The Electronic Intifada 16 July 2025
Children at a charity kitchen in Nuseirat await food rations on 13 July 2025.
APA imagesThere is a lot of talk at the moment about a ceasefire in Gaza.
But unlike 24 June, when the entire world watched US President Donald Trump proudly impose a ceasefire on Israel and Iran after 12 days, there is no similar urgency on Gaza, where Israel has now killed more than 58,000 people since October 2023.
“Congratulations to the Iranian people,” said Yasser al-Hour, 19, who lost his brother and sister when an Israeli airstrike hit the house across from theirs in Nuseirat on 13 October 2023. He is currently displaced to a tent in another part of the area.
“No one deserves to live the way we are living in this world. But what truly hurts is the sense of isolation.”
That sentiment is universally shared in Gaza. We are genuinely happy for Iran. But the world continues to ignore our suffering – suffering that has dragged on for over 650 days.
Since 7 October, 2023, several conflicts have erupted and ended within comparatively short time frames – largely due to massive international pressure. This includes, in addition to the 12-day Iran-Israel conflict, the Hizballah-Israel agreement on 27 November 2024 – which Israel continues to breach at will – and the India-Pakistan conflict, which ended after just four days of mutual bombardment on 10 May 2025.
Although these wars differed in scale, geography, political dynamics and military capacities – whether it was a border conflict, a regional standoff or a confrontation between distant enemies – they all ended the same way: through US and international mediation and pressure.
So why not Gaza, where Israel’s military – fully equipped with the latest weaponry from its Western sponsors – is facing an opponent with no missile defense, no army, no air force, no navy or anything approaching modern military hardware?
Double standards
The Israeli military has destroyed almost all Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including housing, schools, hospitals, universities. It has forcibly displaced 90 percent of Gaza’s population, leaving 1.9 million people homeless and destitute. It is deliberately preventing the delivery of food, medicine, electricity and fuel from entry and is even banning people from going into the sea.
More than 82 percent of Gaza’s tiny territory has been declared no-go areas, and, for good measure, Israel is now planning to push all Gaza’s residents into the south in Rafah, which it has completely destroyed. The UN has said that the Rafah plan would “de-facto create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt.”
Where is the urgency? Where is the international pressure?
The world, it seems, respects only the language of power. If a war erupts between two equal sides, international actors will act with haste and determination to end the conflict.
But in a clearly unequal situation, there is no similar response. This is where all the illusions of international law collapse. What is expected from us is simple: to accept death, slow or quick, and to do so silently, without resistance.
Gaza has become irrefutable evidence of the world’s double standards. Since October 2023, we have been stripped of even the most basic rights, and yet no real action has ever been taken.
Every so-called red line the world claims should never be crossed against civilians has been crossed against us repeatedly for over 21 months.
Our turn
“When is our turn?” Sama, 14, my younger sister, asked with childlike innocence when I told my father about the Iran-Israel ceasefire.
That morning, I had woken up early and climbed onto our roof, holding my phone high, trying to connect my eSIM card to access the internet – the only way to update the news from Telegram channels, since Gaza’s internet had been completely cut off that day.
Trying to reassure her, I told her: “Inshallah, our turn is coming soon.”
But deep inside, I was confronted with a reality that said differently.
I still remember the first days of the Iran-Israel conflict.
Back then, I was constantly calling Hassan Abo Qamar, the only person I knew whose TV cables were still intact, just to stay in touch with what was happening in the world while Gaza was suffering from an internet blackout.
I once asked him if there was any serious possibility of a ceasefire for Gaza. He replied:
“Do you know the news ticker at the bottom of the screen on Al Jazeera?”
“Yes,” I answered, expecting him to share breaking news.
He sighed: “We’re not even mentioned in that ticker.”
Writing hungry
I still can’t understand how directly targeting civilians with the most brutal weapons has become normalized. How can the bombing of hospitals – like Al Ahli Arab Hospital, which left over 500 martyrs in October 2023, for instance, or the repeated invasions of Al-Shifa and Kamal Adwan hospitals – pass with little to no comment.
Even now, as you read these words, I’m sure there is a mother crying because she has lost her son – after all, Israel has killed or maimed more than 50,000 children over the past 650 days, working out at more than 76 children every day.
Somewhere, a brother is digging a grave to bury his sister’s body.
Somewhere, a father is crushed by helplessness because he cannot afford bread for his family in a place where one in four people face starvation.
And yet, according to the First Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1977, Article 54 – Protection of Objects Indispensable to the Survival of the Civilian Population: “Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited.”
Yet, this is where we are.
As I write the final lines of this article at 10 pm, I have barely eaten – just a single meal today of beans and rice. We eat not to enjoy, but to avoid dying of hunger – just enough calories to fuel the exhausting search for the next meal.
And the world still watches.
Ahmad Abu Shawish is a journalist and an activist in Gaza. He is a dabka dancer and a chess player.
