The world’s total failure to safeguard Palestinian civilians in Gaza over the past year is causing lasting harm to international law, with potentially alarming consequences for the entire globe.
Over the past year, international law has been violated daily with complete impunity. Israel’s relentless and indiscriminate assaults have killed and injured civilians at a faster rate than anywhere else this century. Starvation is being used as a weapon of war, with food blocked from reaching malnourished children. Families are shuffled from one place to another like chess pieces, only to be bombed in the schools and tents where they were told to seek safety. Entire neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble, and schools, hospitals, and religious sites have faced unprecedented destruction.
Gaza has seen more humanitarian workers, medics, teachers, and journalists killed than anywhere else. Alarming warnings of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and war crimes are being ignored as each day brings new horrors, with families forced into ever-smaller areas. The entire fabric of Gaza’s society is being torn apart.
International Humanitarian Law (IHL), or ‘the law of war’, was established to protect civilians all over the world from the impact of conflict. If these laws are not upheld consistently and are allowed to be violated so blatantly, there is even less chance of holding warring parties to account and protecting civilians elsewhere. Millions of lives affected by conflicts all over the world are at stake.
As the crisis worsens, Islamic Relief is urging for an immediate and lasting ceasefire across the region. They call on international governments to use all their influence to stop attacks on civilians and violations of international law, including halting arms sales that drive the violence. Their ultimate vision is a lasting peace where Palestinians and Israelis can live safely, with dignity, and enjoy equal fundamental human rights. They believe this can only happen once the Israeli Occupation ends.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is almost unmatched. An Islamic Relief aid worker there, whose identity is kept secret for safety reasons, says:
This has been a year of torture, famine, loss and annihilation. After one year, I still don’t see any ceasefire on the horizon, and Israel blocks aid with impunity as the world watches.
“Almost everyone is displaced. My own house is damaged and uninhabitable, my sisters and brothers have lost their homes, and all my colleagues at Islamic Relief have lost theirs.
“Our Islamic Relief office is gone, as are my children’s schools, the mosque I used to pray at, the hospital where my kids were born, the restaurants I liked, and my Christian neighbours’ church. Israel is systematically destroying our lives.
“We search everywhere for medicine for my mum’s diabetes, but can’t find it anywhere. My friend is suffering so badly from kidney stones that they can hardly move, but there is no treatment. I can’t even find paracetamol, and Israel blocks wounded people from leaving Gaza for treatment.”
Despite the enormous challenges, Islamic Relief staff and local partners have delivered aid almost every single day over the past year. This includes cooking and distributing more than 40 million hot meals for displaced families who have nothing else to eat, providing water to 110,000 people a day, supplying nutritional supplements to 35,000 pregnant women and young children every 2 weeks, and running psychosocial support sessions for over 94,000 children.
But the scale of the crisis is almost incomprehensible. One in every 16 people in Gaza has now killed or wounded, with more than 41,000 people killed and 96,000 injured. Around 1.9 million people – 90% of the population – are now displaced from their homes, most of them having to move multiple times as nowhere is safe. 60% of homes and 68% of roads are damaged or destroyed, and more than half of hospitals and health facilities have been forced to shut down. 85% of schools have been bombed, hundreds of teachers have been killed, and 625,000 children have now been out of school for a whole year, with enormous implications for future generations. The relentless crisis is having a devastating psychological toll.
Almost all civilians are facing severe shortages of food, with young children at immediate risk of starvation and facing long-term impacts of malnutrition such as stunted growth and impaired cognitive development.
This year-long massacre must not be allowed to continue for a moment longer.