Daily Times

For the bombed, shelled, internally displaced, hungry, thirsty and in need of essential supplies Gazans, the brief respite from flares and explosions might seem far too surreal to be real.

After all, they have endured a seemingly endless battle for survival ever since October 7 when the said actions of a terrorist organisation turned their world upside down. Whether Israel was to be blamed for how it facilitated the meteoric rise of Hamas as a counter to the Palestinian liberation movement is another story altogether but under no circumstances did its claim of self-defence and mantra to make to example out of its enemies apply to those sandwiched between barricades and the roaring sea.

The ongoing truce days have allowed people to enjoy the joys of social communication. With humanitarian trucks delivering payloads in northern Gaza, hunger and desperation might step back for a bit. But even total normalcy would appear helpless when tasked with normalisation of the unbelievable destruction that has taken hold. Even now, as Qatar hammers out an extension in the temporary peace arrangement to last two more days and the UN chief pushes for a full humanitarian ceasefire, a heart-wrenching stream of Gazans drudge southwards, fearing the renewal of Israeli bombardments. International attention is fixated on their plight with an unimaginably large number of protestors forcing their government all around the world to snap out of their slumber and cough out the courage to call a spade a spade.

As the West remains quiet, reluctant to mourn those who have passed for the sole crime of being born a Palestinian in a land, it would do well to remember that to be silent is to be complicit in Israeli crimes. Sooner rather than later, these leaders would enter election season and answer their own people about why their conscience snored hard when more children were killed by Netanyahu’s soldiers in a month than in all other conflicts this year. *