Humanity is Being Buried in Gaza. We Must Rise Up to Save our Collective Future.

Gaza is not an anomaly. It is a mirror. A reflection of our world as it really is today. And for many, a preview of what is to come.

Displaced in Gaza (Image: creative commons).

“Where do you stand on the question of evil?” That question has echoed around my mind ever since interviewing Palestinian author and Nakba survivor Dr Ghada Karmi last June. She told me that her own childhood experiences—being ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem in 1948—almost feels like “nothing” compared to what’s unfolding in Gaza today.

This weekend, we woke to the news that Israel had incinerated 33 more Palestinians—mostly children—as they sheltered in a school in Gaza City. A video shows a six-year-old child, named Ward (“flowers” in English), running in desperation. Her small silhouette was etched against the raging inferno consuming the night sky.

We also learnt that Israeli forces bombed the home of Palestinian doctor Alaa al-Najjar while she was at work, killing nine of her children and injuring her husband. One child survives, clinging to life in intensive care.

And as if Israel’s actions could get any more depraved, news breaks that Israeli forces have killed at least ten starving Palestinians queuing for aid in the newly established US-backed distribution site on the outskirts of Rafah.

The genocide has now entered a new, even more lethal phase—dubbed “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” by Israel. Each day delivers a new count: “30 Palestinians killed before breakfast.” “80 Palestinians killed today.” “100 yesterday.” The drumbeat of Israel’s campaign of extermination continues to accelerate.

Meanwhile, videos circulate of Israelis lighting barbecues just outside Gaza. The scent of grilled meat is deliberately sent wafting over a starved population living under forced famine. Israeli protesters block aid trucks. And the world, for the most part, does nothing.

Trump maintains sanctions on the International Criminal Court for daring to prosecute Israeli war criminals. Western states keep weapons and intelligence flowing, and diplomatic channels open. Gaza remains caged. And so we must ask ourselves: where do we stand on the question of evil?

This is no longer a philosophical question or a rhetorical one. It is visceral. It is urgent. And it demands an answer—not only from our governments, but from each of us.

If genocide—the crime of crimes—no longer marks a red line, then no red lines remain. Humanity as a whole is under threat. We are all vulnerable.

We must finally abandon the illusion that governments will protect our shared moral boundaries. If they won’t draw the line, we must.

Israel’s Onslaught Is Unprecedented

What Israel has unleashed on Gaza is unprecedented in both scale and savagery. Its onslaught is marked not just by a systematic campaign of extermination which has already killed over 60,000 Palestinians, but by a performative cruelty so brazen that its own soldiers record and broadcast their atrocities to the world. A proud spectacle of heroic achievement–smashing kids toys, obliterating a home at the touch of a button and prancing around in Palestinian women’s underwear. Gaza has been turned into a slaughterhouse, thousands of Palestinian hostages still languish in Israeli torture chambers and those carrying out the crimes appear to revel in the devastation. In its actions, Israel has declared itself not merely indifferent to the sanctity of human life—but an enemy of it.

Just look at the scale.

This is the world’s most accelerated famine. The highest proportion of women and children killed in any recorded conflict. The most journalists, aid workers, UN staff, and doctors deliberately targeted and murdered. Gaza now has the largest per capita population of child amputees anywhere on Earth.

Over 70,000 tons of explosives were dropped in the first six months—more than were dropped on Europe’s most devastated cities during all six years of World War II. That is the explosive equivalent of six nuclear bombs, dropped on a strip of land smaller than East London. A place where half the population are children. And no one can escape.

Yet Israel claims “self-defence.” A laughably grotesque fiction in the face of the world’s most documented genocide.

A recent Haaretz poll found that 82% of Israeli Jews support ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And 47% support killing all Palestinians in cities captured by Israeli forces. Carrying out the genocide is a not fringe view of a political elite, but mainstream, widespread and popular. The state of Israeli society today is the fruit of decades of impunity granted towards decades of uninterrupted violence wielded against Palestinians.

Zionism—long shielded from criticism—has now laid itself bare for the world to see. It is nothing but a settler-colonial ideology that treats Palestinian life as a problem which must be eliminated. Whether Palestinians resist with arms or with smiles—it is their existence alone that is intolerable.

Even Gaza’s largest fertility clinic was bombed. 4,000 embryos obliterated in a single shell. In Zionism’s logic, even the potential for Palestinian life is a threat which must be eliminated.

This Won’t Stay in Gaza

Colombian President Gustavo Petro said it best at COP28: “What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future.”

Gaza is a live experiment. A testing bed. And in a globalised world, what goes around truly does come back around, and fast.

The future has arrived and the global north has slept through its alarm. For decades, Palestinians have been staring up the barrel of the gun and into the soul of the beast.

Palestinians—especially in Gaza—have long been at the sharpest, most extreme edge of the coalescence of forces that dominate our world and increasingly threaten us all.

One of our contributors, Omar Salah, described the constant presence of drones over his displacement camp in Deir al-Balah. “At night it’s worse,” he said. “Quadcopters hover and take photos. Sometimes they force you out of your tent. Sometimes they shoot. Sometimes they kill.”

We already know Israel uses Palestinians as guinea pigs for testing new weapons and surveillance. These technologies—marketed as “battle-tested”—are sold to governments and corporations worldwide. The same tools are used in the widespread surveillance of dissidents, journalists, and citizens more generally from New York to New Delhi.

Now, Gaza is the testing ground for AI-powered warfare, in what has been dubbed the first “AI-assisted genocide.” As drones surveil the skies 24/7, Israel boasts of real-time surveillance of the entire captive population, and has admitted to using AI to generate “kill lists” of Palestinians, based on data such as which WhatsApp groups they belong to and how often they changed their mobile phones. And tech giants including Microsoft, Google, and Palantir are proudly providing the Israeli military with crucial tech services while it carries out its onslaught. To these tech companies, the path to AI domination is paved with corpses—and Palestinians are the ideal testing ground.

A System That Rewards Barbarism

What is happening in Gaza is not an aberration. It is the logical endpoint of a global system that has for centuries rewarded the rapacious accumulation of resources, land and labour through indigenous dispossession and genocide.

It’s the same system that idolises billionaires for launching vanity rockets while defunding public services. That rewards selfishness and punishes solidarity. That incentivises an extractivist, hyper-individualistic mentality at the expense of the collective.

That sees everything conducive to life as a cost to be cut or cancelled, or better still, privatised for profit.

With the far right resurgent in the absence of an organised left, the trajectory is clear: higher walls, more prisons, deeper surveillance, ever more militarised policing—and more lives deemed disposable.

Gaza is not an anomaly. It is a mirror. A reflection of our world as it really is today. And for many, a preview of what is to come. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

As Dr. Sai Englert told us at Palestine Deep Dive:

“The Palestinian national movement gives us a tool to transform our own society. It says: fight for democratic control of your institutions, your companies, your governments. Don’t be ruled by capital. Be ruled by collective interests.”

If the future is to really be ours and not theirs, theirs being the arms dealers’, the fossil magnates’, the tech barons’ or the financiers of war—then we must seize it.

Rise Up

Dr. Mohammed Ashraf, a Palestinian surgeon in Gaza, went viral holding the limb of a child he had to amputate without anaesthetic—because Israel blocked medical aid.

His words were stark: “What we are witnessing now is a test. If humanity fails this test, it will not stop in Gaza only.”

This is not just about Palestine. It is about the future of humanity.

And this moment demands more than hashtags, more than outrage. It demands a collective response commensurate with the crime.

Palestinians have shown us what it means to resist against all odds. They’ve exposed the brutality of our global systems and the moral bankruptcy of those in power. We owe Gaza not just solidarity, but meaningful action.

If one aid ship can set sail towards Gaza—like the Freedom Flotilla’s Conscience before being bombed by an Israeli drone—why not a thousand?

If one Israeli arms factory can be shut down in the West through direct action, why not all of them?

If hundreds of thousands of protestors march in London and across the globe—why not lay down permanent occupations?

If trade unions declare solidarity, where are the widespread strikes?

A reckoning is coming — but we cannot wait for it. We must become that reckoning.

As Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil reminds us from behind bars in the United States, detained for protesting Israel’s genocide, Gaza is not a burden. To stand with Gaza is not an obligation to endure, but a privilege to uphold. In this moment, to stand unapologetically with Gaza is to stand on the side of humanity — and in defence of our collective future.

A future which will not be delivered. But must be seized—built from below, by hand, by heart, and by will as we reclaim our right to feel. Our right to have empathy. As we resist lovelessness and assert our right to the fullness of life. Through disruption. Through imagination. Through fearless organising.

Gaza is not for sale. If Trump imagines Gaza turned into luxury beachfront real estate, then we must imagine it revived for Palestinian life.

Let us be worthy of this moment. In each of our domains, let us raise the ceiling. In the classrooms, courtrooms, concert halls and in the streets, stadiums, factories and offices—we must escalate for Gaza. We must act.

Now is the time for greater defiance. To unite to stop the genocide and defend Gaza like never before. And then to collectively help rebuild Gaza and in doing so, rebuild ourselves and the world we see around us.

All roads now lead to Gaza. All conversations crash upon its shores. All moral questions take place within its jurisdiction.

For Gaza is now the heart of the world. One fully exposed, burning, but still beating.

Rise.

Originally published at Mondoweiss.