37 Humanitarian Orgs Fired. 60 Million Tons of Rubble. Palestinian Babies Freezing. This Is Genocide.

A Palestinian in despair in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

The math is brutal. Sixty million tonnes of rubble. Seventy-one thousand five hundred forty-eight Palestinians dead. Seven years minimum to clear the rubble that once was home, school, hospital, life. These numbers don’t lie, but the story they tell is one Israel desperately wants the world to forget: a story of calculated destruction, of engineered despair, of a methodical campaign to make Gaza unlivable.

They say this was all about “fighting Hamas.” When an occupying force systematically reduces 2 million people to living among mountains of their own destroyed homes, when they turn hospitals into ruins and schools into graves, when they create conditions so hellish that even survival becomes an act of resistance — this is not war. It is genocide. Plain to see. Documented, and still somehow downplayed.

Such is the depth of Palestinian dehumanization.

The United Nations, those chroniclers of human catastrophe, put it plainly: Gaza is buried under 55-60 million tonnes of debris. “This is a very arduous process and will take many years to complete,” Jaco Cilliers of UNDP warned. Many years. Years in which Palestinians will continue to die, not just from bombs, but from the deliberate suffocation of their existence. Years in which children will be born into ruins, generations will be shaped by trauma, and the world will watch and debate and equivocate while the architects of this horror continue their work unabated.

And what is the world’s response? Sanctions. On Iran. While Israel continues to bomb Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran. While Israeli soldiers continue their killing spree, with at least 451 Palestinians killed since the ceasefire began.

“International law must apply to everyone,” Belgian MEP Marc Botenga declared, a statement so obvious it should be tattooed on the conscience of every world leader. But it isn’t. Because when the victims are Palestinian, when the oppressor has powerful friends, international law becomes a suggestion, something to be easily ignored with impunity.

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Then there’s the latest Israeli innovation: the humanitarian gag order. Thirty-seven aid organizations suspended. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) — the very name a promise of medical care for the wounded and dying – expelled from Gaza because they had the audacity to call this what it is: genocide.

Why was MSF targeted? Because they support 20% of hospital beds in Gaza. Because they deliver one in three babies born in that besieged territory. Because their voices, their witnesses, their medical records became inconvenient truths in Israel’s carefully constructed narrative of “self-defense.”

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) APAC on Instagram: ““We’re not fi…

Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs claimed these organizations “failed to comply with new registration rules.” What those rules really represent is a chilling attempt to control the narrative, silence the witnesses, and criminalize truth-telling. As MSF rightly stated: “MSF would never knowingly employ people engaging in military activity.”

But in the Orwellian world of Israeli logic, telling the truth about war crimes becomes a crime in itself.

While Israel chokes off aid, while it expels the healers, while it buries the living under mountains of dead architecture, Palestinian babies freeze to death in tents. Over 800,000 Palestinians shelter in flimsy tents vulnerable to rain and wind, where at least eight children have died from hypothermia since winter began, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, UNICEF, and The Guardian. Recent storms collapsed tent walls in Gaza City, killing five more including children, while Israel blocks aid like tents and generators labeled as ‘dual-use items,’ leaving nearly $50 million undelivered.

Two-week-old Mohammed Khalil Abu al-Khair died from acute hypothermia. Eight-month-old Rahaf Abu Jazar perished from exposure. Two-month-old Arkan Firas Musleh froze to death recently.

Maktoob on Instagram: “A Palestinian infant has frozen to death…

If these babies had been Israeli, American, or British; if they had been white; if they had not been Palestinian, the whole world would know their names. Meanwhile, Palestinian bodies decompose in the rubble.

Fathers like Abu Ismail Hamad searches through the ruins for his wife and children, executed by the Israeli occupation.

This is not news. Never trending. It is not even making headlines. As my former colleague and a journalist I respect deeply Barry Malone (who has a great newsletter you should check out called Proximities) notes with painful clarity:

Why the silence? Why the normalization? Perhaps because the story has become too familiar, too overwhelming, too inconvenient for the comfortable consciences of the world. Perhaps because the media has moved on, the public has grown more weary, and politicians have finally found their most shameless excuses.

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When Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi warns that “Mossad agents are hiding among Iranian demonstrators to distract from its ongoing genocide of Palestinians,” he’s not just commenting on Iranian politics. He’s exposing a pattern – Israel’s desperate attempts to shift focus, to create diversions, to avoid accountability for the crimes committed in Gaza. The spectacle of Iranian protests becomes a convenient distraction from the reality of Palestinian suffering.

The same world that imposes sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program ignores Israel’s nuclear arsenal. The same media that obsesses over Iranian “threats” barely notices Israeli airstrikes. The same diplomatic corps that condemns human rights violations elsewhere gives Israel a pass for its systematic destruction of an entire population.

This architecture of erasure goes beyond the physical destruction of buildings, to the deliberate demolition of memory, of conscience … the demolition of our collective humanity. When we allow Israel to continue its work without consequence, when we accept the narrative that equates resistance with terrorism, when we normalize the idea that Palestinian lives are somehow less valuable — WE — become complicit in this erasure.

The world can look away. The media can move on. And the politicians can equivocate. What will we do? Will we continue to speak up for the voices who have been buried under sixty million tonnes of injustice. Will we continue to say the quiet parts out loud? Will you?