According to recent estimates, it will take around four decades to clear out the rubble in Gaza.
Around 88% of physical infrastructure in the besieged enclave has been completely destroyed or at least partially damaged.
Life expectancy plummeted from 75.5 to just 40 years since Israel escalated its genocidal campaign against Palestine in October 2023.
The deliberate targeting of non-combatants, hospitals, residential areas, and aid distribution points, coupled with the systemic deployment of starvation as a tool of mass death, has led to the murder of upwards of 70,000 innocent people by now. The overwhelming majority of the population has been displaced.
All of this was carried out with the blessing of the United States and complacent European institutions and governments.
In less than two years, Israel turned Palestine into a graveyard.
Our political leaders sit and watch as a live-streamed genocide continues to unfold. They now claim that they’ve always stood for Palestinian rights and that they’ve always lamented the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the issue. Actually using the word ‘genocide’ continues to elude them.
Those of us who were never scared of calling a spade a spade know better.
I experience no joy whatsoever at the notion that time has proven my initial judgement about Israel’s genocidal campaign to be correct.
In the very early days of Israel’s latest escalation, I was one of the very few journalists in Malta who bothered to point out how European institutions betrayed Palestine.
In this context, knowing I chose to stand on the right side of history is a very hollow form of comfort. It is the kind of reassurance that is only afforded to me by the privilege of my heritage.
It matters very little when I know that my Palestinian counterparts are dying of hunger. Colleagues who I will never meet, simply because fate dictated that I was to be born in Europe while they were born under the shadow of a monster that has all but consumed their homeland.
It hardly matters when you know that something as unimaginably horrible as a nationwide slaughter was not enough to move a continent that claims to be a staunch defender of the right to live in peace.
It ceases to matter entirely when you understand that Europe’s betrayal of Palestine means that the value of human life no longer carries universal meaning.
It is the indelible mark of shame of our time – your right to live or die is not guaranteed because of your intrinsic worth as a human being, but is instead dictated by company profits, political capital, and backroom deals.
Needless to say, this shameful dereliction of duty is not something that happened overnight. It didn’t start on 7 October, 2023. It’s been creeping up on us for decades.
Though I have only been on this earth for three of those decades, I still remember a time when it would have been unthinkable to fathom that Europe would stand idly by while a full-scale genocide is occurring in the Middle East.
What exactly is the point of having broad, international military alliances that fail to take any kind of serious action in the face of obvious wrongdoing?
What is the point of Europe’s renewed drive to increase its military spending if those armies are not used to defend the common good, to uphold democratic order, to prevent the murder of so many innocent people?
What is the point of declaring human rights as universal, only to then do nothing about protecting the most vulnerable among us, those who have suffered never ending torture at the hands of their captors?
It used to be unthinkable that Europe would do nothing about another holocaust on our doorstep. Now, the opposite is true: Europe taking action became the unthinkable scenario. Europe amounting to more than just a useless hub of bureaucrats becomes more of a far out fantasy with every passing day.
Every pallid statement that is being issued by our political representatives to defend their track record is genuinely irrelevant by now.
I don’t give a fuck about growing calls to recognise Palestinian statehood. There is no Palestinian state left to recognise.
I don’t give a fuck about the latest press release demanding a ceasefire. That ship has sailed now.
And last but not least, I truly do not give a fuck about politicians who continue to insist that abandoning millions of people to slaughter was the only call they could have made.
I hope all of you rot in whichever hell your ugly souls came from.