Gaza is exploited either way, through silence or stale statements

While Gaza mourns, the international community continues to turn a blind eye. On Tuesday this week, 112 members from the Abu Sharia and al-Hasayna families were put to rest in a mass funeral in the Sabra neighbourhood. The remains were recently recovered from the rubble of homes destroyed in 2023 during Israel’s genocide. According to the Gaza Civil Defence, the bodies of around 8,000 Palestinians are still beneath the rubble, but the conditions make it impossible for complete recovery of those killed by airstrikes. 

“Some bodies have disappeared. Some have been scattered into very small pieces, making identification extremely difficult,” Mahmoud Basal, the spokesman for Gaza’s civil defence stated. 

Lara Abu Sharia, whose family members were among those recovered from the rubble and buried yesterday, spoke of grief. “I wanted to hug the bag. I wanted to hug whatever remained of them.”

Between both statements, the Palestinian experience of Israel’s genocide in Gaza is clearly portrayed. Loss is imparted through the process of recovering and identifying the bodies, while knowing that the task is impossible to conclude. For Lara, the process of grief started all over again, burying shards of human remains almost three years since an Israeli airstrike killed her relatives. 

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Through its silence, the international community made it clear that what happens in Gaza is of no consequence if there is no publicity or profit to deal with. World leaders and officials from international organisations have remained silent about the mass funeral.

By contrast, when mass graves were discovered in Gaza in 2024, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk expressed horror and called for independent investigations. The horror was, of course, short lived, but enough to make the UN look like it acted upon the parameters of international law while evading its responsibilities. Israel continued its genocide in Gaza, and Palestinians were left to deal not only with the mass graves, but with the ongoing genocide which the international community refused to stop and only belatedly acknowledged. 

A mass funeral is not as visually shocking as the discovery of a mass grave, hence the silence and blatant inhumanity in international politics. The politics and war crimes behind both, though are the same. Just as the international community prefers to choose which violations or war crimes to focus on, it did the same with the mass graves and the mass funeral. One must therefore conclude that, just like it does with colonial violence, the UN will indicate its preference on which atrocities it will speak about, even if achieving nothing but a recorded statement for perfunctory purposes. Gaza will be exploited either way, through silence or stale statements. 

For Palestinians who survived the genocide, grief will not be solved by resolutions or the lack of them. From mass graves to mass funerals, the international community’s statements or silence are completely void of humanity.

The horror is not what UN officials expressed in 2024 without addressing the genocide; it is watching a population retain its humanity even as Israel, in collusion with the international community, does its utmost to annihilate it. 

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