A great sickness

How will we repent?

How do you describe the months-long ongoing genocide in Gaza? As a way of describing the livestream of Israeli horrors since October 7, all kinds of words have been deployed: cruel, savage, horrendous, abhorrent, vile, hellish, diabolical, ghastly, horrible, thuggish, grotesque, uncivilised, inhuman, horrific, barbaric, demonic, satanic. There are plenty more in this unexhaustive list. We started running out of words to describe this Israeli massacre of the innocents months ago. Eight months ago, one writer laid out how the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza was already a “slaughter of superlatives.” Eight months ago.

In the eleventh month of this holocaust, we still wake up to children crying over the bodies of their dead parents, mothers crying over their beheaded babies, fathers who can’t fathom the sight they just witnessed, bodies without limbs, heads without bodies, bodies with all identifying markers erased in an inferno, solitary limbs attached to mangled remains, charred human flesh, shivering children, dazed children, children covered in soot, children with parts of their face missing, children with limbs missing but in such shock that they don’t even cry. What horrors could Dante conjure in his Inferno that we haven’t witnessed in Gaza over the last ten months?

Headlines after headlines scream some variation of today’s “More than 100 killed as Israel attacks Gaza City school during dawn prayers.” Sometimes Gaza City is replaced with Deir al-Balah or Rafah or Tal al-Hawa or Khan Yunis or Shuja’iyya or Jabalia. At other times, dawn prayers make way for afternoon prayers, evening prayers, night prayers, Eid prayers, taraweeh. Schools replace hospitals, mosques, refugee camps, aid distribution centres. More than 100 has at times changed to more than 200, more than 300, sometimes more than 1,000.

Life is so cheap in Gaza that they can’t even count the exact number of the dead. The counting mechanisms have been destroyed, bodies remain unextractable in the rubble, some are classified missing. There are no exact numbers of dead in Gaza. This is not New York, London, or Tel Aviv. Life in Gaza is cheap.

How many ceasefire proposals have come and gone, how many weapon shipments have been paused only to be eventually released, how many orders of the international courts have asked for the halting of the genocide, how many warrants for the arrest of Israeli war criminals have been issued, how many genocide scholars have described the horrors in Gaza as unprecedented, a Holocaust.

Yet, here we are with another headline that says “More than 100 killed as Israel attacks Gaza City school during dawn prayers.” Another morning of bodies with severed limbs, crying children, wailing mothers, heartbroken fathers, mangled remains, crushed skulls, headless children.

For the past ten months we have tweeted our rage, shed a tear, sobbed uncontrollably, contributed to charities, cursed the tyrants, let out righteous rants. But not a solitary needle has moved. “More than 100 killed as Israel attacks Gaza City school during dawn prayers.”

The impunity of the Israeli barbarians is unparalleled. The Israelis don’t care what you think of them, how much you curse them, how violated you feel, how angry you get, how much you want them to stop. They go on raping, looting, massacring, genociding, holocausting.

I am sure I am not the only one who has shivered at the thought of opening their social media timelines for the fear of fresh photos and videos of the hell manifest in Gaza. We have witnessed what we never thought we would after all these years of our leaders telling us about denazification, setting up of courts that would ensure “never again,” living in modernity, and in a system of checks and balances. Surely, someone would step in to stop a situation this barbaric.

Sometimes the tears don’t flow at the site of such savagery. Perhaps a months-long genocide is way too long to bear even from a distance. Somewhere inside something just switches off, dies. The tears won’t fall, the words won’t come out, the fingers won’t type. The savagery is too much to bear for a human soul. We aren’t wired to process such wholescale slaughter, inhumanity. There is probably some solace in it: perhaps it is a sign that those of us who go through these emotions retain our humanity.

The starving and parched Palestinians in Gaza, living through the apocalyptic horrors of the past 300+ days, still keep their lips wet with the remembrance of God. They know well how highly the Qur’an holds the sanctity of life:

[W]hoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land — it is as if he had slain mankind entirely.

The killing of one soul is akin to killing mankind entirely in the sight of God, what then the killing of 200,000?

The Palestinians’ feeling of injustice is acute — more so for what they have lived through for the past ten months. Not being in Gaza doesn’t bestow some sort of immunity on our souls, however. The witnessing also comes at a cost — as does not witnessing. “There is great sickness in all of this.” This sickness only intensifies with every day that this barbarity extends. We have all been rendered profoundly sick by what we are witnessing.

If we can’t stop this holocaust, how will we repent?

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