After months of genocide, a ceasefire – even the one that allowed them to continue to deprive the Palestinians to Gaza from their most fundamental rights to food, water, medical care, education and freedom of movement – proved to be too much for Israeli forces. They therefore decided to continue their war against Gaza.
Israel has casually abandoned the cease-fire agreement and restarted his mortal war which had already destroyed Gaza and killed tens of thousands, because he knew that the global community would do nothing to stop him. After all, the world has been largely indifferent to the many other violations and massacres of the Palestinians of Israel since 1948. Israel has violated international law without any significant consequences since its creation.
Israel did not break this last cease-fire agreement because he thought that the Palestinian part had raped her first. He also did not break the agreement to try to recover his remaining prisoners (after all, it was going to happen if he joined the agreement).
Israel has broken the ceasefire to prevent the reconstruction of Gaza. He restarted the war to prevent the Palestinians from trying to rebuild even a small part of their destroyed homeland – to ensure that no Palestinian in Gaza has hope for the future.
The end of the temporary ceasefire marked the start of another period of travel, loss and fear for people who have long suffered from Gaza. The first night of the renewed war, Israel has bombed all parts of the Gaza Strip just before dawn. More than 400 civilians, who prepared Sahoor food in their cold tents when the bombs started to rain on them, lost their lives in the most horrible way and transmitted to another world where they would be free from the abuse and the cruelty of Israel. Many deaths were children, who died hungry, frightened, cold. The massacre, undoubtedly engaged with the total approval of the Americans, also injured hundreds of others, filling the rare hospitals in Gaza.
Since that night, bombs, threats, murder have not stopped.
In the middle of the renewed genocide, a persistent sound echoes – hollow slogans, devoid of all humanity, are repeated by people of the world who want to appease their consciousness towards Gaza. The tragedy and suffering of exhausted people from Gaza have been reduced in their mouths and their minds to an empty celebration of their “legendary constancy”. The inhabitants of Gaza are stripped of their humanity and portrayed as heroes who are crying or the tire.
Slogans echoing around the world do nothing to stop suffering in Gaza. On the contrary, they make more difficult for the Palestinians to express themselves – express their fear, their love and their dreams of a worthy life free of war and loss, without waking up to the sound of missiles. The world expects nothing from them to die in silence as a hero.
After Israel restarted his genocide, governments and institutions did nothing to feed a hungry child or protect a family from the occupation missiles. They only published empty statements – they “condemned” and they “denounced”. But did nothing that would make a difference.
The Palestinians knew that the world’s response would not go beyond words, and that these words – as true – would do nothing. Since the very beginning of their oppression, they have repeatedly seen how these declarations, convictions, reports on human rights and even court decisions do nothing to mitigate their suffering. To date, they know that the world would not take any real measure to help them. They know that the international community is deaf even to the sound of its own conscience with regard to Palestine.
For years, we, Palestinians, we have fought not only for our survival, but to recover our humanity in the eyes of the world. We have talked about protests, art, cinema and journalism – desperate to unravel the world indifference which reduces us to new segments and statistics on media platforms.
Initiatives like we are not figures – of which I have been – were created in response to this dehumanization. We have told our stories to remind the world that we are not only coming information or injury reports, but human beings with names, stories, emotions and, above all, dreams.
We wrote on the friends we lost, our houses that have been reduced into rubble, the injustice inflicted on our people and our lives which have been forever modified by the occupation and the abuses of Israel – hoping that by sharing our truths, we could force the world to see.
But despite all that, the Palestinians remain figures. When a family is wiped out in an air strike, the big titles count the dead, but they do not name them. They do not say who they were – the child who liked to play football with his friends, the teenager who dreamed of making a high GPA makes his family proud, the mother who kept her children nearby in the last moments.
And yet, when Israel claims to have targeted a “highly publicized activist”, the attention of the world moves instantly – not to the dozens of innocent civilians killed in the strike, but to the so -called success or the failure of the assassination. The world cries with abstraction, detached from lost lives. And therefore, the murder continues.
Even after months of documented war crimes, after initiatives like we are not figures, after all the conviction and the denunciation, there are still hungry children in Gaza who cannot sleep because of the pain of the empty stomach and the fear of the bombs that fall near their makeshift tent.
This means that our world has failed. That all the institutions that we have built to protect justice have fallen and that all of our constitutions have lost their meaning. This means that there is no international law or human rights. This means that all our “good” armies, supposedly united to protect the innocent, are helpless.
All the protections of the world, the safety nets, the promises and the guarantees seem to have collapsed under the weight of the colonial impunity of Israel.
But why? What are the nations afraid of? American weapons? Israel’s anger?
Why do they sacrifice all this to welcome Israel’s desire for destruction and domination?
I do not understand why the world asks the children of Gaza to be courageous in the face of death, patient in the face of loss and resilient in the face of hunger. Why had a hungry child had to show more strength than leaders of what is called “free world”?
Silence is not only complicity; It is consent. And so, the bombs continue to fall, and the Palestinians remain what the world has allowed them to become: figures. Death continues to visit their houses, and somewhere under the rubble, a child wonders what sin they have undertaken to be born in this world.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.