Writing for Al Jazeera, commentator Belen Fernandez says that it is “hardly a stretch to argue that taking the Palestinians of Gaza off the online grid is a modern twist on the age-old phenomenon of forced disappearances, at least in terms of the lack of accountability for victims as well as the psychological effects on their families.” Ms Fernandez is correct in estimating that this is precisely what the Israeli state is trying to do: literally erase and disappear Palestine and Palestinians off the world map. Tuesday’s attack on the Jabalia refugee camp could not be a better example of just how dehumanized the Palestinian is: killed, maimed, buried under rubble, starved – as the world not only looks on but also tries to block ceasefire options. Not content with the 50 people killed in Tuesday’s Jabalia attack, Israel attacked the camp again on Wednesday despite growing condemnation from countries and organizations around the world.
As fears of intense dehydration grow, the UN has had to call the Gaza Strip ‘a graveyard for thousands of children’. A more devastating picture is drawn by Save the Children which has said that more children have now been killed in Gaza in the last three weeks than the total number of children killed in conflicts around the world in every year since 2019. And yet the world’s superpowers led by the US have doubled down on their support for what is essentially a genocide in full public display. There is now a very stark divide between the cheerleaders of this terror-inducing ethnic cleansing and those countries that are standing by a principled humanitarian approach. As Bolivia cut diplomatic ties with Israel, Colombia, Chile and Jordan recalled their ambassadors from Israel while Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei has asked Muslim states to cease oil and food exports to Israel. Protests in the West and on the Arab Street show no signs of dying down, thanks to a sustained support by the Palestinian diaspora and conscientious voices in the West like the Jewish Voice for Peace. Encouragingly, there has also been a spate of resignations from within governments and organizations. The latest resignation was by the director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Craig Mokhiber, whose letter of resignation has gone viral. Mokhiber has rightly called out the UN for failing to address this “textbook case of genocide” in Gaza.
All the while, many in the West have been under extreme pressure to either stay silent or become Team Israel during the ongoing spate of brutalities and massacres being unleashed by the Zionist state. This includes Western media, which has managed to spectacularly fail this litmus test of journalism, each unverified and fake news shared by a Western journalist being effectively and politely checked by Palestinian groups and supporters. For anyone even vaguely interested in how journalism can be a vehicle for truth but also for disinformation, the Israel- Palestine situation as it currently stands is a good lesson in how powerful social media can be in the face of traditional centres of power that fail to uphold the basics of journalistic integrity. As Gaza prepares for the 27th day of assault by Israel, there have been growing fears that Israel’s end goal is mass expulsion of whatever remains of the Palestinians once it stops killing them. With these fears are also increasingly loud questions about who all is to blame for this Second Nakba and the more than 3500 Palestinian children who have been killed as the world debated the semantics of a genocide.