“Civilians are hungry. They are thirsty. They are sick. They are homeless. They have been pushed beyond the limits of endurance – beyond what any human being should bear. The lives of 2.1 million people cannot depend on luck and hope alone.”
And yet, that is exactly what they depend on. Luck and hope. As has been proven, they cannot rely on anything else.
Rightly, UN official Joyce Msuya asks: “What has become of our basic sense of humanity?” She pointed out in a speech during a session on Gaza that “what we have witnessed over the past 11 months calls into question the world’s commitment to the international legal order that was designed to prevent these tragedies.”
The question “What became of our humanity?” haunts, or should haunt us all. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, their homes destroyed, starvation and disease threaten the lives of thousands more, and children are dying even from sheer terror.
Sometimes, a story comes along that shakes us. Like the one about the father who went to obtain birth certificates for his newborn twin children, only to return to find that he no longer had children or a wife. They were killed in the bombings.
But the shock lasts very little. One news story follows another, and the prolonged duration of a war turns it into a routine in the minds of people.
The same people might still be moved by cinematic and literary depictions of the suffering endured by a people some decades ago. A people whose government happens to be the perpetrator today.
Is our sensitivity selective, or is it because we have the alibi that we weren’t there back then to be held accountable for inaction or even complicity, allowing us to empathise with the human tragedy?
“Are we blind to history repeating?” asks Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. “The world’s failure to protect Palestinians echoes its failures with Bosnians and Tutsis, despite promises made after the Holocaust to prevent such atrocities,” she stated. “Human rights are being buried altogether, one by one.”
In a few decades, when what is happening now becomes a historical event, future generations will wonder what the rest of the world did, what their governments did, how they could tolerate all this happening beside them. What had happened to their humanity?
Indeed, what has happened to our humanity?