The Gaza Crisis is Not a Surprise, but a Failure on a Global Scale: Palestinians in Gaza as a People’s Lives

We were just one family, experiencing one terrifying close call. More than two million Palestinians are trapped inside Gaza, about half under the age of 18, as Israel pounds us in retaliation for Hamas’s surprise attack on Saturday, with the United States promising “surging” military support.

No electricity means no internet or connection to the outside world. Sewage is pouring into Gaza’s streets and waste treatment facilities need electricity. The water supply had been cut. Driving south on Monday, I passed five United Nations schools-turned-shelters, so jampacked with displaced people that families spilled out into the yards. The dread is growing inside me as I know the worst is yet to come.

Many of the fighters who breached the walls are older than Ali and were born during the second intifada. Unemployment and poverty rates have been an issue for them because of their experience with Israeli military occupation, siege and the devastating military assault on assault that occurred in an enclave of 140 square miles. The conditions that have shaped so many in Gaza, not a justification, are the history. Israel created these fighters by starving them.

War is all around us. These are people’s lives, not just names. It is easy for the world to forget about places like Nagorno-Karabakh, until they explode. Israel and Palestine are always on the minds of everyone, and they also explode.

The attack by Hamas was shock but not a surprise. We all saw peacemaking fail here. It is a failure on a global level, and not just for grass-roots peace activists. Lately the whole notion of solving conflicts, containing violence through international rules and institutions, the international system itself, appears wholly inadequate to its task of protecting people and preventing wars.

Israel has ignored international law for decades by expanding settlements, annexing areas conquered in war, and suffocating the civilian population in Gaza through a 16-year blockade. The United States ignores international courts, even though they don’t like them. The prosecution for Putin’s invasion ofUkraine is likely to be avoided. When Hamas slaughtered over 1,300 Israelis, they had no concern for the future of the liberal world order or the possibility of international prosecution. More than 400 Palestinian children have been killed in the Israeli reprisal, which the Palestinian health ministry says is justified.