Opinion | Palestinians are not believed, but this is what genocide looks like

Over the past sleepless weeks I have seen images and videos that will always haunt me. Palestinian parents carry the charred and mutilated bodies of their children in plastic bags to makeshift morgues, entire families with three generations lie crushed under their self-built house, exhausted doctors working desperately with flashlights and operate on patients without anesthesia, one of the oldest churches in the world, where displaced people find shelter, has been bombed. Reportedly, so far more than 10,000 Palestinians died – after one month already more than the number of civilians killed in Ukraine after two years of war.

The Israeli war machine has always been brutally brutal. But this time we are witnessing a level of violence that has not been seen since since the Nakba in 1948 – then about 70 percent of the Palestinian population was forcibly expelled and more than 500 communities were completely wiped out. For almost four weeks now, the Israeli government has cut off power and restricted access to the internet, reducing contact with the outside world and hiding the full extent of the attack from the world. Some Palestinians in Gaza still manage to maintain some communication by charging phones in cars and using power from the solar panels that are still there. Among them are also Palestinian journalists – at least 32 media employees have been killed since the Hamas offensive on October 7 – risking their lives to show us the devastation inflicted on them.

But despite the abundance of photos, videos and testimonies that have emerged in recent weeks, Palestinians are once again in a position where they are denied control over their own experiences and are not seen as credible. This was particularly evident after the Israeli army ordered 1.1 million people to evacuate northern Gaza and the world was told that Palestinians would be given safe routes to the south. But these ‘safe routes’ were also bombed, in one case hitting a convoy and killing at least seventy Palestinians, including children. Independent research confirmed what the Palestinians had been saying all along: that there were no ‘safe routes’ out of northern Gaza.

False evidence

While Palestinian journalists have reported phenomenally bravely and comprehensively, too much of the international mainstream media insisted on giving credence to representatives of the Israeli regime: for example when they provided ‘evidence’ of a recording of a conversation between Palestinians who claimed responsibility for the bombing of Al-Ahli hospital. Based on the accents and the dialogue, the Palestinians immediately determined that it was faked. In research by Channel 4 News two independent journalists were cited as having determined that the recording was not “credible.”

Benjamin Netanyahu Called Palestinians ‘Children of Darkness’

The astonishing thing is still that a regime is seen as an occupying power under international law and according to many human rights organizations imposes an apartheid system, is trusted to provide information about its own atrocities. In the meantime, the Palestinians in Gaza are continuously confronted with doubts and question marks. Even their deaths are questioned, as was the case with the American president Joe Biden said he had no “confidence.” in the number of Palestinians killed. The Ministry of Health in Gaza has drawn up a list of all the names of the dead and their identity numbers registered with Israeli authorities.

‘Human animals’

The Israeli regime continues to dehumanize Palestinians as part of its tactics to cast doubt on their statements and justify the atrocities it commits. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said they were against “human animals” fought and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mentioned the Palestinians in a deleted tweet “children of darkness”. The Israeli Minister of Heritage even suggested the possibility to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza. There is so much reporting that contributes to this dehumanization of Palestinians, as Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd noted when he appeared in the British media. “Our death is so commonplace,” he writes, “that journalists report it as if it were the weather.” We often see the age-old linguistic gymnastics in which Israelis are killed and Palestinians simply ‘perish’.

In fact, the Palestinians have now been so dehumanized that even when they hold up their murdered children in front of the camera and show them to the world, people will still say they are responsible for the deaths of their own children. But make no mistake: it is unfurling before our eyes in Gaza a genocide and the Palestinians are showing the world what this looks like in practice.

This article previously appeared in The Guardian.

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