Gaza genocide: How Israel made horror a ritual of daily life
Hossam Shaker writes in Middle East Eye on 16 August 2026:
Life under genocide has its familiar daily rituals. A discerning eye detects latent horrors in the scenes that unfold in succession across screens.
Elsewhere, the scene itself disappears beneath rubble, entombing the bodies of thousands of Palestinians whose breath was cut off below, while their families remain unable to retrieve them.
In the Gaza Strip, modern brutality has made its terrible presence felt through atrocity after atrocity, in full view of the entire world. These horrors were caused not by a natural disaster, but by the tsunami of modern genocide carried out by Israel using American and western weapons, munitions and technologies.
Genocide has taken possession of the defining features of everyday life in all their details, leaving its tragic imprint on the population in every sphere. The fragments that follow are drawn from that reality.
The children of Gaza know no daily life without a menacing sound accompanying them day and night, without pause. This has been the case almost since the moment they first opened their eyes to the world.
Sonic terror
The sound that accompanies Gaza day and night is the buzzing of Israeli military drones, which circle overhead in swarms and tirelessly monitor every part of the Gaza Strip around the clock.
These drones acquired their local name from their disturbing acoustic effect: residents call them “zanana”, an Arabic coinage derived from the buzzing sound they emit.
The world has come to know that there is no shelter in Gaza, and nowhere within it that is safe. Young children besieged in this narrow strip overlooking the flank of the Mediterranean Sea may find it difficult to imagine a world free of the noise, a noise that entrenches within them a constant sense of threat, of bombardment that may come at any moment.
In this way, the occupation seizes control of the soundscape and sends its inhabitants a message: they are being watched relentlessly and the next projectile may strike one of them here or there, killing or wounding that person together with everyone nearby.
This thunderous hovering is a mixture of auditory domination, sonic terror and psychological intimidation.
Every Palestinian in Gaza has personal experience of tragedies associated with these military drones in their various forms, through witnessing firsthand the bombardments that took the lives of relatives, neighbours and loved ones, whose bodies were torn apart while their memories remained.
Air strikes were unknown before the modern age. They began to develop during the First World War and gave rise to a preventive practice: warning sirens were sounded so people could take cover and seek refuge in shelters prepared for that purpose.
The genocidal campaign targeting the Palestinian people in Gaza since October 2023 has employed the most advanced instruments of warfare of its time, including squadrons of American-made warplanes and drones sharing the work of aerial bombardment.
Yet not a single warning siren has sounded in Gaza. This is not the result of negligence or malfunction. The very idea of warning sirens has become absurd as bombardment has continued without interruption, making any warning a cruel joke. More importantly, there is no shelter for residents to flee to, no possibility of protection from the exploding horrors falling from the sky.
The crowding of civilians into an underground shelter would itself pose a grave risk to their lives. Heavy munitions penetrate deep below the surface and leave vast craters, as has been seen in the heart of residential neighbourhoods, in refugee camps, around hospitals and near places of worship.
The primitive tools available cannot retrieve those trapped beneath the rubble.
The world has come to know that there is no shelter in Gaza, and nowhere within it that is safe.