The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has now suspended all aid distribution sites in the besieged enclave in what can only be called an extraordinary admission that there is no safe space left in Gaza. Not for medicine. Not for food. Not for life.
What began as a military campaign has descended into a humanitarian apocalypse. Over 54,000 Palestinians are dead, more than half of which are women and children. Entire families have been wiped from the civil registry. Mosques were reduced to rubble, hospitals flattened, and refugee shelters rebranded as military targets.
On June 2, Israel bombed a mosque in Deir al-Balah. It later levelled Gaza’s only dialysis facility. “Safe zones” such as Al-Mawasi, designated by Israel itself, have been relentlessly targeted; killing families already displaced. And as the world watched, Israel announced the construction of 22 new illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Every tenet of international humanitarian law is being shredded in real-time. The Geneva Conventions. The Rome Statute. UN Resolutions. All ignored. In the meantime, the silence from the Global North has become deafening. American officials speak of Israel’s “right to defend itself” while continuing to supply the very weapons pulverizing an already imprisoned population. Western media peddles false symmetry in a war that is anything but.
The Muslim world, too, stands indicted. OIC summits issue resolutions; humanitarian funds trickle in. Yet diplomatic outrage still fails to translate into diplomatic cost. The Ummah’s claim to solidarity rings hollow when it cannot stop genocide in its sacred geography.
However, the people refuse to be silent. In London, an 18-hour vigil read the names of over 15,000 children slain in Gaza. In capitals across the West, public rage simmers beneath the surface of official hypocrisy.
Pakistan’s position must now evolve beyond condemnation. The Foreign Office should actively pursue legal avenues, at the International Court of Justice, through universal jurisdiction, and via coordinated economic pressure. Similarly, at home, we must ensure that Palestine is not a passing headline but a permanent national cause.
History will not forget this hour. Let it not record that the sky fell on Gaza and all of us watched from behind a veil of caution. *