After months of genocide, a ceasefire – even one that allowed them to continue depriving Palestinians in Gaza of their most basic rights to food, water, medical care, education and freedom of movement – proved too much for the Israeli forces. So they decided to continue their war on Gaza.
Israel casually abandoned the ceasefire agreement and restarted its deadly war that had already destroyed Gaza and killed tens of thousands, because it knew the global community would not do anything to stop it. After all, the world has been largely indifferent to Israel’s many other ceasefire violations and massacres of Palestinians since 1948. Israel has been violating international law without any meaningful consequences since its very inception.
Israel did not break this latest ceasefire agreement because it believed the Palestinian side violated it first. It did not break the agreement to try and retrieve its remaining prisoners either (this, after all, was going to happen if it adhered to the agreement).
Israel broke the ceasefire to prevent the reconstruction of Gaza. It restarted the war to stop Palestinians from attempting to rebuild even a small part of their destroyed homeland – to make sure no Palestinian in Gaza has any hope for the future.
The end of the temporary ceasefire marked the beginning of yet another period of displacement, loss and fear for the long-suffering people of Gaza. On the first night of the renewed war, Israel bombed all parts of the Gaza Strip just before dawn. More than 400 civilians, who were preparing food for Sahoor in their cold tents when the bombs began raining on them, lost their lives in the most horrific ways and passed on to another world where they would be free of Israel’s abuse and cruelty. Many of the dead were children, who died hungry, scared, cold. The massacre, undoubtedly committed with full approval from the Americans, also wounded hundreds of others, filling up Gaza’s few remaining hospitals.
Since that night, the bombs, the threats, the killing did not stop.
Amid the renewed genocide, a persistent sound echoes – hollow slogans, devoid of any humanity, are being repeated by people around the world who want to soothe their conscience towards Gaza. The tragedy and the suffering of Gaza’s exhausted people have been reduced in their mouths and minds to an empty celebration of their “legendary steadfastness”. People of Gaza are being stripped of their humanity and portrayed as heroes who neither grieve nor tire.
The slogans echoing across the world are doing nothing to stop the suffering in Gaza. On the contrary, they are making it harder for Palestinians to express themselves – to voice their fear, their love, and their dreams of a dignified life free from war and loss, free from waking up to the sound of missiles. The world expects nothing of them but to die in silence as heroes.
After Israel restarted its genocide, governments and institutions have done nothing to feed a hungry child or protect a family from the occupation’s missiles. They only issued empty statements – they “condemned” and they “denounced”. But did nothing that would make a difference.
Palestinians knew the world’s response would not go beyond words, and that these words – however true – would not achieve anything. Since the very beginning of their oppression, they have seen over and over again how such statements, condemnations, human rights reports, and even court rulings do nothing to ease their suffering. By now, they know well the world would not take any real action to help them. They know the international community is deaf even to the sound of its own conscience when it comes to Palestine.
For years, we Palestinians have fought not only for our survival but to reclaim our humanity in the eyes of the world. We have spoken up through protests, art, cinema, and journalism – desperate to break through the global indifference that reduces us to news segments and statistics on media platforms.
Initiatives like We Are Not Numbers – which I have been part of – were created as a response to this dehumanisation. We have told our stories to remind the world that we are not just breaking news items or casualty reports, but human beings with names, histories, emotions, and most importantly, dreams.
We have written about the friends we have lost, our homes that have been reduced to rubble, the injustice inflicted upon our people, and our lives that have been forever altered by Israel’s occupation and abuse – hoping that, by sharing our truths, we could force the world to see us.
But despite all this, Palestinians remain numbers. When a family is wiped out in an air strike, the headlines count the dead, but they do not name them. They do not say who they were – the child who loved to play football with his friends, the teenager who dreamed of getting a high GPA to make his family proud, the mother who held her children close in the final moments.
And yet, when Israel claims to have targeted a “high-profile militant” the world’s attention instantly shifts – not to the dozens of innocent civilians killed in the strike, but to the so-called success or failure of the assassination. The world mourns in abstraction, detached from the lives lost. And so, the killing continues.
Even after months of documented war crimes, after initiatives like We Are Not Numbers, after all the condemnation and denunciation, there are still hungry children in Gaza who cannot sleep because of the pain of an empty stomach and the fear of bombs falling near their makeshift tent.
This means that our world has failed. That all the institutions we built to protect justice have fallen, and all our constitutions have lost their meaning. It means there is no international law or human rights. It means all our “good” armies, supposedly put together to protect the innocent, are powerless.
All the world’s protections, safety nets, promises and guarantees appear to have collapsed under the weight of Israel’s colonial impunity.
But why? What exactly are the nations afraid of? America’s weapons? Israel’s wrath?
Why are they sacrificing all this to accommodate Israel’s desire for destruction and domination?
I do not understand why the world asks Gaza’s children to be brave in the face of death, patient in the face of loss, and resilient in the face of hunger. Why should a starving child be expected to show more strength than the leaders of what is called the “free world”?
Silence is not just complicity; it is consent. And so, the bombs keep falling, and the Palestinians remain what the world has allowed them to become: numbers. Death continues to visit their homes, and somewhere under the rubble, a child wonders what sin they committed to be born into this world.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/3/26/israels-genocide-continues-and-we-remain-numbers?traffic_source=rss
