Africa-Press – Botswana. Let there be no doubt: Every parliament that fails to condemn the unspeakable atrocities that are being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, every journalist who blurs the facts, every intellectual who equivocates, and every human being who sees this and turns away contributes to normalisation of genocide.
There are few words in any language that carry the moral gravity of genocide. It is the deliberate destruction of a people – ethnic, racial, religious, or national – not merely through bombs and bullets but through starvation, displacement, erasure of identity, and annihilation of hope.
And yet, in the face of such a crime unfolding in Gaza, the world stands mute, its moral compass shattered, its institutions compromised, its leaders complicit by silence or worse – by active support.
Since October 2023, the Gaza Strip has become a landscape of unspeakable suffering. As at 24 June 2025, more than 56,000 people have been killed and 131 848 injured, the majority of them women and children.
This is extermination
More than 70% of all homes have been destroyed. Hospitals have been reduced to rubble, water systems and electricity, education, healthcare facilities obliterated. Nearly the entire population – over two million souls – has been displaced, many more than once.
This is not war. This is not proportionality. This is extermination.
And yet the international community dithers. Some governments offer carefully-worded statements about “regret” or “concern.” Others supply the very weapons – and intelligence – used to commit these atrocities.
Israel claims it is fighting Hamas, and yet it is Gaza’s children who are dying by the thousands. Entire families have been wiped from the civil registry. Aid convoys are bombed. Journalists are silenced, with several killed. The dead are buried in mass graves, if at all.
Silence is not neutral
If this is not genocide, then the term has no meaning.
History will record this moment. It will ask: where were the champions of human rights? Where were the defenders of international law? Where were the voices that said “Never Again” after Rwanda, Srebrenica, and the Holocaust? That haunting pledge rings hollow now.
The silence is not neutral. It is endorsement. It is complicity. Every veto at the UN Security Council, every suspension of funding to UNRWA, every “unequivocal” support for Israel’s actions – even as it violates the Fourth Geneva Convention with impunity – is a brick in the edifice of impunity.
Gaza is not merely a tragedy for Palestinians. It is a test for humanity. And humanity is failing.
For decades, the people of Gaza have lived in a cage – a blockade imposed by land, sea and air. The international community watched. When children drank sewage-contaminated water, the world debated. When hospitals ran out of medicine, the world wrote reports. Now, as white phosphorus rains down and starvation is used as a weapon of war, the world closes its eyes.
The impotence of the African Union
The silence of the Arab League, the impotence of the African Union, the division of the European Union, and the moral bankruptcy of American foreign policy converge into a deafening moral vacuum.
The International Court of Justice has ruled, in its provisional measures, that there is a plausible case that Israel is committing genocide. South Africa – against the tide of fear and geopolitics – has shown courage by bringing this case forward. Yet even this legal process is treated by many states as a political inconvenience, not a desperate plea for justice.
When Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide, he did so to describe the horror of the Nazi extermination of Jews. He wanted to name a crime so monstrous that it would never be repeated. Today, Israel invokes that same Holocaust to justify the total destruction of a people locked behind barbed wire and cement walls. The very logic of ‘Never Again’ has been inverted.
Bombing refugee camps
Genocide is not only the act of mass killing. It includes measures intended to destroy a people “in whole or in part,” including the deliberate infliction of conditions calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Starving a population. Denying them medicine. Bombing refugee camps. Declaring them “human animals.” These are not accidental byproducts of war. They are deliberate policies.
Let there be no doubt: those who remain silent now are on the wrong side of history. Every parliament that fails to condemn. Every journalist who blurs the facts. Every intellectual who equivocates. Every human being who sees this suffering and turns away contributes to the normalisation of genocide.
This is not a call for slogans. It is a call for action. A total arms embargo on Israel. Suspension of diplomatic relations. Economic sanctions. War crimes investigations. Reparations. Protection for the people of Gaza through international humanitarian intervention – not in the name of politics but in the name of human decency.
Although its soil is soaked in blood, Gaza will rise again. Its children will remember who stood with them and who let them die. And the world must ask itself: how many more genocides will we ignore before we realise that each one chips away at our own humanity?
Because in the end, what is at stake in Gaza is not only the future of the Palestinian people but the future of the idea that we are capable of justice.
Source: Botswana Gazette
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