The moral imperative: confronting the unseen horrors of Gaza amidst global indifference

Steve Bannon calls it “flooding the zone with shit”. Bannon argues that the media can only deal with one thing at a time, and that therefore if you flood the media with misinformation, lies (and shit) people become disorientated.

If you are so inclined, it is at those times that Bannon believes you disrupt things. Even democracy. Donald Trump, of course, is a master of flooding our minds with shit. In the four months since becoming president, there seems to be little other than his lies and cruelty.

In 2024, despite the many horrors, there were moments when I hung on to a faint hope that journalism and the coverage of what was happening in Gaza might be different this time around. Palestinians in Gaza have always been dying. Children have been slaughtered in Gaza for decades. Was it at all possible that a veil was being lifted?

The etymology of the word veil is Anglo-French and Old North French. In its most common usage, it is a head or face covering that a nun or bride might wear. But it is also about concealment and invisibility. Hiding something from the eyes of another. And hiding one’s own eyes perhaps from seeing.

The counterpoint is, of course, that of unveiling, about making clear, and so importantly freeing the eyes from what has been hidden.

It felt that for the first time that hundreds of thousands of people were beginning to see, to move the veil from their eyes and to begin to see the suffering of the Palestinians. And for so much of that year, the stories and the images kept reaching me.

As appalling as the stories and images were, it felt that they were part of the unveiling. I saw pictures and read stories that more often than not made me miss a breath.

I saw the dismembered corpse of a young girl hanging from a wall, of a father carrying his dead child with the child’s skull split wide open like a smashed watermelon, and I read report after report about five-year-old Hind Rajab, a little girl that men in a tank felt they could kill with impunity.

In that year, I tried to write about the horror of Gaza in an attempt to grapple with it in my own mind, in a vain and impotent contribution from afar.

But then, slowly but surely, over the course of the past five months, for me (in my feeds), the stories emerging from Gaza slowed. There were fewer horrifying images. I began to wonder why. Is it because all the journalists have been killed by Israel? Is it because Trump has taken over our news feeds? Is it my algorithm? Or perhaps there is simply less killing.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs publishes the Humanitarian Situation Update/Gaza Strip every other Tuesday. Below, I have chosen and reproduced selected parts of one of the sections on fatalities (#284 from 30 April 2025).

For the period (22-28 April, 2025), they report 12 sets of fatalities – below, I have chosen five of the 12. There are never fewer than nine fatalities on a single day, while the highest number is 23.

• “Between 22 and 28 April, incidents resulting in fatalities were reported across the Gaza Strip, including the following:

1. a)   On 23 April, at about 01:30, at least 10 Palestinians were reportedly killed and several others, including women and children, were injured when IDP tents within the premises of Yafa school-turned-shelter were hit in At Tuffah neighbourhood, in eastern Gaza city. A fire broke out across the school with most of the fatalities reportedly severely burned.


2. b) On 24 April, at about 17:03, 23 Palestinians were reportedly killed and others, including women and children, were injured when a residential building reportedly housing IDPs (internally displaced persons) was hit in Jabalya refugee camp, in North Gaza.


3. c) On 25 April, at about 15:00, 10 Palestinians, including five brothers, were reportedly killed and others injured when a residential building was hit in southeastern Khan Younis.


4. d)   On 26 April, at about 01:00, at least 22 Palestinians, including at least 13 children and six women, were reportedly killed and others injured when a residential building was hit in As Sabra neighbourhood, in central Gaza City.


5. e) On 27 April, at about 20:10, 13 Palestinians, including a woman and her six children, were reportedly killed and others injured when a residential building was hit in southern Khan Younis.” (from #284 from 30 April 2025)

Far from the killing having stopped, it is clear that the slaughter continues. And then, as if to allay any thoughts I had about veils, about concealment, about impunity, on 4 May 2025, the lead cheerleader for the extermination of Gaza, Itamar Ben-Gvir (Minister of National Security in the Israeli government), called for the expansion of the war in Gaza.

Of course, for Ben-Gvir, “expansion” has no geographic meaning (given that Gaza is only 41km long and from 6km to 12km wide, but has seen 85,000 tonnes of bombs dropped.

For Ben-Gvir, expansion is about annihilation, cruelty and pushing up the death count. On 5 May 2025, the Israeli cabinet approved plans for an expanded offensive in Gaza and the permanent occupation of the territory.

And on the same day, while attending a conference, the Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich – almost as if feeling outdone by the callousness of his cabinet colleague Ben-Gvir – stated that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed”.

In his recent book, The World After Gaza, Pankaj Mishra describes how he wrote it out of a deep sense of guilt. He writes that his guilt is “a broad human condition after Israel’s livestreamed mass-murder spree in the Middle East, and the obligation that the living have to the innocent dead”.

In locating his sense of guilt, he also draws on the work of the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who, in trying to understand post-World War 2 moral responsibility, spoke of “metaphysical guilt”. Jaspers saw this as an actual affliction, felt when people became aware of their impotence in the face of inconceivable barbarism.

For Jaspers (and for Mishra), guilt lies in the failure to act.

Gaza is the defining moral issue of our time. I write this out of guilt. Out of a sense that I am not doing enough in the face of barbarism. The killing has not stopped, and it is now clear that it will not stop.

Can you lift your veil? Can you let your eyes see what is happening? And I put this challenge to you, borrowing from the title of Omar El Akkad’s new book (One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This), are you against this now? Right now, in the present.

And if you are, what are you going to do? DM