There Are No Words
On some level, it doesn’t really matter whether or not Israeli officials are doing all this intentionally (though they unambiguously are) or whether or not the war counts as a genocide (though it most certainly does). As even skimming these facts and figures makes clear, what Israel is doing to Gaza, however you want to define it, is intolerable and world-historically awful.
There are other wars that have had bigger death tolls or even larger proportions of civilians killed. There are other countries that have had more explosives dropped on them. Other governments have killed more kids and sadistically tortured them. Other countries have been similarly physically destroyed and environmentally poisoned. Other wars have seen health care and aid workers killed and hospitals destroyed. There are other conflicts that have seen deliberately created famines.
What sets Gaza apart is not just that it contains all of these features and more, but that it ranks among the worst, if not the worst, in all of them going back decades — and sometimes even for the full scope of history. There is a reason why people who have spent their careers living in, fighting, observing, doing humanitarian work in, and researching conflicts keep consistently saying that they have never in their lives seen something as bad as what is happening in Gaza: because what we are watching in Gaza is not just another sad and terrible thing happening in some far-off part of the world, but something unprecedentedly cruel and inhuman even in the scope of those terrible things.
What we have watched, what we are continuing to watch, is the obliteration of a society of two million people. Every facet of modern civilization, as well as the most elementary things needed for even a state of basic subsistence for a human community, has been deliberately and almost completely destroyed by the Israeli military in Gaza. And now we are watching the gradual but accelerating mass die-off of the people who once lived there, through a combination of starvation, disease, and murder.
