Never Before: Genocide in Gaza

Last night, I watched in disbelief the reports from Gaza.

The reporters were using battery-operated lights for their cameras, and stood in a halo beyond which was the kind of darkness — and silence — few people have experienced since before the industrial revolution.

Images filmed earlier, in daylight, showed entire neighborhoods flooded with raw sewage, as the pumps in the water treatment plant stopped working, due to a lack of fuel.

Drinking water has become dangerously toxic. Children, already weakened by malnutrition, suffer from diarrhea, kidney diseases and many other debilitating effects, all preventable, deliberately inflicted on them by Israel’s malice, for the sole reason that they are not Jewish children.

After a day of crowds waiting in line for some precious bread, by nightfall the bakeries were empty: no more flour, no more fuel, no more bread. Those lucky enough to have bread, rushed home to feed their families by the light of equally-precious candles.

80% of Gazans are dependent on UNRWA for their food. UNRWA announced that they might be obliged to stop distributing food as early as Wednesday, due to the Israeli closures.

In the freezing cold, overcrowded hospitals, patients and their families prayed that the equipment that kept them alive, would continue to receive electricity. They prayed that the hospital would have the medicines they needed. Their prayers were unanswered. Already, dozens of patients have died as a direct result of Israel’s deliberately genocidal policy.

I saw hospital rooms lit by candles, screaming children being treated in the dark by doctors, as their parents tried to help with lights from their cell-phones.

While the zionist killers whine about missiles fired from Gaza, which have caused a total of 19 Israeli casualties in more than seven years, Israeli missiles, war-planes, bombs and tanks have caused thousands of Palestinian deaths, destroyed thousands of homes, roads, the main electricity plant, Gaza’s airport, hospitals, schools, and essential government buildings. They have left almost a quarter of a million human beings permanently crippled, while destroying the infrastructure that would have allowed their families to care for them properly.

They have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from these desperately poor people, they have destroyed precious agricultural crops, Gaza’s almost 3,800 factories have shut down for lack of fuel and access to the outside world, and they have prevented donors from coming to their rescue.

Israeli prisons are filled with Palestinian political prisoners and innocent civilians, including children, all of whom are tortured, most of whom have not been charged with any crime.

Never before, in the history of humankind, has an ethno-supremacist state deliberately perpetrated a murderous siege against 1.5 million human beings solely because of their ethnicity, in full view of the world.

Never before, has the world watched and listened in real time, as an entire people was ethnically-cleansed so that their land and resources could be stolen by foreign settlers, with the settlers viewed as the victims, and the victims viewed as the aggressors.

Never before has one side been guilty of so many specific, documented, severe violations of law, and yet been hailed as a democracy and a civilized, peace-loving nation, and received so much material, political and military support from the world’s democracies.

Never before have so many otherwise decent people, living in free democracies, been so genuinely afraid of speaking out against atrocities committed by a state against civilians, for fear of being labeled racists.

Never before.

AlicetheKurious @ RI