Every day is 11 September in Gaza

The world hasn’t forgotten 11 September 2001. The images of planes crashing into the Twin Towers in New York, the smoke, the collapse of the buildings, and the thousands of lives lost in a single day are etched in our collective memory forever.

It was a tragedy that was immediate, brutal, and televised live, shocking people on every continent. Since then, it has become a universal reference for horror, political violence, and human vulnerability in the face of war and terrorism.

However, while that single day of destruction became a symbol of global trauma, in the Gaza Strip, the same horror is repeated daily with live broadcasts. It’s not an isolated event but a prolonged reality that has already amounted to more than 706 days of massacres, bombings, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, and forced displacement.

Since 7 October 2023, when Israel began its military offensive in response to the attacks of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation led by Hamas, the Gaza Strip has been transformed into a scene of unprecedented devastation and death.

What started as a retaliatory campaign has turned into a war of extermination against a civilian population of more than two million people confined to just 365 square kilometres, without escape routes and under an air, sea, and land blockade.

Today, more than 200,000 Palestinians have been killed by “Israel”, with the majority being women and children, according to the renowned scientific journal The Lancet (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext). Tens of thousands remain missing under the rubble, while the remaining hospitals are collapsing, and mass graves are replacing cemeteries due to the sheer number of bodies.

The 9/11 attacks in New York became a pretext for a new era of persecution, with entire communities being monitored, criminalised, and treated as suspects. This fed a cycle of Islamophobia and cultural demonisation that still legitimises wars, occupations, and human rights violations today.

The attacks were used to justify the invasion and destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq under the rhetoric of the “war on terror,” which ultimately became a war against the Arab and Muslim peoples.

The comparison with Gaza is unavoidable. If the United States lost about three thousand lives in a few hours on 11 September, “Israel” is doing this daily with “exacerbated and visible cruelty”. Meanwhile, Western powers are not taking any action beyond rhetoric to stop the genocideand ensure respect for international humanitarian law.

With every new bombing of schools, refugee camps, hospitals, or mosques and churches, images of bloodied children, buried families, and survivors walking through ruins are repeated. What for the West was a tragic and unrepeatable exception has become routine for Palestinians.

The tragedy in Gaza, however, is not limited to the sinister events since October 2023. It is part of a longer historical process that has lasted 77 years, since the 1948 Nakba. At that time, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their lands for the creation of the Zionist entity that they named the “State of ‘Israel’”.

Since then, entire generations of Palestinians have been born and died in refugee camps, subjected to military occupation, economic blockades, land confiscation, and periodic military operations that destroy the little that is rebuilt. The current genocide is the most brutal face of the “Israeli” policy of ethnic cleansing that has never ceased.

In the face of this situation, a question echoes: why was 11 September immediately recognized as a crime against humanity and an attack on international order, while Gaza does not deserve the same global rejection?

Why doesn’t the pain of thousands of Palestinians mobilise governments, courts, and organizations with the same intensity as the pain of Americans in 2001?

The answer lies in the moral selectivity of international politics. When the victims are Palestinian, indignation is diluted by strategic justifications, geopolitical calculations, and the “war on terror” rhetoric that legitimizes the unacceptable.

“Every day is 11 September in Gaza”. This is not mere rhetoric but a statement of fact. What was an exception in the United States is routine in Palestine. Each morning brings new mourning, each night ends in new rubble.

The difference is that, unlike the attack in New York, Gaza does not generate a global response of solidarity, but rather a “complicit silence”. It is as if humanity has normalized the Palestinian genocide, allowing more than 706 days of horror to be added to 77 years of occupation without fully recognizing the criminal nature of this process.

Meanwhile, with every American bomb that “Israel” drops on Gaza, the wound in the human conscience deepens, reminding us that the value of life, for many governments, still depends on the passport and ethnic identity of the person who loses it.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.