What will we do for the people of Gaza?

Dhaka—As the world observes the holy month of Ramadan, Gaza continues to suffer endless bloodshed under Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. More than 50,000 lives have been lost, with women, children, and the elderly among them, while over 100,000 have been wounded. Most of them suffered permanent disabilities that will affect them for the rest of their lives.

Homes have been flattened with people still sleeping in their beds, hospitals removed from the face of the earth along with their patients, and mosques leveled with worshippers still praying inside. The people of Gaza have been robbed of daily essentials such as food, water, medicine, and electricity. They have been systematically denied and deprived of their needs and robbed of dignity, peace of mind, and humanity.

The Israeli government under Netanyahu however was not satisfied with the catastrophe they’ve inflicted over 15 months. Contrary to what Israel and some others claim, the recent 57-day pause was not a humanitarian respite. Rather, it was a strategic reprieve for Netanyahu’s exhausted military force. Tired of endlessly killing innocent Gazans, they’ve now returned with even greater ferocity, rejuvenated and ready to kill more innocent women and children. Netanyahu himself confirmed this with alarming impudence: “We resumed the war with all our strength, and this is just the beginning”—as if he were threatening a great power and not a tiny strip of land with majority of its population being women and children.

Then comes his minister of defense, who is even more racist, parroting his master and saying: “Oh people of Gaza, the destruction that the air force has caused is just the beginning, and what is coming will be worse, and you alone will pay the price. You must return all the hostages and expel Hamas from Gaza, and then we will allow everyone to leave Gaza to any place in the world, for whoever wants to.”

This demand is both unrealistic and revealing. It acknowledges that after more than a year of warfare, Israel has failed to achieve its own objectives despite committing the most heinous massacre in the 21st century. Instead, it now seeks to coerce the Gazan population into achieving what its own military could not. The implication is clear—displacement remains their ultimate goal. They offer the people of Gaza permission to leave their own land and disperse themselves across the world as if this were a reward, and that the indigenous people of the land would abandon their homes.

This moment raises urgent questions, not just for Palestinians, but for the world. If the massacre of Palestinians were met with silence today, then who will be next? The paralysis of the United Nations and the Security Council in the face of a single veto from the United States sheds light on a troubling reality: International law is simply a tool to be discarded if its implementation is contrary to US interests.

The US, through its military and political support, has made itself complicit in Israel’s actions. This is not merely an issue of Palestinian suffering; it is an indictment of a world order where one country gets to unilaterally decide who lives or dies, where power dictates justice, and where the suffering of millions is reduced to a geopolitical calculation.

In this holy month, for nearly two billion Muslims and for conscientious people across the globe, this is a test of principle. If a collective voice is not raised now, what does that say about the mighty values we claim to uphold? The demand is not for war or violence, it is for moral clarity, for a loud and unequivocal rejection of a system that enables war crimes under the guise of security. We are tired of coded rhetoric. The blood of our children forces us to call things by their actual names. A genocide continues in front of our eyes, and we have normalized it, just as our enemy wanted. History will show us no mercy, nor will future generations, and most importantly, God will not forgive us for our silence.

The support for Israel by the US, especially under the Trump administration, constitutes not just an insult to Palestinians but explicit hostility to humanity itself. Diplomatic statements and carefully worded condemnations are no longer sufficient—history will judge our response, and future generations will ask whether we remained silent in the face of such undeniable injustice. The Daily Star/Asia News Network

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Yousef SY Ramadan is the ambassador of Palestine to Bangladesh.

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The Philippine Daily Inquirer is a member of the Asia News Network, an alliance of 22 media titles in the region.