This morning when I woke up the power was off, a common occurrence in South Africa, which has frequent blackouts. It made me think of the people of Gaza, without power. My electricity however soon returned and I made myself coffee and breakfast. In Gaza it won’t be coming back. My cupboards have food, water flows from my taps. My home is intact. I am enormously privileged in comparison.
Israel is collectively punishing every single person in Gaza. That is a war crime. Clear war crimes are being committed every day.
Without power, nobody can study, students cannot learn. What of the student who wants to be an engineer, a doctor, a therapist? How can they study when there is no electricity, when the universities have been bombed? All of them. Nobody can go to school. The schools have become refugee camps, which are sometimes attacked, shamefully. The aspirations of every single child and young person are being destroyed before our eyes.
Children are being tortured by the continuous attack on their livelihood.
Women have to raise children, breastfeed without electricity, water or enough food. How can they bathe their children? How can they when bombs and shells are continuously exploding? Constant disruptions to every day life punctuate their existence.
Fathers and brothers search the ruins for their family members.
Beautiful, priceless mosques have been destroyed. Apartment buildings have been obliterated in shocking ways. Blown into craters by huge 1-ton bombs. These weapons are entirely unsuitable for use in a densely populated area.
All the hospitals have been systematically attacked and are no longer functioning in the entirety of northern Gaza. The health system has been completely destroyed. People with severe burns and injuries cannot be treated. Babies languish without proper care.
Half the homes have been destroyed. The entire northern Gaza, the most populous part had to flee while unprecedented destruction from the air has destroyed their neighbourhoods.
This is far worse than anything which Israel has gone through. It’s a systematic, cold blooded, brutal and unrelenting destruction of everyday life. We cannot imagine what these poor people are experiencing. It is a total nightmare.
Have these people not been tortured enough? Have they not experienced enough epic pain and suffering? Why must it continue day after day? Who shall rebuild their homes, clear the toxic rubble?
What is the endgame here? What is the plan with Gaza? Are we going to sit back and allow this to take place before our eyes. It’s sickening what I have witnessed day in and day out.
Words fail me. It needs to end now. But it seems like Israel will not relent until mass death takes place. It’s a sick degenerate society that does this, and same to the people who condone this and allow it to happen.
Don’t stop protesting. Get down there now to the Israeli embassy and the US embassy and tell them that this is completely unacceptable. The Israelis are drunk on vengeance without end. It is the duty of every decent person to call out this unrestrained madness.
Bombs are not the solution to Israel’s security woes. Attacking and brutalising people is not the way to greater security for Israelis. On the contrary what Israel is doing is threatening a potential catastrophe upon itself, it could even lead to its ultimate destruction.
The word “genocide” is used a lot these days, for example to describe the situation of Gaza. It seems to have acquired a new meaning. No longer does it mean the literal wiping out of entire peoples like what happened to Jews in WW2 or Native Americans. Now it is used to describe what Israel is doing to Gaza.
I think this new interpretation of genocide reflects a greater sensitivity by people globally. The wholesale destruction at the end of World War 2 of entire cities for example would, properly, be called genocidal today. This new redefinition of “genocide” may we are becoming more civilised and are slowly facing up to the crimes of the west. Therefore even though it may be technically incorrect, if you’re a stickler for definitions, I think may be an appropriate term to convey the horrors of war on a civilian population.
This is the case today with Gaza, also South Sudan (Sudan) and Congo – lest we forget that wars are raging in other places.
Look at what man can do to our fellow man. Mankind must renounce war or face extinction.