In the 21st century, how is it possible that over 15,000 children have been killed in a matter of months, yet the world remains silent? A mother, a doctor, is forced to treat the wounded beside the bodies of her nine murdered children. Civilians lining up for flour are machine-gunned by drones and tanks. An entire population is starved under siege, with food, water and medicine withheld as weapons of war.
Doctors and nurses are shot, hospitals are reduced to rubble, and patients are operated on without anesthesia under sniper fire. Journalists are hunted down and killed, silencing the last remaining witnesses in what has become the most documented atrocity in history. Schools, mosques and refugee camps are flattened; mourners are bombed again as they bury their dead. How can United Nations shelters and aid convoys be repeatedly targeted with impunity while the world looks away?
Settler groups announce the annexation of depopulated land even as displaced families starve in tents. Extremist Jewish supremacist groups openly advocate ethnic cleansing, calling it biblical justice, without condemnation. How can the assault continue unabated even after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared the situation a plausible genocide, and the U.N. described it as a grave breach of international law?
Powerful democracies still speak of a “rules-based order” while supplying weapons, vetoing cease-fires and shielding Israel from accountability.
How is genocide not only committed, but broadcast, denied and applauded by those who once vowed “never again”? How can Gaza be told to evacuate itself, to depopulate, as part of Israel’s openly declared plans to erase it from the map?
One day, perhaps 20 years from now, a child will sit in a classroom, reading these horrors in a history textbook. She will see the images: skeletal children reaching for a sack of flour, hospitals in ruins, families buried beneath rubble. She will read that over 54,000 people, including 15,000 children, were slaughtered in Gaza over months. That people were gunned down while waiting for food. Doctors operated without anesthesia. That entire neighborhoods were leveled.
And she will turn to her teacher and ask, with trembling innocence: “Was there no U.N.? No media? No democracy? What about America, the one that lectures the world about freedom? What about Europe, the land of enlightenment, that calls others savages? Where were they? Where were the human rights champions, the moral guardians, and the West that claimed to stand for civilization? How could this happen, not in the Middle Ages but in the 21st century, when social media broadcasts every atrocity live to the world? How could this happen in daylight, in front of everyone, and no one stopped it?”
What answer shall we give her? Shall we tell her the truth, that the world did see, but chose not to act? That justice bowed to geopolitics, that empathy was drowned in hypocrisy, that the powerful chose to supply bombs instead of food? That some nations called it self-defense, while others called it divine prophecy? That human rights collapse under the weight of strategic alliances? In this information age, silence was not ignorance, but complicity?
This is not a question for tomorrow. It is a question for today. Because Gaza is not history yet, it is happening now. And if we fail to answer it with action, then we are writing the darkest chapter of our own civilization.
What makes it all the more harrowing is that a besieged, defenseless, starved and bombed people, locked in what has been called the world’s largest open-air prison, are not seen as victims, but labeled as beasts. A hapless population, whose only crime was to exist under occupation, was described as subhuman. Mothers, children, paramedics, journalists, teachers, all are condemned in one breath as “terrorists.” The bombs rain down with the full endorsement of some of the most powerful democracies. The rubble is justified. The starvation is rationalized. The deaths, tens of thousands, are shrugged off as collateral damage.
And so, the real question, the one history will never forgive us for not asking, is this: How could Israel carry out this mass murder with such impunity, and still be embraced as a democracy? How could genocide be made palatable, even noble, by simply branding the victims unworthy of sympathy? What does that say about Gaza as a moral quagmire and about the present world order?
The genocide unfolding in Gaza is not an isolated tragedy but the logical outcome of a global order steeped in selective justice and entrenched bias. In the last 50 years, every territory that has gained self-determination with U.N. endorsement, East Timor, Namibia and South Sudan, has been overwhelmingly non-Muslim. Meanwhile, Palestine and numerous other Muslim-majority regions remain under occupation, their rights systematically denied. The so-called “war on terror” is a cynical instrument not to combat violence but to justify occupation and suppress legitimate resistance. From Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, millions of lives have been shattered. Yet, Muslim suffering is no longer seen as a human tragedy but framed as a threat.
A continuation of a centuries-old narrative casts Muslims as the perpetual other: alien, suspect and disposable within the global order. Far from an impartial guarantor of justice, the international system is a modern crusade, equating Muslim identity with insecurity and extremism. Netanyahu’s callous remark after 9/11, that the attacks would generate sympathy for Israel, exposed how terror narratives are weaponized to defend occupation and delegitimize resistance.
Muslims are politically, economically and symbolically disempowered, stripped of rights routinely afforded to others. Without this entrenched disempowerment, could such impunity endure?
Yet, is the horror in Gaza simply a “clash of civilizations”? Ideally, that crude framework is a divisive oversimplification. The truth is more complex and disturbing. While not a clash of civilizations in essence, the crisis is shaped by deep historical, political and ideological forces that function as one. The world’s persistent framing of Muslims as the "other" shifts political struggles into existential battles, casting Muslim suffering as part of a wider civilizational conflict. Not natural or inevitable, but manufactured through persistent denial of Muslim dignity and agency, rooted in historic prejudice and power imbalances.
Israel’s impunity stems from its strategic alliances with global powers, the normalization of its narrative and the framing of Palestinian resistance as illegitimate.
In this moral void, hypocrisy reigns supreme. Powerful states posture as guardians of human rights while arming the perpetrators and vetoing every attempt at accountability. The global community’s deafening silence and political shielding grant Israel unprecedented impunity, exposing the rotten core of international law and human rights rhetoric. Gaza’s genocide unmasks the world’s greatest lie: that justice is blind and universal. Instead, justice here wears the mask of convenience and allegiance.
