaza has been under siege since 2007 - a 18-year blockade that has controlled every aspect of life for over two million people. Before the current assault, Gaza was already described by human rights organisations as an "open-air prison." Israel controlled what went in and what came out: food, medicine, fuel, building materials, even fishing nets and children's toys were subject to military approval. The UN had warned repeatedly that Gaza was becoming ‘uninhabitable’ long before the current genocide began.
The siege meant that 97% of Gaza's water was undrinkable (UN OCHA, 2022). It meant that electricity was available for only a few hours a day (World Bank, 2022). It meant that unemployment reached over 40%, with youth unemployment even higher (Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024). It meant that people needed permits to leave – ones that were rarely granted, and never guaranteed (B'Tselem, 2023). It meant that families were separated for decades, unable to visit relatives just miles away.
This was the ‘normal’ that existed before October 2023. A slow-motion suffocation of an entire population, carried out through bureaucratic control rather than bombs. The current assault has simply accelerated and intensified a process that was already underway.
Israeli leaders have been remarkably candid about this. In October 2023, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant infamously declared that "we are fighting human animals" and announced a "complete siege" of Gaza - no electricity, no food, no water (Times of Israel, 2023). These were not the words of a rogue figure. They were part of a state-sanctioned discourse, repeated and normalised across Israeli media and politics. Government advisor Daniel Hagari later described the aim as "creating a new security reality," one in which the geography and demographics of Gaza are fundamentally transformed (Middle East Eye, 2024).
Since the beginning of the assault, over 70% of Gaza's residential buildings have been destroyed or severely damaged (UNOSAT, 2025). The Strip's universities, hospitals, and cultural institutions lie in ruins. The possibility of rebuilding - economically, socially, or psychologically - has been shattered. And all of this is being carried out under the banner of ‘precision targeting’ and ‘counterterrorism.’
But a leaked Israeli government document from December 2023 reveals what many have long suspected: plans for the mass transfer of Gaza's population into the Sinai desert, framed as a "humanitarian evacuation" (Haaretz, 2023). The proposal describes "infrastructure corridors" and "safe relocation," but the goal is clear: ethnic cleansing dressed up as logistics (The Guardian, 2025b).
This is not new. It fits a settler-colonial framework that has guided Zionist expansion since the Nakba of 1948, when over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes (Pappé, 2006). Historian Ilan Pappé has described this as "incremental ethnic cleansing" - a long-term strategy of removing a native population through both violence and bureaucratic displacement.
What makes the current moment particularly dangerous is the cover it receives from Western capitals. By invoking terrorism, Hamas, or Iranian influence, Israel has managed to recast mass civilian suffering as unfortunate but necessary. It is a discourse that echoes the War on Terror, where every dead body was rationalised as a strategic inevitability.
But what we are witnessing now is not counterterrorism. It is population management through force. The deliberate creation of uninhabitable zones. The elimination of entire neighbourhoods. The slow-motion erasure of a people.
And behind the euphemisms of ‘security’ and ‘stabilisation’ lies an ancient and brutal truth: to take the land, you must first empty it.
The aid line killings are not aberrations in this project, but integral to it. They serve multiple functions: they terrorise the population, they demonstrate Israeli control over life and death, and they send a message that even the most basic acts of survival will be met with violence. They are designed to break the will to remain.
This is genocide by design. Not the sudden explosion of mass killing, but the methodical destruction of the conditions that make life possible. The elimination of food security, medical care, education, shelter, and hope. The creation of circumstances where death becomes preferable to continued existence.
Conclusion: A Reckoning Is Coming
What we are witnessing in Gaza is not a war.
It is not a conflict.
It is not even a tragedy.
It is a genocide.
Systematic and deliberate.
And carried out with the full knowledge and support of Western governments who claim to champion human rights and the rule of law.
The massacres at aid lines are not aberrations. They are the logical outcome of a system designed to make survival impossible. They are the predictable result of policies that treat Palestinian life as expendable and Palestinian suffering as acceptable collateral damage.
For too long, we have allowed ourselves to be deceived by the language of diplomacy, by the fiction of ‘both sides,’ by the comfortable lie that this is a complex conflict with no clear moral lines. But there is nothing complex about shooting hungry people as they queue for food. There is nothing nuanced about starving children and calling it security. There is nothing balanced about genocide.
The Western governments that fund Israel's military, sell it weapons, and provide it diplomatic cover are not neutral observers. They are active participants in this genocide. Every bomb dropped on Gaza, every bullet fired into a crowd of civilians, every child killed while reaching for bread - all of it is made possible by Western complicity.
And that complicity extends beyond governments to institutions, media outlets, and individuals who choose silence in the face of mass murder. Who speak of ‘complexity’ when the moral choice is clear. Who worry more about being accused of antisemitism than about the actual genocide unfolding before their eyes.
But history will not forget. The children of Gaza who survive this genocide will remember who stood with them and who turned away. They will remember the governments that funded their oppressors and the media that justified their suffering. They will remember the universities that silenced their supporters and the politicians who called their deaths ‘regrettable but necessary.’
And they will remember those who spoke out. Who refused to be complicit. Who insisted that Palestinian lives matter as much as any other lives. Who understood that ‘Never Again’ means never again for anyone, anywhere.
The reckoning is coming. Not in some distant future, but now. In the choices we make today. In the words we speak and the silence we refuse to keep. In our willingness to name genocide when we see it and to act accordingly.
We can no longer pretend that we don't know what is happening. We can no longer claim that the evidence is unclear or the situation too complex to judge. The truth is in front of us, documented in real time, broadcast live to the world.
The only question that remains is what we will do with that truth.
Will we continue to look away? Will we keep making excuses? Will we allow the machinery of genocide to grind on while we debate the finer points of international law?
Or will we finally find the courage to say what needs to be said: that what is happening in Gaza is wrong, that it must stop, and that those who enable it must be held accountable?
The children queuing for food in Gaza are not asking for our pity or charity. They are asking for their lives. They are asking for justice. They are asking us to remember that they are human beings who deserve to live.
But we will say what it was: a genocide.
We should look at ourselves in the mirror to ask what has happened to us to so comfortably get to this point – where we watch a genocide unfold in real time, as hollow eyes stare back.
Until we are no longer comfortable for this to happen to anyone, anywhere, only then will ‘Never Again’ truly mean ‘never again’.
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