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The World Has Never Cared About Gaza’s Suffering [1]
['Ahmed Nehad', 'Kali Holloway', 'Mara Marques Cavallaro', 'Hanno Hauenstein', 'Ethan Iverson', 'Bharati Mahajan', 'Jeet Heer', 'Andrea Arroyo', 'Mohammed R. Mhawish', 'Dave Zirin']
Date: 2023-10-27 20:09:11+00:00
World / The World Has Never Cared About Gaza’s Suffering Gaza is being obliterated, and no global power is doing anything to stop it.
A woman walks amid the rubble of residential buildings destroyed by Israeli air strikes in the al-Zahra neighborhood of the Gaza Strip on October 19, 2023. (Mustafa Hassona / Anadolu via Getty Images)
On October 6, blood, pain, and suffering in Palestine were of no interest to the world. They were too mundane, too “normal” to be acknowledged. Never mind that “normal” meant a Gaza that had been smothered by a 17-year Israeli blockade and a 56-year occupation. Never mind that it meant a Gaza where Israeli military invasions had become almost routine; with civilians laid to rest after every attack, and with entire neighborhoods leveled—tens of thousands of homes, mosques, churches, hospitals, cultural centers, and educational institutions crumbling to rubble every couple of years.
In Gaza, “normal” was the meager four to 12 hours of electricity a day. Hospitals had become destinations of last resort because, in this “normal,” there were just 1.4 beds for every thousand residents.
It was “normal” for families to starve, for essential medicines to run out, for graduates to stare at bleak futures, and for the vast majority to survive on mere aid.
Yet, this “normal”’ had long been met with a deafening global silence. This “normal” went unnoticed, a mere backdrop to world politics, seldom worth more than a passing remark.
Until recently. Until October 7. When Israeli civilians were killed, the world sat upright. They took note, they discussed, they condemned. They saw the horror of blood spilled in historic Palestine. Conversations about Palestine became mainstream only when the blood took on a different hue.
The very same world that had remained nonchalant about the everyday horrors in Gaza and in all of occupied Palestine was now interested and invested.
Twenty days on, the Gaza Strip has borne the brunt of over 12,000 tons of explosives. This translates to an average of 33 tons of explosives for every square kilometre of Gaza since October 7.
Israel has slaughtered around 6,000 Palestinians, including more than 2,300 children, with over 1,500 people still under the rubble. It has injured more than 16,000 children and women and men left to teeter on the edge of life, with almost no hospitals left to seek treatment, and almost no treatments available if they do manage to get to a hospital.
Israeli bombs have demolished residential blocks, including my own. My home, like so many thousands of others, stands no more. Around 1.4 million Gazans have been displaced. Gaza is being obliterated, and no global power is doing anything to stop it.
For the past 20 days, the world has appeared fixated on one haunting question. It has seemingly resolved that the answer is to obliterate Gaza from the map. But one question lingers globally: How do we do it? How do we annihilate Gaza?
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