Monday marked one year since Israel began its most recent onslaught of violence against Palestinians in Gaza. The violence followed a Hamas attack on the Nova Music Festival and surrounding areas in Israel that tragically killed 1200 and resulted in 250 taken hostage.

The violence Israel has inflicted on Palestinians in the past year as a response to this attack is horrifying and egregious. The mass destruction, murder and humanitarian crisis forced on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is reprehensible. 

In Gaza, the majority have been displaced – that’s over 2 million of the region’s 2.3 million population. The death toll in the region currently exceeds 41,000, including more than 14,000 children, and over 97,000 have been injured. These are only mere estimates, and the actual numbers are likely to be far higher. 

The healthcare system in Gaza has all but collapsed with zero fully functioning hospitals in the region and little access to medicine. Displacement areas have been bombed – even zones marked “safe” by Israel. Hospitals with the injured, sick and sheltering, food distribution sites, homes, schools, mosques, aid workers, journalists and more have been bombed and striked. Palestinians have no home to return to. Their lives are riddled with rubble. They have no “safe place”.

Gazans also have little access to food. There is no clean water. There is vast malnutrition, starvation  and famine – which Israel has denied – taking the lives of children who’ve become skin and bones.

Aid has been blocked and impeded from arriving into parts of Gaza, including 100,000 metric tons of food due to restrictions. ABC News reported that “90 percent of coordinated humanitarian aid movements between northern and southern Gaza have been denied or impeded” as of Sept. 1. 

Infrastructure is completely decimated and the United Nations suggests it could take 15 years to clean up debris and 80 to rebuild all housing units lost if the pace follows previous reconstruction patterns. The total volume of debris accumulated over the past year is “14 times greater than the combined total of all conflicts over the past 16 years” according to a UN report. 

Furthermore, Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons have reported mass human rights abuses, including torture and sexual violence according to Amnesty International. Likewise, Amnesty International contends that documentation indicates Israel has used their Unlawful Combatants law to “arbitrarily round up Palestinians from Gaza…for prolonged periods without producing any evidence that they pose a security threat and without minimum due process.” 

Gazans have had to beg on social media for people to help them, to somehow “prove” that they’re experiencing such an atrocity.

Israel is not just targeting Gaza either. Palestinians in the West Bank face aggression too.

742 West Bank Palestinians have been killed, including over 163 children according to Al-Jazeera. 6,250 have been injured. 

The United States has been wholly complicit in this genocide. It has sent over 50,000 tons of military aid to Israel and such aid has been used in the country’s attacks on Gaza. The U.S. government refuses to wholly condemn Israel’s actions against Palestinians, President Joe Biden saying in an Instagram post that Palestinians have merely “suffered” and their suffering has only been made worse by “terrorists hiding and operating among innocent people.” 

He calls for a ceasefire, but it doesn’t feel like anything more than a poor attempt to save face and strengthen allyship with an apartheid state. 

Why is no blame being put on the Israeli government for Palestinian suffering? Are they not the ones indiscriminately bombing civilian eras, now more than ever, and inflicting this so-called “suffering”? 

Everyday I wake up and my Instagram feed is filled with the horrors Palestinians face in Gaza, and I remind myself that this violence extends to far before Oct. 7, 2023. It dates all the way back to at least the first Nakba in 1948 and even the Balfour Declaration in 1926. 

Western apathy kills, and it has since Oct. 7 and long before then.