For over five months, the world has witnessed an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.
The videos of parents searching for their children buried under rubble with their bare hands, children screaming in anguish as their limbs are amputated without anaesthetic to numb the pain, young bodies emaciated from starvation, and many more haunting images have been live-streamed to our devices and will not soon be forgotten.
While some commentators—especially in the United States and Israel—will defend this carnage as a justified, albeit unfortunate, response to the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7 October that killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostages, international law states that acts of collective punishment are war crimes.
If the international system that the United States claims to champion is supposed to play a meaningful role in governing how nations act—to protect fundamental human rights and prevent wars—then all states must be held accountable for their actions and held to the same standards under the law.
Read more: One UN envoy's quest to hold Israel accountable under international law
In fact, it is the responsibility of the US to use the international system and its own leverage to pressure Israel to heed global calls to end the war in Gaza and resolve the larger Palestinian conflict.
At the same time, it is impossible to understand the current crisis without acknowledging the historical context, such as Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories, its control over Palestinian life, and the systematic oppression Palestinian people have long endured.
Not only do Western mainstream narratives have a tendency to ignore this history, but they also have a habit of compartmentalising the issue of Palestinian liberation into separate disputes.
By treating the war on Gaza—of which there have been many—separate from concerns in the West Bank, East Jerusalem or even the Palestinian refugee population outside the territories who have been denied their right of return, Western narratives deliberately present a misleading picture of the conflict.
If you’re not writing the truth about crimes against humanity, you’re culpable in them. pic.twitter.com/uJKrqObcPy
— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) May 8, 2021
Palestinian rights for all Palestinians
There is no doubt about the destruction that Israel has unleashed on Gaza since October 2023. UN experts argue Gaza is becoming uninhabitable and estimate it will cost tens of billions of dollars and take over a decade for the territory to recover.
The current death toll in Gaza is over 32,000 Palestinians killed, thousands more still buried under rubble, and over 74,000 injured, including an unprecedented cohort of pediatric amputees.
In addition to the extraordinary pace of death and destruction, Palestinians in Gaza have also been subjected to “the fastest acceleration of a hunger crisis that has ever been seen.”
Given the enormity of the horrors, it is no wonder that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has garnered so much global attention.
However, while Palestinians in Gaza face this disaster, Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem continue to be subjected to violence, apartheid, humiliation, and daily oppression with little media coverage.
Yet, these matters are not detached from each other. Instead, to grasp the full extent of Palestinian suffering and the central issue of their systematic subjugation by Israel, these issues must be understood together.
When mainstream Western media outlets refer to Palestinians in Gaza as “Gazans” rather than “Palestinians,” this is the deliberate erasure of their national identity, which is inextricably tied to their struggle for self-determination, freedom, and equality.
The separation of Palestinian disputes in Western narratives helps to serve the Israeli strategy of dividing Palestinian territory and people to expand its control over those people and territories.
Issues of territorial integrity will be paramount to any discussions of a future Palestinian state. Yet, under the guise of the war on Gaza, Israel has increased its encroachment on Palestinian land in the West Bank, making the practical possibility of any viable Palestinian state less likely.
Just this month, Israel announced plans to build 3,500 more illegal housing units in the West Bank and the largest seizure of land in over three decades.
All of this despite pushback from the Biden administration—in language, not action—and clear statements from the UN saying the expansion of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land amounts to a war crime.
