By Nco Dube | 07 August 2025

For over seven decades, the Palestinian people have endured relentless dispossession, occupation, and cycles of brutal violence. In the current moment of crisis, few places on earth provide a starker indictment of our global failures than Gaza. This 42km strip of coastal land, a narrow corridor home to two million people half of them children, has become an open-air prison under siege. Starved of freedom, water, food, and medicine, battered by warplanes and shells, and left without functioning hospitals or schools, Gaza is a crucible of suffering.

Yet, beyond the shock of the images of children pulled lifeless from ruins, hospitals without electricity, and parents wailing in grief, lies an unbearable truth. This is not merely a conflict. It is a massacre enabled by sustained global indifference and hypocrisy. Palestinian lives have come to be treated as expendable variables in a cold geopolitical calculus. As Martin Luther King Jr. foresaw, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The injustice unfolding in Gaza is not isolated. It shatters the very foundations of justice worldwide.

The Historical Roots of Gaza’s Nightmare

The pain endured by Palestinians today is the consequence of a deep and protracted history of systemic oppression. The 1948 Nakba, or “catastrophe”, remains the foundational wound. Over 700,000 Palestinians were violently expelled in the birth pangs of the state of Israel, stripped from their homes, and scattered into refugee camps. Entire villages ceased to exist overnight, erased from the map.

Since then, Israel has pursued policies of enforced displacement and gradual ethnic cleansing. The West Bank is marred by sprawling illegal settlements, supported by the world’s most powerful militaries and protected from consequences by an international diplomatic shield. Gaza has borne the brunt of the punishment: since 2007, it has lived under a grim siege. Movement is all but impossible, medical supplies are inadequate, clean water a rarity, and reconstruction after successive bombardments impossible.

The Oslo Accords of the 1990s promised peace but institutionalised fragmentation instead. Palestinian lands became isolated cantons, shackled by checkpoints and walls, hemmed in from economic development or political unity. Gaza’s medieval siege, repeatedly condemned by the United Nations, has left it on track to become “uninhabitable” in the near future. Yet world leaders avert their eyes.

The Human Catastrophe Unfolding

Since the escalation of violence in late 2023 and throughout 2024 into 2025, the scale of human suffering in Gaza has been staggering. Estimates indicate over 60,000 Palestinians killed, including thousands of children, unimaginable in any modern conflict. Many more wounded and traumatised. The devastation includes the displacement of more than 90% of its population; entire families forced to flee repeatedly under a relentless pounding. By mid-2025, approximately 75% of Gaza’s buildings lay in ruins, with hospitals and sanitation infrastructure bombed beyond repair.

Food shortages are dire. Diseases linked to contaminated water and malnutrition have surged. Starvation deaths are reported among children, with hundreds of thousands living at the precipice of death. The United Nations warns of a “humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions.” How can any society claiming to value human dignity stand idly by?

The Role of Western Powers and the Machinery of Impunity

This catastrophe is neither random nor accidental. It persists, and indeed grows worse, because of the shielding afforded by global powers, chiefly the United States, Britain, and Germany. The US, alone, provides $3.8 billion annually in military aid to Israel, facilitating ongoing bombings and occupation. Over 50 UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel’s conduct have been vetoed by the US since Israel’s founding.

When South Africa sought to hold Israel accountable for alleged genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Western powers rushed to dismiss and undermine these proceedings, revealing the profound double standard in international justice. Israel is treated not as a country subject to international law but as an exception permitted violations without penalty. Journalists like Shireen Abu Akleh have been assassinated with scant investigation, refugee camps like Jabalia have been subjected to indiscriminate bombardment, all without repercussion.

Meanwhile, Palestinians are routinely labelled “terrorists” simply for resisting dispossession and occupation. The very existence of Palestinians is framed as a threat to global security, obscuring their legitimate aspirations for freedom and self-determination.

The Global Hierarchy of Human Suffering

The silence toward Gaza cannot be divorced from a global racialised hierarchy of whose lives matter. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Western nations immediately mobilised sanctions, arms shipments, diplomatic support, and refugee programmes. Ukrainian refugees were welcomed widely in Europe, Australia, and North America.

By contrast, Palestinians who are Arab, Muslim, brown people face erasure in the international discourse. The language shifts to cautious “both sides,” “complex issues,” and narratives framing Israel’s brutal occupation as self-defence. This reveals the entrenched racism underpinning global power relations. Palestinian lives are deemed less worthy.

The same Western powers that champion “rules-based international order” simultaneously fund dictatorships, bomb civilians in the Global South, and close borders to refugees fleeing Western-made wars. The message is chillingly clear: some lives matter more.

The Moral Bankruptcy of the “Rules-Based International Order”

The West purports to uphold a “rules-based international order,” grounded in law and human rights. Yet this order is selective, arbitrary, and deeply hypocritical. International law is enforced unevenly: rigorously against Russia, Iran, and weaker states, but with near-immunity for Israel and the United States.

When the ICJ ordered Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, the US dismissed the ruling as “meritless.” UN experts warning about ethnic cleansing and war crimes have been ignored. Such flagrant impunity erodes the credibility of international institutions and fuels global resentment.

The Global South, long subjected to colonial exploitation, war, and displacement, watches in weary disillusionment as Western states lecture us on human rights while enabling, even arming, brutal occupations.

Starvation and Siege as Weapons of War

Israel’s tactics extend beyond bombs to shattering Gaza’s ability to survive. Since March 2025, the blockade has tightened to almost complete closure, blocking almost all food, medicine, water, and humanitarian relief. Limited aid trickles through when at all, termed by Western diplomats themselves as a “drip feed.” The logic is brutal: to force Gaza’s population into submission through starvation and deprivation.

Reports reveal discussions among Israeli officials about pushing 2.1 million Gazans into a tiny “humanitarian zone” while flattening the rest of the strip, a plan Human Rights Watch condemns as genocidal.

The systematic destruction of homes, schools, clinics, and the withholding of essential supplies is not collateral damage; it is a deliberate policy of collective punishment. A war crime.

The International Community’s Deafening Silence

The “international community,” supposedly upholding order and human rights, is absent from real intervention. Occasional diplomatic statements with calls for restraint are rarely followed by action. Arms exports to Israel continue unabated, diplomatic protections roll on, and no serious accountability measures have been taken.

This facade exposes the “rules-based order” as a façade masking the interests of powerful countries. Justice is secondary to strategic alliances and geopolitical calculations.

Palestinian Resilience: A Beacon Amid Ruins

Despite overwhelming odds, the Palestinian people endure. They bury their dead, treat the wounded, educate their children, and sustain their culture and dignity amid the rubble. Their resilience is a profound rebuke to the world’s indifference and complicity.

Solidarity is awakening across continents, from the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town to Latin America, Asia, and Europe. Millions in the Global South identify this struggle as a continuation of colonial resistance.

American Political Activist and philosopher Angela Davies, once said, “Palestine is the moral litmus test for the world.” Injustice inflicted here is not isolated, it speaks to the conscience of humanity. Let the test not end in failure.

What Genuine Justice Demands Now

Words alone are not enough. The moment demands bold action:

Lift the Siege on Gaza: The blockade is collective punishment and must be ended immediately to allow food, water, medicine, and rebuilding materials to flow freely.

Stop Arming Israel: All military aid, arms sales, and diplomatic cover enabling further destruction must cease. If it is right to sanction Russia, it must be right here too.

Impose Targeted Sanctions: Political and military figures responsible for war crimes should face sanctions equivalent to those for Russians or others accused of atrocities.

Recognise Palestinian Statehood: Full statehood with rights and sovereignty must be recognised without delay or precondition.

Boycott and Divest: Economic pressure on companies profiting from occupation is effective. South Africa’s apartheid boycott history is a powerful precedent.

Guarantee Unhindered Humanitarian Aid: International agencies must be allowed full, unimpeded access to mitigate the humanitarian crisis.

Gaza Is Our Mirror

Gaza’s suffering is not an isolated event. It is a fault line running through the heart of the 21st century, exposing every fault of a global order built on platitudes, hypocrisy, colour-coded compassion, and ultimately, indifference.

Allowing this slaughter to continue makes a mockery of every human rights declaration, every Holocaust memorial, every pious speech in Parliament or the United Nations. If Palestinian lives do not matter, then the international order is a farce, and we are all participants in the lie. The world has arrived at a moral crossroads: to remain silent is to be complicit.

Conclusion: The Far Side of Silence

Gaza will not vanish. The Palestinian people’s rights to dignity, justice, and self-determination are indelible. The siege, bombings, and hunger cannot erase a history, a culture, or a will to live.

The world stands at a crossroads. History will judge those who stood silent as complicit in one of the greatest injustices of our time.

It is time to break the unbearable silence.

Enough is enough. Justice cannot wait.

(Dube is a Political Economist, Businessman, and Social Commentator on UkhoziFM and various newspapers. Read more of his articles here: www. ncodube.blog)