Today I watched those children again, the ones who stood before the cameras at al-Shifa hospital on 7 November 2023. They spoke in English, not their mother tongue, but the language of those who they thought might save them.
“We want to live, we want peace, we want to judge the killers of children,” one boy said. “We want medicine, food and education. We want to live as the other children live.”
Even then, the children pleaded. They had no clean drinking water, no food, no medicine.
Now, 21 months later, as 60,000 confirmed Palestinian corpses pile higher, or in mass graves, and independent estimates show over 100,000 dead, something has happened. Suddenly, the same institutions that spent months debating, or more actively denying, whether Palestinian testimony deserved credence are finding their voices.
Western academics speak of “genocide” with newfound authority. Two Israeli human rights organizations issued reports declaring what Palestinians have screamed from under rubble since October. They say they are “experts”, but it took them two years to see what was always before them: that a sky that delivers bombs was never looking for hostages.
Why weren’t our corpses enough? What renders Palestinian death so consistently unconvincing to those who witness our slaughter in real time? What is it about our breath, our blood, our bodies, that makes them so easy to doubt, so easy to dismiss, so easy to destroy? It is not the eyes that are blind, but the hearts.
The answer lies not in our deaths but in how we are constructed as less than human from the moment we draw breath. Palestinian dehumanization is philosophical, deliberate, essential to the colonial project. We must be made into something other than human so that our elimination becomes necessary violence. The colonizer requires the colonized to be beasts so that caging us appears humane and killing us appears justified.
This same dehumanization allows the media to place the genocide of Palestinians within the context of 7 October 2023, to act as if history started two years ago, but never place 7 October in the context of 77 years of colonial dispossession and 17 years of complete siege. When Palestinian experts appeared on television saying this was genocide, they were berated, attacked, dismissed. Now it seems only non-Palestinians can declare it genocide, as if they are being brave, as if Palestinians haven’t been fireddoxed and imprisoned for describing our killers as evil. Perhaps they wanted eulogies for the soldiers who murdered our children?
Christiane Amanpour, and those like her, speaks of her epiphany about genocide only after the Israeli writer David Grossman comes to his sad realization that Israel is committing genocide. Palestinians can only narrate if accompanied by authority. But I don’t recognize an authority that can’t feel 22,000lb bombs that have killed a classroom of children every day for 670 days.
How holy their concern now sounds, rising over a land emptied of the living.
These newfound experts, the same voices that spent 21 months debating whether witnessing mass slaughter constituted evidence of mass slaughter, now speak with such authority about our suffering. But even Israeli validation comes with escape hatches built in. When B’Tselem finally published their report, calling it Our Genocidethey spent 88 pages dancing around the legal definition they claimed to embrace. They acknowledged genocidal acts while avoiding the question of genocidal intent, the very element that makes genocide legally prosecutable. Did they forget Netanyahu compared us to Amalek? That he called for our biblical death?
The media enabled this genocide from the start. When Israeli officials announced they had seen “40 beheaded babies” and the world moved to war, there were no photos required, no verification needed. Former US president Joe Biden repeated this blood libel multiple times, even after his own staff admitted he never saw such images. The White House walked back his statements twice. Haaretz investigated and found only one infant died on 7 October, shot, not beheaded. But the lie had already traveled around the world while Palestinian truth was still begging for a hearing.
When Israel killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen in April 2024, precision-striking their clearly marked vehicles in three separate hits, they called it an “unintentional mistake”. When they systematically murdered over 200 journalists, more than in any war in recorded history, each death was labeled an unfortunate accident. When they created the highest concentration of child amputees in the world, this too is presented as an unintended consequence.
The pattern never changes. Israel commits a war crime, promises to investigate itself, and quietly concludes months later that procedures were followed correctly. Yet, the world expects us to forgive and forget.
Until recently, Piers Morgan paraded Palestinian advocates across his stage, a courtroom where the oppressed are always on trial. Rehearsed, he asked each guest the same question: “Do you condemn Hamas?” In that moment, every Palestinian was stripped of grief and forced into a posture of apology.
The follow-up question is just as predictable: “Does Israel have a right to defend itself?” The occupier, we are told, has a sacred right to violence. The occupied must earn the right to grieve. Israel’s so-called “defense” is never interrogated, even though international law grants no such right to an occupying power against the people it occupies.
International law is unambiguous, when it chooses to remember its own language. It affirms the right of all peoples to self-determination, and in UN Resolution 3236, it enshrines the right to resist occupation by “any means necessary”. Apparently these laws do not apply to Palestinian flesh.
Israel has violated every principle of international law: the prohibition on apartheidthe crime of forcible transferthe destruction of cultural propertythe targeting of civilians, the use of starvation as a weapon of war. And now genocidethe highest crime of all. Western regimes expect us not to recognize this reality, perhaps because they have seen how the world has not moved swiftly to stop this genocide, they know they can commit it again.
The Intercept’s analysis of over 1,000 articles from major newspapers during the first six weeks after 7 October 2023 reveals the systematic nature of dehumanization. Humanizing language was reserved almost exclusively for Israeli suffering: “slaughter” appeared in a 60:1 ratio favoring Israeli over Palestinian deaths, “massacre” at 125:2, and “horrific” at 36:4. This was systematic preparation for genocide, the deliberate murder of language itself.
Edward Said understood this decades ago. In Permission to Narratehe showed how Palestinians are robbed of the right to tell our own story, how our voices are filtered through the lens of those who wish us gone. Said knew that the question was never whether Palestinians could speak, we always spoke. The question was who would be allowed to listen, and under what conditions our words would be deemed credible.
But I understand now why the discourse shifts, why genocide suddenly becomes speakable after so much death. It’s not because Palestinian voices gained credibility, it’s because Palestinian death reached a form western consciences can process. Starvation photographs better than bombs or a sniper’s bullet in a child’s chest. Skeletal children evoke sympathy that crushed bodies never will. They can mourn our corpses without confronting the systems that created them. So, western nations can acceptably feign concern over famine in Gaza as if Palestinian mothers hadn’t been carrying their dying children to hospitals for over a year. And, suddenly politicians can offer conditional recognition of Palestinian statehood, but only if we promise to remain defenseless forever. They prefer us as martyrs because martyrs make no demands for liberation.
This performative shift comes not from moral awakening but from calculated safety. Famine sounds like misfortune; genocide sounds like guilt. Famine lets them send aid without admitting harm, grieve publicly without calling out the inflictors. They can express horror while avoiding the truth that western bombs destroyed almost all of Gaza.
Even when evidence becomes undeniable, they adapt. When photographs of 18-month-old Mohammed al-Mutawaq, skeletal from malnutrition, went viral, pro-Israeli voices found new ways to dismiss Palestinian suffering. Once it was revealed the child has cerebral palsy, columnists declared the starvation narrative “a lie”, calling such images “propaganda”.
As if starving a child pre-disposed to death makes the violence more justified?
But the New York Times, quick to factcheck a starving Palestinian child for having a pre-existing condition, let their Screams Without Words report go uncorrected for over 500 days, helping launch popular support for genocide.
But Palestinian voices break through not despite the repression, but because of our refusal to accept that some stories cannot be told, some deaths cannot be mourned, some truths cannot be spoken. Those who remain breathing will speak the truth others died trying to tell: that Palestinian blood waters the earth of our homeland, that our resistance grows from every grave they dig, that our liberation cannot be delayed by their comfort with finishing the Nakba. If you want to listen to Palestinians now, respect our call: immediate sanctions on Israel, stop the sale and flow of weapons that continue to kill, and respect the Palestinian right to self-determination.
The children at al-Shifa hospital understood what the world refuses to see. Many of them are probably buried now, killed by the same forces that dismissed their testimony as propaganda. And still, the only question their corpses might be asked is if they condemned Hamas before Israel killed them.
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