It's been two years since the Gaza War began on October 7, 2023.

At the time of writing, peace talks have begun in Cairo. 

If this deal somehow goes through, it will mark not a victory of peace, but the death of credibility. Because peace imposed through coercion is not peace. Reconstruction without accountability is not justice.

Some Gazans – weary, starved, emotionally hollowed out – are welcoming the proposal. Not because they believe it will save them, but because it is the only thing left that faintly resembles hope.

An impossible choice seems to have been dangled in front of Gazans: “Do you love your children more than you hate your oppressor?” 

For them, it’s either peace without dignity, or resistance without a future.

What we’re witnessing is a grotesque theatre – a ‘rule-based order’ that enforces no rules when its favored actor breaks them. 

The international community, bound by treaties and moral obligation to act against genocide, instead offers euphemisms: “complex situation,” “difficult circumstances,” “shared tragedy.” In doing so, it has revealed itself not as a keeper of order but as a curator of selective outrage.

The weight of the dead

Two years into this war, Gaza has ceased to exist in the way the world once understood it.

Over 67,000 Palestinians are dead. Nearly half are children. Entire bloodlines erased in minutes. Gaza’s hospitals were fragile once, but now they’ve turned into graveyards. The United Nations calls it a genocide. The International Court of Justice indicts Israel’s leadership. Yet the bombs don’t stop. The aid doesn’t flow. And the world, that loves its phrase “rule-based order,” stares at its feet.

The UN’s latest reports suggest that tens of thousands more are missing, buried under rubble that aid workers have neither the tools nor the permission to clear. More than 1.9 million people have been displaced, which is nearly all Gazans. Famine conditions have been confirmed across the northern strip. Children are dying not only from bombs, but from malnutrition and thirst.

Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid has only tightened. UNRWA convoys have been repeatedly halted or targeted. Trucks loaded with flour and insulin are turned back for “security checks” that last weeks. Air-dropped food parcels land in craters or are seized by desperate crowds. The Israeli government continues to insist that “enough aid” is flowing through, even as satellite imagery shows entire districts starved into silence.

The International Court of Justice has formally declared that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the threshold for genocide – a historic indictment. Yet nothing has changed. The UN Secretary-General has said, in uncharacteristically blunt language, “We are witnessing a war on children.” The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, accusing them of “extermination, starvation as a method of warfare, and persecution.”

Still, Israel’s campaign goes on, funded and armed by the same nations that once lectured the world about rules and restraint.

Silencing of witnesses

If the world still struggles to comprehend the full scale of Gaza’s destruction, it’s because the witnesses have been systematically erased.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 223 journalists have been killed in Gaza – the highest toll of media workers in any conflict this century. Reporters in marked press vests, camera crews, and entire news bureaus were wiped out. Their press vests did not protect them; they made them easier to find.

Foreign reporters have been banned from entering Gaza. Internet and phone services are routinely cut during major military operations. Drone strikes have hit marked press vehicles. Al Jazeera’s offices were bombed. The message is clear: If you show the world what’s happening, you won’t live to file your story.

This chokehold on truth is what allows governments to maintain the illusion of moral neutrality. Without pictures, the suffering is easier to debate. Without reporters, atrocities become “claims.” The deliberate destruction of Gaza’s storytellers is not collateral damage; it is strategy. It ensures that the world’s conscience remains comfortably underinformed.

Politics of hypocrisy

Through it all, the United States has continued to play benefactor and bystander in equal measure. In the past 24 months, Washington has supplied Israel with billions in military aid, precision bombs, artillery shells, and diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Every ceasefire resolution that carried the word “binding” was vetoed. Every condemnation was softened to “concern.”

The proposed Israel-Palestine peace deal promises a ceasefire and reconstruction under international supervision, with US President Donald Trump himself reportedly offering to oversee “peace governance.”

The irony writes itself – a man who recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, whose administration greenlit unprecedented military aid to the Israeli Defense Forces – now positioned as the arbiter of balance. No Palestinian voice was consulted in drafting these terms. No guarantee has been offered if Israel chooses to violate them.

Now, with an election season looming and Trump’s shadow re-emerging, the White House has embraced this ‘peace initiative’ – a plan drafted by those who bear direct responsibility for the carnage. It is sold as pragmatism, but it reeks of political convenience. It offers reconstruction without justice, autonomy without sovereignty, peace without dignity.

Even Trump’s “express demand” for Israel to halt bombings was ignored. The airstrikes continued, unbothered, as if to remind the world who truly calls the shots. Netanyahu’s cabinet has since refused to formally accept the deal’s terms, declaring them “contrary to Israel’s security needs.” In other words, even this colonial script, written by allies, was not subservient enough.

End of pretenses

A colleague I was speaking to the other day said he feels guilty every time he scrolls past Gaza’s pictures – the starving children, the white shrouds, the eyes that haunt your feed – but he still scrolls. “Nothing changes,” he said, “You have to look away sometimes, just to stay sane.” 

He and I have never agreed more. Empathy, in this era, comes with burnout.

A flotilla did sail with Greta Thunberg aboard, a 22-year-old still stubborn enough to believe in doing the right thing when adults have perfected the art of looking away. But even she knows this is not about a single act of courage. It’s about a system that pretends to care. A world that chants “never again” while watching “again” unfold in real time.

Thunberg is no savior, and she doesn’t pretend to be one. But in her quiet persistence, there’s a reminder of what moral clarity looks like. It shouldn’t require a Swedish activist barely out of her teens to stand in for the conscience of the world – and yet, here we are.

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