The numbers emerging from Gaza read like a nightmare. Israel has killed more than 300 Palestinians — human beings — in the last 48 hours.
In a world where algorithms curate our outrage and attention spans are measured in seconds, opposing mass slaughter is framed not as a moral imperative, but as a radical stance.
Speaking out against the killing of children, the flattening of homes, the starvation of entire populations—is now seen as divisive, controversial, even dangerous.
Why? Because genocide, when politically expedient or committed by allies, has been rebranded. It’s no longer called by its name. It’s “self-defense.” It’s “necessary evil.” It’s “precision warfare.”
According to UN agencies, some 1.9 million people – 90% of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents – have been driven from their homes by bombardment and invasion. Gaza’s Ministry of Health reports at least 52,928 Palestinians killed and 119,846 injured as of mid-May 2025 – and the Lancet puts the death toll at over 100,000.
Entire neighborhoods lie in ruins. In this unconscionable campaign, bodies fall at a rate no modern conflict has seen: Oxfam calculated roughly 250 Gazans killed every day, far outpacing the death rates of Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan or any other recent war. These are not faceless statistics but human beings – whole families obliterated in weeks, years of life extinguished in a heartbeat.
Children, Women, and Healthcare Under Fire
Gaza’s dead are overwhelmingly the most vulnerable. A Lancet study found that about 59% of victims are women, children or the elderly. UNICEF warns that in just the past two months over 950 children were killed by airstrikes and shelling. Bombardment has turned hospitals and schools into killing fields: WHO reports 516 attacks on health facilities and ambulances, killing 765 patients and medics. 94% of Gaza’s clinics are damaged or destroyed, with only 17 of 36 hospitals even partially functional.
As the WHO Director-General grimly noted, 12 months of war have brought “nothing but death, disease, destruction and displacement”. Today nine in ten Gazan children under five suffer serious infectious diseases, and 60,000 toddlers are acutely malnourished. Every day, mothers give birth among the rubble or in the cold, under siege without water or medicine. The suffering of Gaza’s families – mothers cradling lifeless children, whole schools wiped out – is beyond comprehension.
We are watching the language of humanity collapse under the weight of geopolitical convenience.
Today, the people who cry out for the sanctity of human life are silenced by those who claim neutrality while standing squarely on the side of power.
Siege, Starvation, and Infrastructure Collapse
As the war grinds on, Gaza has been sealed off almost completely. The UN warns that half a million people are now facing actual starvation, the entire territory is at “critical risk of famine” after 19 months of siege . Fuel shortages have paralyzed Gaza’s infrastructure: 85% of water and sanitation facilities are out of service, sewage floods the few makeshift camps, and cases of diarrhea and respiratory illness skyrocket. UN officials report that Israel is “deliberately imposing inhumane conditions” on Gaza’s civilians. Even trucks of food and medicine are blocked; in early May 2025, 69 out of 109 planned UN aid convoys were denied entry.
Every week there are new accounts of Palestinian in Gaza collapsing from hunger. Aid workers now speak of food as a weapon of war. UNRWA’s chief warned that “humanitarian aid including food is being used as a weapon of war”, calling the ongoing assault “massive atrocities… that could end up in genocide”. Half of Gaza teeters on the brink of famine; every passing day of siege brings the region closer to wholesale annihilation.
A Silenced Conscience: Narrative and History
And yet the world has largely grown quiet. In fact, condemning the slaughter of civilians is treated as antisocial, as if empathy were a form of extremism. We’ve reached a point where calling for a ceasefire is met with more skepticism than dropping bombs on refugee camps.
These awful truths are solemnly recorded by UN and NGO reports, but they rarely break into headlines. When Gaza’s president or UN envoys label it “genocide,” critics rush to smother the word and vilify its hearers. History makes the comparison stark. By the end of 2024, Gaza had lost at least 45,000 people – more Gazans killed in 15 months than in many whole campaigns elsewhere. In contrast, the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan cost roughly 40–50,000 Afghan civilian lives in total; Gaza matched and surpassed that toll in a few months.
Even the firestorms of World War II, with millions killed, played out over years and across continents – here, a tiny enclave has been leveled in months. At the UN Security Council, aid chief Tom Fletcher begged, “for those killed and those whose voices are silenced: what more evidence do you need… Will you act to prevent genocide?”. But asking the question is deemed extreme. To call for a ceasefire now is treated as political heresy.
We are gaslit into believing that to mourn Palestinian lives is to condone terrorism, while those who reduce Palestinian children in Gaza to “collateral damage” are promoted as “experts.” What does it say about us—about our collective moral compass—when the burden of proof is on the oppressed to prove their humanity, while the perpetrators of atrocity are granted the benefit of the doubt, again and again?
The most dangerous normalization isn’t the one we can see, it’s the one we’ve absorbed: where grief is tiered, and justice is doled out by the powerful only to those who resemble them. And in this twisted reality, those who refuse to look away, those who name the crime, those who choose conscience over comfort—they’re branded as radicals.
But maybe radical is just another word for fully awake — fully human.
If this is not genocide, what is? If speaking out is extreme, then silence is monstrous. The harrowing facts & figures etched by the UN and humanitarian agencies leave no room for doubt: Gaza today bears the scars of a deliberate campaign against civilians. Denying it only normalizes the barbarity. The time to stop this slaughter is long past overdue.
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