How many more atrocities must Gaza endure?

On 5 April, Hind Al-Khoudary, a Palestinian journalist based in the Gaza Strip who has reported for Al Jazeera, the Anadolu Agency, and others, asked on Instagram, "How many crimes do you want us to document?" 

She has a point. How much more evidence is needed? How much more "documentation" of Israel violating international law and committing war crimes for 18 months now is necessary to turn the tide?  

The crimes are so incredibly violent that, perhaps, if it were not for Hind, Bisan Owda, and Hossam Shabat (killed on 24 March by an Israeli airstrike) and hundreds of others, the world at large may not have believed the atrocities that soak Gaza's soil. 

One of the latest (a tall order to keep track of given Israel's relentless attacks in Gaza and the West Bank) is Israel's killing of 15 Gaza medics on 23 March. 

The IDF then went on to bury the 15 bodies and the ambulances. 

Later discovered by an aid team, a phone recording of a paramedic, Refat Radwan, was uncovered — it was his last prayer when he came under fire, part of the convoy of Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulances. 

"A mistake," Israel admitted, says BBC, after the video footage emerged contradicting their original narrative that the convoy (including a UN car and a fire truck from Gaza's Civil Defence) was moving suspiciously in the dark without authorisation and, of course, Hamas members were allegedly part of it. 

The convoy was responding to a call in Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip. Now, as drone footage would show, it is a decimated city, all but erased from the face of the earth. And Israel's track record of admitting to "mistakes" has also grown into a long list since 7 October 2023. 

While killings and destruction continue to plague Palestinians in the Gaza conclave (a population of roughly 2 million people), voices who speak up against Israel and the US are being curtailed. 

In the United States, a second Trump administration breathed new life into cracking down on pro-Palestinian voices. Conveniently, conflating support for the Palestinian cause — this can even mean as uncomplicated as calling for a ceasefire — as "terrorism". 

Students and professors are being reprimanded — detained, visas revoked, doxxed, harassed, defunded, self-deported, and what have you. Even institutions, including Ivy League ones, which "failed" to curb "anti-semitism" — again, this can be deduced as protests calling to divest from Israeli ties — have seen fund cuts. 

Recently, Berlin issued deportation orders for four EU and US citizens over their participation in pro-Palestine protests. 

Around the same time, Hungary withdrew from the International Criminal Court to welcome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity. This, the Prime Minister of Israel's office sees as "a battle against the ICC," and was part of the agenda for Netyanhu's latest Washington visit, according to the office's 6 April post on X. 

Palestinians, those in Gaza, in the West Bank and the diaspora, never asked for our pity. They asked for condemnation for Israel's crimes; they asked for actions to prevent Israel from committing crimes against their people — and that barely makes it to the discourse. Perhaps the least we can do is take account of our complicity, even if it were in misunderstanding the Palestinian struggle.

The international courts, the UN, Amnesty International, along with nearly all international humanitarian organisations, the Pope, foreign doctors (several of whom went back to North America and the UK to testify about witnessing the targeting of children by IDF with "bullets shot in the head") all spoke against Israel's crimes and genocide of the Palestinian people. What does this tell us, if not of Israel's crimes and its allies' complicity? 

The "live-streamed" genocide of the Palestinians continues to show up on your phone screens despite substantial "shadow bans" across social media platforms. What does this tell us, if not of the momentum of the global solidarity movement for the Palestinians? 

Israel has killed "more than 50,000" Palestinians since 7 October 2023, when a Hamas terrorist attack killed 1,195 Israelis — that is a disproportionate response by roughly 40 times. 

The ruthless collective punishment campaigns engineered by Israel and financed by the US and allies started as a threat to Western values as custodians of "international law". But that mirage of "democracy" has been shot, bombed and decapitated to death by now. 

When Israel broke the second ceasefire (lasting about two months) around 17-18 March with a surprise attack on the Gaza Strip and continued on its path of death and destruction, it painted a new picture of geopolitical alliances, the military industry and Trump's "riviera" plans in the Middle East.  

While many of us now feel compelled to perhaps mourn the last vestiges of Palestinians getting killed at the backdrop of US campuses "growing quiet" on pro-Palestinian protests, maybe it is best to understand our complicity in it too. 

The mainstream media's complicity has been thoroughly documented in this "Gaza War" (a quick search can lead to BBC and NYT's examples of complicity) and, for the most part, that model (story angles to words used) is followed by national outlets elsewhere. 

That being said, it is interesting to come across columns now which bemoan the tragedy that has befallen the Palestinians. 

In a Bloomberg column, Max Hastings wrote how he "feels pity" for the Palestinians, prescribing them as "history's losers" and stating that if he were Palestinian, he would have wanted to move elsewhere. Of course, all this is backed by anecdotal support of the cause where he attended a pro-Palestine event in London and even donated to buy tents. 

He believes Palestine is well on its way to living through a global diaspora. Hastings also bemoaned Trump's era and how he might not be welcomed in the US given his trail of "support." In this column, and he is not alone, Hastings has already written off the Palestinians, comparing them to Native Americans and how Palestinians failed to produce any leader of substance. 

But Palestinians, those in Gaza, in the West Bank and the diaspora, never asked for our pity. They asked for condemnation for Israel's crimes; they asked for actions to prevent Israel from committing crimes against their people — and that barely makes it to the discourse.

Perhaps the least we can do is take account of our complicity, even if it were in misunderstanding the Palestinian struggle. Perhaps Ghassan Kanafani was right in saying, "That is [a] kind of a conversation between the sword and the neck", on not negotiating with Israel in 1970.