Guevara Rosas noted that both Israel’s ongoing genocide and refusal to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza have compounded the consequences of flooding.
“The devastation and deaths caused by the storm in Gaza provide yet another wakeup call to the international community, paid for with the lives of people who had managed to survive two years of Israel’s ongoing genocide,” Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director for research, advocacy, policy and campaigns, stated.
Is it a wakeup call, though? There is a certain selfishness in having Palestinians in Gaza suffer just for the world to have a wakeup call and never wake up from its self-imposed perpetual slumber. Amnesty International is right to call out the context, but the international organisation also took its time to formally call out Israel’s genocide in Gaza in December 2024. While investigations and research must indeed happen, human rights organisations are mirroring diplomatic engagement too much in failing to call out the obvious earlier, only to issue a statement more than a year later. This begs the question – where is Gaza’s narrative centred? With Palestinians, or with organisations and institutions that speak out too late for Palestinians?
OPINION: Call it what it is: A genocide!
The current humanitarian disaster in Gaza could have been prevented. But then again, even Israel’s genocide in Gaza could have been prevented. The international community worked to allow genocide rather than stop it from happening. Now, when Palestinians are dying as a result of genocide and flooding, the focus on rebuilding Gaza according to Trump’s plan – colonisation and land grab – takes precedence over the bare minimum of humanitarian assistance. This is also not an isolated incident. Similar patterns occur every winter in Gaza, and all were preventable. So when does another wakeup call start being the wakeup call that prompts both political and humanitarian action? Could earlier humanitarian disasters not have been wakeup calls for the international community to act to prevent genocide?
Can we go back to the UN and ask why it never took its ‘Gaza will become unliveable by 2020’ seriously, ostensibly because Palestinians in Gaza were still living in unliveable circumstances? Is it not the biggest hypocritical decision to suddenly omit ‘unliveable’ from rhetoric about Gaza at a time when Israel has completely destroyed its infrastructure? Or has Gaza now become associated with ‘rebuilding’ and therefore unliveable means rising from the ruins for the colonial-favouring international organisation and its masquerading as protector of human rights?
A wakeup call implies a novelty that would usher some form of introspection and action. The level of destruction in Gaza as a result of Israel’s ongoing genocide may be new, but it is not without precedents, so there is no concept of ‘another wakeup call’ in the way it is normally perceived and understood. We cannot forget that the UN allowed Israel to commit genocide in Gaza. A conscious decision to allow genocide is not undone by a wakeup call. And as Palestinians are killed in Gaza, speaking of wakeup calls only testifies to growing alienation cultivated in varying degrees of comfort. If human rights organisations are to make a difference, generalised jargon must be avoided.
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