Gaza: Two Years Since October 7, and the World Still Looks Away
It has been two years since October 7, 2023. That day was not the start of anything. It was a brutal flashpoint in a much longer story of dispossession, siege and violence. For Palestinians, the trauma stretches back decades. For the rest of the world, October 7 was a moment people briefly noticed, then decided they preferred not to look anymore.
I am not from Gaza. I do not live under bombardment. But I watch the footage, I read the reports, and I feel something in my chest break every single time. Neighborhoods have been reduced to dust. Families have been buried in cars and under rubble. Children grow up with hunger as their day and fear as their night. These are human beings. They are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and small children who do not deserve this.
When hospitals are bombed and people die in operating rooms, when ambulances are shelled and doctors are killed at work, what do you call that if not a crime? When journalists are killed again and again while doing the only work that can show the world what is happening, how can anyone still ask for proof as if this is a debate between opinions? The reporting is there. The footage is there. The bodies are there.
Some human rights experts and United Nations officials have used the word genocide. Leading genocide scholars have said the facts meet the legal definition. Countries like South Africa have brought cases at the International Court of Justice and accused Israel of genocide. That is not language to be bandied about lightly. It is the most serious accusation a state can face. And yet the question is not only whether a legal body will rule on that. The question is simpler and uglier: when people in power and citizens with means know and still do little, what does that make us?
This is ethnic cleansing. Call it what it is. The most powerful countries in the world have resources and influence that could change things. Instead they talk. They vote abstentions. They offer hollow statements about complexity. They keep sending weapons, or they keep quiet while weapons are sent. People with money who could raise their voices for those dying choose instead the comfort of silence. If you spend your life living inside a system that profits from or enables this, and you do not use your platform, you are complicit.
You cannot hide behind arguments about politics or security while babies starve. You cannot say you are against violence and then shrug when a flotilla carrying aid is intercepted or attacked. You cannot claim your hands are clean when the systems you depend on keep children from receiving food and medicine. Boycott campaigns, petitions, cheap moral gestures will not repair the blood on hands that could have done more. Convenience does not absolve conscience.
Mahmoud Issa/Reuters
There are millions of children in Gaza. A huge percentage of the population are kids. What do you expect them to grow into after watching everything they love bombed to rubble? You think you can label them terrorists for the trauma they inherit, while you keep arming the violence that created that trauma? You cannot call others terrorists while your policies and alliances teach terror as a daily lesson.
There are names that will not leave me. Hind Rajab, a child who begged for help on the phone as her family’s car was struck. Doctors who went to work to save lives and never came home. Journalists who tried to tell the world what was happening and were killed for it. Hospitals shelled while patients lay inside. A flotilla of civilians bringing aid intercepted on the sea. These are not faceless statistics. They are the proof that this is happening, and yet many ask for more proof as if the sight of a child’s body is not evidence enough.
If you look away now, history will remember you. The institutions that should protect civilians have faltered. The United Nations has had officials and experts use the language of genocide and warned states to act. Many human rights organizations have documented clear patterns of mass killing, of starvation used as a weapon, of collective punishment. Yet governments that could have done something in those early hours and days did not. They did not halt the flow of arms, they did not demand corridors of safe passage that were kept open, and they did not use their leverage to make the difference that sovereignty alone should have enabled.
The silence of the powerful is a moral crime. The silence of ordinary people is also a crime of omission. If hell exists, we will all be there together for staying quiet while children died. That is not hyperbole. It is simple logic. If you choose your convenience over another human being’s life, you have chosen. If your silence shields your comfort, then your comfort is purchased with the blood of others.
People will try to argue context, to demand balance, to smear compassion as taking a side. But this is not about taking sides in some abstract geopolitical game. This is about feeding people, fixing hospitals, treating the wounded. This is about honoring basic human life. If you need to protect your identity by dehumanizing others, by painting them as the problem, then that is a reflection of who you are far more than who they are.
I am done with polite distance. I am done with the language of complexity that masks obvious cruelty. Two years on from October 7, Gaza is still under siege. The graves are still fresh. The media cycles move on, the red carpets roll out, elections come and go, and the bombing continues. If that does not rattle your bones, if that does not force you to ask yourself who you are when you choose silence, then you have already lost a piece of what makes you human.
This is not an abstract plea. This is a call to the heart. Look at the faces. Read the names. Remember Hind Rajab. Remember the doctors and the journalists and the mothers who dug graves for their children. If you still believe there are reasons to stay silent, then you must interrogate what you have become.
Do not let another year pass with silence. Speak, write, protest, demand. Like Mehdi Hassan said, “there is no solid ground on the wrong side of history.”
