IT has been a little over 200 days since Israel unleashed its monstrous war of annihilation in the Gaza Strip last October. In these six months, and counting, the Palestinian people have suffered at the hands of the Israeli war machine the worst that humanity is capable of. Their children have been slaughtered, their homes reduced to rubble, while they have been forcibly starved by a cruel adversary and its heartless, and incredibly powerful, international backers. While the governments of most Muslim states have expressed their ‘sincere’ regrets as the butchery continues, others with a conscience, such as South Africa and Nicaragua, have moved international fora to help end this genocidal violence. But Israel respects no law. The latest proof of that is the discovery of mass graves — containing hundreds of bodies — at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis. The discovery was made after the Israeli military withdrew from the medical facility. Clearly, the Israelis have studied what the Nazis did to their forebears with great precision, and are applying these ‘lessons’ to the defenceless Palestinians.

Yet there is a silver lining to the ongoing nightmare in the shape of the growing protest movement shaking campuses across the Global North. While the movement began in the US, protests are also taking place in Europe and Australia. They indicate that young people, students, faculty members and civil society in these states have had enough of the complicity of their governments in Israel’s genocidal campaign. While the sight of tiny corpses of Palestinian children murdered by Israel are not enough to move Western ‘statesmen’ to end their blanket support for Tel Aviv, perhaps they may moderate their policies if a significant percentage of Western voters punish them at the ballot box. Unless the international community musters the courage to say that 34,000 Palestinian deaths are simply unacceptable, Gazans will continue to endure this living hell.

Published in Dawn, April 28th, 2024