We Deserve A Better Death

Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian Poet

We deserve a better death.

Our bodies are disfigured and twisted,

Embroidered with bullets and shrapnel.

Our names are pronounced incorrectly

On the radio and TV.

Our photos, plastered onto our gravestones disappear,

Covered in the feces of birds and reptiles.

No one waters the trees that give shade to our graves.

The blazing sun has overwhelmed our rotting bodies

On October 24, children stranded on the streets after consecutive days of attacks rested on broken chunks of cement, thinking they had seen the last of it. The sky had not been calm for some time, and an eerie suspicion lingered. Moments later, it was confirmed as the sky lit ablaze. The children rushed to their feet. For a moment, it looked like fireworks, but fear still loomed in their minds. The smiles across their faces turned to shock as airstrikes flew across the Gaza Strip faster than they could move. One would assume their survival instincts were more finely tuned, having lived their entire lives under siege. Timing is essential to their survival, but each time they were ambushed, they were momentarily stunned until reality forced them to move. Again, they ran to live another day—until they could no longer. The children sought refuge behind broken walls and rubble, while some were utterly immobilized, bowing down before the attack and instructing others to cover their eyes. In moments, the sky filled with dense gray smoke from all directions as the pace of rocket fire intensified. Soon enough, airstrikes indiscriminately dug their graves, wiping out entire families. Those under siege had a collective sensation of disappearing entirely—as if they were consumed by the wind, leaving behind a sea of bodies. Over 700 people, mostly women and children, were killed.

The same day, Qatar’s ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani, addressed the Gaza onslaught in an annual speech to open the Gulf Arab state’s advisory Shura council. He urged the international community not to grant Israel “unrestricted authorization to kill,” describing the intense bombing of the Gaza Strip, which killed over 5,000 civilians, as “barbaric.” Sheikh Tamim, who hosts an office of Hamas and has acted as an intermediary in hostage negotiations, said the bombing “is a dangerous escalation and exceeds all limits. We refuse attacks on civilians from any party, regardless of their nationality, and we refuse to act as if the lives of Palestinian children do not count, as if they have no faces or names.”

Sheikh Tamim called for “a serious regional and international stance against this dangerous escalation that we are witnessing, which threatens the security of the region and the world.”

Gaza is a 25-mile strip of land populated by over 2.2 million Palestinians, densely packed into an area of about 365 square kilometers. It is where the Israeli government has trapped Palestinians under a brutal and illegal siege for 16 years, turning Gaza into the world’s largest open-air prison under violent military rule for over 56 years. According to Al Jazeera, Israel’s land, air, and sea blockade has trapped more than two million people inside the Gaza Strip since 2007. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to turn Gaza into a “deserted island” and warned its residents to “leave now.”

Following the deadly Hamas attack across southern Israel on October 7 during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, Israel began bombing Gaza indiscriminately in retaliation, targeting hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, marketplaces, refugee camps, family homes, and more, while completely cutting off water, food, medicines, and electricity. “We are at war,” Netanyahu declared. As of October 23, the death toll of Palestinians has risen to 5,087, with women and children making up more than 62% of the fatalities, and over 15,273 injured. More than 1,000 bodies remain trapped beneath the rubble. As of October 7, Israel ordered an immediate cutoff of the country’s water supply to the Gaza Strip.

By October 13, the Israeli military ordered over a million civilians living in northern Gaza to evacuate within 24 hours. According to Reuters, Israeli forces have massed at the border, with tanks and infantry units carrying out the first ground attacks inside Gaza on that Friday. The evacuation area includes the enclave’s largest metropolitan area, Gaza City, home to over 645,000 people. The residents received no instructions on where to go. Figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics indicate that 1.19 million people live in the region now under evacuation orders, expected to move across a densely populated war zone in less than 24 hours.

The Israeli Defense Forces took to the social media site X, stating, “the IDF will protect the people of Israel; Hamas indiscriminately slaughtered innocent Israeli civilians. Now Hamas is hiding behind the people in Gaza. That’s why we’re asking them to move.” This included vulnerable hospital patients. Yet, with two major hospitals in the north already exceeding their combined 760-bed capacity, where could they go? After 16 years under Israel’s illegal blockade, Gaza’s healthcare system was already close to collapse, its economy in shambles, unable to handle the regular influx of casualties.

The Israeli government is not acting without support. President Joe Biden has stood as a staunch ally of Israel, dispatching two aircraft carrier groups to the region, sending supplies, and announcing a large financial aid package. If that weren’t enough, Biden’s visit to Israel served as a powerful expression of sympathy, meeting with the country’s first responders and family members of those killed, wounded, or taken hostage. He then addressed the nation on television, stating, “Israel has the right to defend itself” and issuing a blunt warning to Iran and other countries hostile to Israel.

President Biden also persuaded Netanyahu to allow Egypt to deliver “limited quantities” of humanitarian aid to Gaza, which was later approved. However, a statement made it clear that Israel “will not thwart” the deliveries of food, water, and medicine, as long as the supplies do not reach Hamas. Simultaneously, the U.S. initiated swift and decisive action by targeting Hamas members and Palestinian militant organizations across Gaza, Sudan, Turkey, Algeria, and Qatar, announcing sanctions in response to the attack on Israel.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered a speech from his office, stating Canada’s support for Israel’s right to self-defense, pledging steadfast support for Israel. In so doing, the Canadian government supported the Israeli version of events. Other powerful countries responded similarly, only secondarily appealing for international law to prevail in Gaza.

Sympathy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in short supply, and Palestinians face both tragedy and farce. The deliberate elimination of Palestinians, characterized by policies ranging from the 1948 mass killing and displacement to half a century of military occupation, discriminatory legal regimes, repeated military assaults on Gaza, and outspoken vows to erase Palestinians by official Israeli statements, all constitute ongoing genocide. Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish Polish legal scholar who coined the term in 1944, explained, “[Genocide] refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destroying the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight.” Since Lemkin’s first use of the term, it has gained political, social, and legal meaning. Martin Shaw, a distinguished modern scholar of genocide, described it as “a major type of collective violence, with a distinctive place in the spectrum of political violence, armed conflict, and war, of which it is usually seen as a part.”

The predicament of Palestinians regarding the creation of the Israeli state in 1948 has been governed by “Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs that have ruthlessly implemented a systematic and comprehensive military, political, religious, economic, and cultural campaign with the intent to destroy, in substantial part, the national, ethnic, racial, and different religious groups constituting the Palestinian people,” argues Francis Boyle, a professor of international law. In 2013, Boyle testified that “the Palestinians have been the victims of genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

The harsh sanctions imposed by Israel and the international community have driven most Palestinian households below the poverty line, establishing mechanisms that limit suffering in Gaza to a point just short of starvation. These actions have transformed a densely populated and impoverished region into an internationally supplied welfare project that has become a prison at the hands of Israel’s apartheid regime.

The international community has been an adamant partner in weakening Palestinian institutions. Led by the United States, joined by the European Union and member states, and supported by a host of international organizations, their “efforts” can be viewed as a failure. The revival of political structures that genuinely represent and can deliver for Palestinian constituencies under a national unity government must take precedence to help Palestine escape its current predicament.