In 1917 during The First World War, Britain’s Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, remarked to a newspaper editor that, “If people really knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know, and can’t know.”
His assessment of people’s revulsion leading to immediate change was probably correct a hundred years ago, but I fear it no longer holds true. Right now, a genocide is being live-streamed from Gaza for everyone to see, with unimaginable horrors recorded daily in high definition and yet not only do huge swaths of people I encounter seem completely unmoved, but there is no end in sight to the slaughter. Has something changed in our collective hearts over the last hundred years? Have we all become so conditioned, calloused, and cowered that no matter what hell is presented to us, no matter how heinous the atrocities committed by Israeli or how loud the innocents scream out for our help, nothing will stop the killing? It feels that way.
Just when I think Israel’s savagery can get no worse, they do something even more unimaginable, and then that previously unimaginable quickly becomes exceeded. When Israel first launched high explosives into a hospital, it felt like a new depth of depravity had been reached. And yet, since then, not only has practically every single hospital in Gaza been attacked, but Israeli snipers have targeted and murdered babies at hospital entrances, surgeons have been shot through windows at the operating table, doctors have been kidnapped, ambulances have been blown up like it’s sport, Israeli soldiers have dressed up as doctors to slaughter patients on the ward, and premature babies have been left to slowly die after the Israeli military forcibly removed medical personnel from the facility where they were being treated – the infants’ tiny bodies discovered months later as withered skeletons in the exact spot they had been abandoned.
At the time of writing, only one healthcare facility, the European Hospital, is functioning in Gaza – and ‘functioning’ is a highly relative term, with it completely out of morphine, nearly all other anesthetics, gauze, antibiotics and much else. Inside its desperate walls, medical personnel work under the constant incessant buzz of swarms of Israeli surveillance drones that hover outside the building day and night, relentlessly tormenting all below, while their companion sniper drones blow off people’s limbs, clocking up the tally of child amputees. According to Canadian surgeon and professor, Dr Yassar Khan, who recently returned from Gaza, there are now 5000 Gazan children who have had a double amputation in the last five months – that is, both legs, both arms or an arm and a leg – and he notes, most of these children have been orphaned too. Little children with their limbs blown off or dangling from a thread, left to face this hell alone with no one to care for them.
A few days ago, I encountered a lost child, a five-year-old girl, shuffling along by herself at a market where I run a stall in Tasmania, having lost her parents in the crowd. She was so small and vulnerable, fear etched across her little face. Her separation lasted no more than thirty minutes before she was reunited with her family, but for her and them this brief period was traumatic enough. What then a lifetime alone for an orphaned Palestinian child who now finds themselves permanently disabled and in constant pain? It is utterly evil. As a parent, I can’t escape imaging my own children in a similar situation and it breaks my heart. And what of the parents who have children missing under the mountains of rubble? To know your child might be alive, dying a terrifying, slow and painful death in the cold earth but you can do absolutely nothing about it is as good a definition of hell as I can think. Or of the children dying of cardiac arrest – actually dying of heart attacks – such is the trauma of having a limb amputated without anesthetic. It is beginning to drive me insane.
Last week I read a story of a little six-year-old boy, discovered by a doctor curled up under the tyre of a truck, who had gone there with the intention of committing suicide, of being crushed to death when the driver drove off without noticing him, so that the boy could return to his family who had all been killed. He died of hypothermia soon after. Today I watched a video of a starving little girl vomiting up animal feed and then dying.
It all feels like the beginning of the end of the world.
And perhaps it actually is.