OPINION: Israel must be held accountable for violence

The so-called “pause” in Gaza is not liberation or self-determination, it’s pacification disguised as peace. An estimated 58,573 Palestinians have been killed and 139,607 injured since October 2023, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Children account for almost one-third of those deaths. The bombardment may have slowed, but the siege, starvation and suffocation of a people continue in full force.

Reconstruction plans and diplomatic resets have reframed what even the United Nations has called a genocide as a “humanitarian challenge,” a tragedy to manage rather than a crime to prosecute. The world, fatigued by images of mass death, is being lulled into a narrative of “rebuilding” without accountability, one that risks the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as a logistics problem instead of an atrocity.

Across the West Bank, violence continues largely unreported. The United Nations calls 2025 one of the deadliest years on record, with settler attacks averaging seven per day, forcing thousands from their homes. Olive groves, the beating heart of Palestinian heritage, are burned and bulldozed; more than 1.3 million trees have been destroyed since the war began. Each uprooted olive tree is an act of cultural erasure, a strike at memory itself. Attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque persist, proving that the campaign against Palestinians is spiritual as much as physical.

In Gaza, famine is no longer a looming hypothetical; it is reality. The World Health Organization confirmed in August 2025 that famine conditions exist for the first time in Gaza’s history. Over 500,000 people face starvation, and 57 children have already died from malnutrition. Fewer than half of planned aid convoys are allowed entry. The UN reports that only 1.5% of Gaza’s cropland remains both accessible and intact, the rest is bombed, poisoned, or sealed off by Israeli “no-go” zones.

Even places of refuge have become killing grounds. Since the start of the war, more than 450 schools and universities, many used as UN shelters, have been damaged or destroyed. The Church of Saint Porphyrius, Gaza’s third-oldest church, was struck in an air raid that killed at least 16 people. Hospitals like Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Arab have been bombed multiple times, while the Palestine Hotel and other civilian shelters were reduced to rubble.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has confirmed over 230 journalists and media workers killed, the highest toll for press freedom in modern history. Cameras became targets; truth became the enemy. To silence witnesses is to prepare the next war unrecorded.

Even in this supposed ceasefire, Palestinians who cross invisible buffer lines are shot by snipers. Israel’s project is not coexistence; it is constriction, to make life so unbearable that survival itself becomes resistance.

Arab and Muslim states, eager for regional stability, have largely acquiesced to this “quasi-peace.” They condemn televised massacres but tolerate the slow killing that doesn’t trend online. Under the guise of normalization, trade and diplomatic deals advance while 1.9 million Gazans remain displaced, many living among the ruins of bombed neighborhoods. This is not peace; it is managed subjugation.

The world cannot let genocide be paused only to resume under new branding. Israel must be held morally, legally and financially accountable. True peace demands four urgent steps:

1. Unrestricted humanitarian access to Gaza and the West Bank.

2. Independent investigations into war crimes, collective punishment and forced displacement.

3. Restoration of land, homes and livelihoods. This includes olive groves, churches, mosques, schools and hospitals.

4. A political process centered on Palestinian sovereignty and the right of return, not externally managed dependency.

After 77 years of dispossession, symbolic gestures and reconstruction conferences are not enough. Liberation means more than the absence of bombs. It means freedom from blockade, from occupation and from erasure. The world revolted against open-ended slaughter; it must not now accept Palestinians’ slow death as the price of “stability.” To rebuild without justice is to bury truth under the rubble. A pause in genocide is not peace, it is preparation for the next chapter of oppression. Only when Palestine is free, sovereign and whole can the world call this justice.