‘How has this year been for you?’

‘How has this year been for you?’ a musician friend from the West Bank asked me when we met for the first time in several years. ‘For us, we have been through a lot before, but we were never scared,’ he said. ‘Now, we do not know. I could have a chance encounter with an Israeli soldier who does not like the look of my face, or my instrument, and just shoots me. It is like the country is in its death throes.’ I didn’t know how to respond. Attempts to reassure or reframe are an insult to the intelligence.

The ‘only thing’ that Israeli forces are asked to do in Northern Gaza, a senior Israeli commander told Haaretz, is ‘to move the population to the south – and to flatten the buildings’. Nizam Mamode, a retired British surgeon who volunteered in Gaza earlier this year, testified to the House of Commons International Development Committee last month. ‘When we crossed the border,’ he said, ‘the landscape reminded me of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’ He worked at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis:

The drones would come down and pick off civilians – children. We had description after description. This is not an occasional thing. This was day after day after day of operating on children who would say: ‘I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped, and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.’ That is clearly a deliberate and persistent act; there was persistent targeting of civilians day after day.

The most high-tech killing machines our world has ever known are being used against a starving population under siege in a scorched and toxic landscape. Forensic Architecture’s recent report, A Cartography of Genocide, illustrates the compounded nature of the destruction of all forms of life in Gaza. There is destruction on every level: from the drone-filled sky to the toxic contamination seeping into the land and the bodies living on it. The air is filled with particulates, the sea with sewage, the groundwater poisoned by munitions and toxins.

‘To my mind, it is over 200,000 now,’ Professor Mamode said of the number of Palestinians killed by Israel since October 2023, drawing on the Lancet’s findings in July:

I've worked in a number of conflict zones and different parts of the world – I was there at the time of the Rwandan genocide – and I’ve never seen anything on this scale, ever. That was also the view of all the experienced colleagues I worked with. One of the surgeons in my team had been to Ukraine five times and said: ‘This is ten times worse.’

Mamode described the death of a doctor in his thirties from hepatitis A; the removal of quadcopter bullets from the neck of a three-year-old, who died days later from infection; the lack of swabs for an eight-year-old bleeding to death; the list goes on.

‘We won’t stop until they’re all back,’ it says on the posters of Israeli hostages plastered across North London.

‘This full-fledged Israeli assault against the Palestinian people and the Palestinian land is about everything except the hostages,’ the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, Majed Bamya, said on 21 November, after the United States had once again vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire:

If the families of the hostages can see that, how can anyone in this room claim otherwise? A ceasefire will allow us to save lives. All lives. This was true a year ago. This is true today. It will not resolve everything, but it is the first step towards resolving anything.

New realities bring new words, stretched words and avoided words. The British foreign secretary, David Lammy, does not believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. He has a problem with numbers. He needs a court judgment. Yet Lammy has, as Chris Doyle of the Council for Arab-British Understanding pointed out at a recent conference at SOAS, visited genocide memorials at Srebrenica (eight thousand killed), and has not had the same need for a court ruling when it came to calling out genocide in other wars and conflicts. More than thirty human rights organisations queried Lammy’s confusing statements, which appeared to show a ‘dangerously misguided understanding of the crime’.

Politicians complain that the information is not available to them. Only a handful of MPs came to the launch of a British Palestinian Committee policy guide at the Houses of Parliament in November, and there were plenty of empty seats when Professor Mamode was addressing the International Development Committee. The testimony is there. Journalists have been killed for reporting it, but it still exists and is readily available. If there is enough evidence for the International Court of Justice to issue special measures and the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants, then surely there is enough for British politicians to grapple with. What is at stake here, other than their own complicity?

On 4 December, the campaign group Led by Donkeys unfolded a giant banner in Parliament Square stating to the skies: ‘Yes it’s a genocide.’ There is footage of the unfurling on social media with a voiceover by Amos Goldberg, an Israeli historian of the Holocaust, calmly describing why what is happening in Gaza fits Raphael Lemkin’s definition. What will Israel get in return for this genocide: land and real estate? Maybe. Living hostages returned to their families? Unlikely, sadly, as it doesn’t appear to be the Israeli government’s priority. Security? Never. As Jewish groups such as Diaspora Alliance have argued, the instrumentalising of antisemitism to defend the indefensible actions of the Israeli state does not bode well for anyone.

On 22 November the UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese gave a lecture at SOAS on Palestine as a ‘litmus test’ of human rights. Hundreds of people queued patiently outside in the dark, past the banners calling for SOAS to ‘Ban Fran!’ She referred to Primo Levi’s words on cowardice, encouraging us to abandon it:

Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers, and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.

The Palestine Book Awards have been held annually for over a decade. Last year the prize ceremony was cancelled. The war on Gaza had just begun. We were in shock or denial. We thought maybe the onslaught would last weeks, months at most. This year, the judges received more books than ever before, and a prize was awarded to a children’s book for the first time: Amanda Najib’s Lana Makes Purple Pizza: A Palestinian Food Tale. Jehan Helou, the president of the Tamer Institute, which built two children’s libraries in Gaza, both of which have been bombed, presented the award. Children’s books have often been the first to be confiscated, she said, or censored by the Israeli army.

The London Palestine Film Festival opened at the Barbican this year with a theatre piece. ‘There were no films that could respond to the current situation in Gaza in time,’ the festival director Khaled Ziada said, ‘so we commissioned a play.’ A play based on the testimony of children. More than 17,000 children in Gaza have no family member to look after them; 13,000 have been killed. The largest cohort of child amputees in history.

‘If this is not a genocide, then what is?’ Ghassan Ghaben, the founder of the Gaza Families Reunited campaign, asked at the British Palestinian Committee event in Parliament. His family have been displaced six times. The campaign has been calling on the UK government for months to establish a family reunification scheme to allow the relatives of hundreds of British Palestinian families to come from Gaza to the UK. They are still waiting.

On 24 November, I received a voice note from my friend Marwa in the south of Gaza:

One week ago, they entered with a truck of aid, food items to Beit Hanoun [in the North] and they went to the school pretending that they are the people distributing aid and they were asking the people in the school and the children to register their ID number.

Beit Hanoun had a population of around fifty thousand before the war. Most of them were evacuated to Jabalia, but it was so overcrowded that about five thousand returned. Some of them were living in a school. They did not trust the men in the trucks.

They refused to register their IDs and they told the guys who came to distribute this aid or to take it and leave, so they took these items and they left. At four a.m. the next night – four a.m. – they came with a quadcopter asking people to evacuate and they burnt all of their items: the food, the money, everything, the passports, the certificates, everything, and the people they were evacuated during the early morning, without shoes, and my sister, she even forgot her phone, her bags and everything, and most of the people are like this.

The men were taken, the women sent to Gaza City. Marwa continues, her voice heavy against the sound of children all around her: ‘My seventy-year-old cousin was looking after my mum most of the time, but he went to see his wife and daughter and he was arrested.’