In Gaza ‘never again’ happened again as the powerful looked on
Palestinians walk through the destruction caused by the Israeli air and ground offensive in Rafah,southern Gaza, early in 2025
Toufic Haddad writes in The New Arab on 29 January 2025:
The scenes of 300,000 Palestinians returning to northern Gaza a week after the ceasefire are poignant and bittersweet.
On the one hand, they speak to the rebuffing of a key element of Israel’s strategy in its 15-month genocide in the Gaza Strip – to depopulate these areas permanently through besiegement, starvation and relentless bombing, and to possibly even re-colonise these areas with Jewish settlers in the future.
On the other hand, everyone knows that a lunar landscape awaits these communities, where entire neighbourhoods, let alone individual homes, are unrecognisable. For those able to identify their personal heap of rubble, the task now becomes one of sifting through an estimated 50 million tons of debris to salvage what might be redeemed, while disentangling decomposed bodies from twisted rebar.
Ten thousand people are expected to be picked from the rubble in this way across the Gaza Strip. These are the missing persons yet to be formally added to the toll of 47,000 corpses already tallied. This presumes of course that these bodies haven’t yet been eaten by wild animals or vaporised entirely by high-explosives from US-Israeli missiles.
A broken global order
One Gaza mother was filmed kissing the skull of her son, as she cradles it like an infant. “Gather his bones for me. Gather everything of him,” she said. “I swear I’m not afraid of you, Hasan [..] I’ve come to take you my son. I couldn’t sleep or find joy until I found you, my son.”
Who listens to the cries of Gaza’s mothers? I posted the video of this chilling scene to my Facebook page but the invisible algorithms that curate our feeds have long ensured posts like these barely get an audience.