The videos from Palestine now come with disclaimers – the images are graphic, warning that we should watch only if we are okay with photographs of bloodshed and slaughter. Since the war on Gaza continues unabated, people including women and children dying every day, has become routine.
Many of our ilk, for whom watching violence brings back trauma now tend to skip them.
“Don’t have the heart to watch them anymore,” we often tell friends. We want to close our eyes and pretend the genocide of a certain people is not taking place.
I have experienced this in my own life. After reading and writing news on Kashmir for years, one editor once told me that no one wants to read the stories on the region like they used to. A ‘Kashmir fatigue’ has set in.
Maybe it is the same fatigue that has set in at other parts of the world where women and children are not dying terrible deaths, where dead bodies of babies are not pulled out of rubble after days, where young children are not seen looking for their parents among the dead.
Where dead bodies don’t line up the roads.
Where food and water are not scarce.
Where hunger has not become a pandemic.
Maybe this fatigue has desensitised us enough so that when we see scores falling to bombs and bullets in Gaza and Lebanon, we consider this the new normal. The internet gives us a choice to skip this reality and go to happier scenes like beaches and mountains, sun-kissed bodies, and wonderful food.
While many among us would chose to scroll away, there are some who have decided otherwise. A good majority of young people mostly students, irrespective of religion, across the world have become torchbearers of human rights and are trying to wake the civilised world up to genocide and war crimes.
Some others play ostriches. “Can’t see so much bloodshed anymore”.
However, the video of two human beings engulfed in flames unable to come out of burning tents in Gaza might not allow the above line to hold anymore.
The tents were targeted in the Al Aqsa Hospital which housed displaced people and medical facilities. The attack killed four people and injured dozens of others.
This kind of Israeli offensive is not new in Gaza. According to the Palestinian health ministry, 42,227 people have been killed in the area since October 7, 2023 and up to October 13, 2024. Another 752 have been killed in the West Bank.
The latest figures show more than a lakh are injured and 10,000 people are missing.
Israel officials say about 1,139 people have also been killed, while around 9,000 were injured.
However, the video and photographs coming from the hospital where silhouettes of burning people can be seen clearly give new face to these numbers. The images also plug holes in the lopsided argument that ;Israel has a right to defend its borders.’
Directly targeting refugee camps, and makeshift tents for the displaced, hospitals, and schools have been part of Israel’s armed offensive for months.
Gaza health ministry has said the wounded are mostly women and children. According to UNRWA, the same site was to be used as a polio vaccination centre.
Also read: Palestine Diary: Where the Gaza Genocide Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
With Israel attacking and asking the UN peacekeepers to leave, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems in no mood to stop the genocide.
As the world watches, Palestinian people are not even allowed food. Tge UNRWA said that on October 14, the Israeli Army fired shells inside and outside the UNRWA Jabalia food distribution centre. At least 10 people were killed and another 40 were injured. UNRWA’s X handle said that this happened while people were trying to get food from the centre.
According to the UN’s World Food Programme, the situation in Gaza is ‘dire’, with food and water running out.
A UN report says 50,000 pregnant women are unable to access health services or even clean water. Electricity has been cut, and no aid is allowed.
The question that arises is what needs to be the number of killed in Gaza and now Lebanon for the world to stand up together and call it a genocide.
The disparity in the world order has never been as pronounced as it is now, where some are collectively neglecting a certain race’s right to exist and rejecting the right of Palestinians to live.
The disparity is in your face when the UK announces sanctions against Iranian military figures in the wake of Iran’s attack on Israel on October 1, 2024. Except for the worldwide boycott of goods by companies supporting this genocide, no country has threatened sanctions against Israel so far.
Photographs and videos of the burning tent symbolise two things – the helplessness of the people in Palestine and the indifference of the rest of the world.
We have to remember a civilisation is being wiped out on our watch.
Toufiq Rashid is a journalist who has covered the Kashmir conflict, health and wellbeing for top Indian newspapers for nearly two decades. She now works at @Pixstory.
