‘Peace deal’ or not, Gaza remains the holocaust of our time

Abdullah Ahmed Jihad al-Hasani, a baby boy, not yet one year old. Masah Mohammad Hamza al-Rifi, a baby girl, not yet one year old. Celine Ahmed Mufid al-Yaziji, a baby girl, not yet one year old… a baby… not yet one year old. 

Somebody’s whole world, gone in an instant.

In Amsterdam, as the first winds of autumn swept through the city, the names of 69,000 people killed in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza were read aloud, one after the next, day and night without pause, for five full days.

It is a staggering death toll, yet one that is vastly incomplete and already outdated by the time the final name was read.

Applying the calculation used by the Lancet medical journal in a 2024 article, a more accurate figure may be as high as half a million people, but it is likely higher. This would mean that the Israeli-US-European axis of genocide has killed about a quarter of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.

This is the holocaust of our time.

Ghosts of Gaza

Overnight, as I wrote this, Israel destroyed 17 homes, residential buildings and a mosque. By the time it is published, those trapped beneath the rubble have likely suffocated in a cloud of dust, succumbed to death from dehydration, or are slowly wasting away, willing death to come soon to release them from their agony.

Someday, the skeletal remains of the many thousands who died alone in the crevasses of collapsed buildings, wedged between immovable blocks of cement, may eventually be recovered.

If Israel continues to be granted impunity, the dead will be disappeared forever, erased from history along with their homeland

It is far more likely, though, if Israel continues to be granted impunity for its crimes, that they will be disappeared forever. Their bones will be crushed into Palestine’s blood-soaked earth or dumped in the Mediterranean Sea, leaving only their ghosts to seek revenge on the Zionist settlers who stole their homeland and occupied it.

The deaths of those whose bodies were obliterated beyond recognition have also not been recorded. Craters hollowed out by US bunker-buster bombs, dropped by US and European-manufactured fighter jets, have turned densely populated areas, once teeming with life, into mass graves of unidentified broken body parts.

Attacks on civil defence teams mean that many bodies, though identifiable when killed, are not recovered. These rotting corpses decay in the midday sun, scavenged by animals devouring limbs, organs and eyeballs, until nothing but bones, licked clean of their flesh, remain.

Gaza is hell on earth.

The list of Gaza’s known dead includes entire families – adults followed by teenagers, children and babies. All with matching surnames.

All gone.

Did anyone survive? Is there anyone left who remembers these families? Who will say their names aloud in their homeland? Will they only be read from afar by people who never knew them, but whose hearts break because they are gone?

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This is a war of extermination, and our governments are accomplices to it. For centuries, European colonial powers wiped out entire peoples. What is happening in Gaza is no different.

But what makes it so deeply disturbing is that it is not occurring out of sight, and we are not learning about it after the fact. No, Palestinians are documenting their own erasure in real time, and we are watching it live.

The political and corporate establishment has made a calculated decision, driven by western powers but with the complicity or tolerance of many Arab states, that the Palestinian people will be sacrificed in order to uphold an imperialist, white, Euro-colonialist world order.

A war remembered

As we recited name after name from a tent in the Netherlands, we wondered whether the people who bore these names in life were burnt alive in similar tents in al-Mawasi.

Images of smoking bodies were broadcast around the world as viewers watched in horror, though we were spared the unbearable stench of burning flesh, until these lives, like the flames that engulfed them, were eventually extinguished.

Were the 45 people burned alive in an Israeli air strike on Rafah among the names read aloud? Or were their smouldering remains too charred to be identified? Rafah was a red line. Now it is gone.

As names poured off the stacks of pages amassed on the podium, it was impossible not to wonder whose name matched which killing, as death bore down on death and Israel savagely destroyed all traces of Palestinian life from Gaza.

As I read the names, one image played over in my mind – a video of a bomb blast, the impact so fierce, so ferocious, that two people were catapulted hundreds of feet into the air.

Sometime last winter, I fixated on this 16-second video, unable to watch it through to the end but equally unable to stop trying. The video sequence was of a rooftop, a thunderous bang, a plume of smoke, bone-chilling screams and two bodies blown to the heavens before falling back to earth.

At what exact moment did they die? Was it when they were hurled upwards? Maybe it was when they landed? Did I read out their names? Who were they in life? Am I betraying their legacy by only recalling them in death?

Other videos too – images of screaming children, of a father’s severed head being carried by a wailing child desperately willing him back to life. Did I read out his name? Did the child survive? So tormented were his screams, would it be better if he did not?

What about the doctors picked off one by one as Israeli snipers lined up and took aim as though playing a video game? What about the hospitals blasted by Israeli tanks until no functioning health-care facility remained?

The lack of accountability for such blatant war crimes sends a chilling message that it is not only the Palestinians but also international law that will be erased in Gaza.

In November 2023, as al-Shifa Hospital came under siege, roughly 15km away, European leaders posed for photo-ops in Kibbutz Be’eri, accompanied by those giving the orders for Gaza’s destruction.

Images would later emerge of mass graves containing hundreds of bodies crushed under the weight of bulldozers, atrocities that likely occurred as European leaders were being wined and dined by the perpetrators only a short distance away, though a world apart.

Weeks later, newborn babies, who scarcely knew the tenderness of human touch, would die alone in incubators as hospitals were forcibly evacuated and the fuel that powered them ran out.

No justice, no peace

Listed among Gaza’s dead was Saeed Darwish al-Kilanei, an 84-year-old man born in a land that was free, a Palestine that existed long before the Zionist entity colonised it.

Surely the only solution is an immediate end to the genocide and ultimately the total dismantling of the Zionist colony

Did Saeed walk the fertile lands of Beit Lahia or Beit Hanoun as a child, harvesting olives in late autumn and feasting on hummus and flat bread? Did he fish in the abundant waters of the Mediterranean and fill his belly by its shores as the sun set? Did he dance dabka and fall in love under a night sky lit not by bombs and drone fire, but by the light of a thousand stars?

In his final years, Saeed witnessed more than 85,000 tonnes of bombs dropped on his homeland – surpassing the tonnage used in World War Two – before he and other elders who were born in a free Palestine and survived the 1948 Nakba were finally killed by the Zionist regime.

What would they say of the regurgitation of the already failed “two-state solution” at the UN General Assembly, or of President Trump’s “peace plan” that excludes Palestinians from Gaza, or of states recognising Palestinian statehood while continuing to arm and back the entity that is erasing it?

These so-called “solutions” are so far removed from what is needed that by the time we get to where we need to be, there will be no Palestinians left in Palestine.

Surely the only solution is an immediate end to the genocide, justice for those who survived it and ultimately the total dismantling of the Zionist colony, with the expulsion of settlers from lands they stole back to Europe, the US and elsewhere.

For the media establishment, which normalised and ignored the daily massacres of Palestinians, it essentially already has. In the wake of Trump’s “peace plan“, renewed media attention has focused on the release of Israeli captives and not the ongoing famine or the myriad ways that Palestinians will continue to die as a result of Israel’s genocide, even if the bombs have stopped for now.

Meanwhile, for many politicians, Gaza is an irritation and starving Palestinians an eyesore. When will Israel “finish the job” so they can get on with attending gala dinners and banquets without the inconvenience of Palestine activists showing up and reminding them of their complicity in genocide?

Entirely absent from the “peace plan” is any notion of justice or accountability for the industrial-scale killing, which is hardly surprising considering the plan was drawn up by those who carried it out.

Without justice, there will be no peace.

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote: “We – who are capable of remembrance – are capable of liberation.” 

So, despite the futility, the rage and the despair of knowing that, like so many actions over the past two years, remembering Gaza’s dead as more continue to be slaughtered will not stop the holocaust nor bring justice for it, we persist in the hope that someday the cumulative effect of our collective efforts just might.

It has to. For as long as Palestinians get up each morning and face the unimaginable each day in Gaza, we have a duty to ensure that this story does not end with their erasure, but with their liberation.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.