Gaza on International Human Rights Day: Two Years of Systematic Killing, Destruction, and Displacement

On International Human Rights Day, Gaza seems to force the world to look into the mirror of truth, a mirror that reveals the extent of the gap between moral rhetoric and actual practices that allow for the continuation of genocide. While slogans of dignity, justice, and equality echo, Gaza counts more than seventy thousand martyrs and one hundred seventy-one thousand wounded, in two years of systematic killing, total destruction, mass arrests, and depriving human beings of the most basic conditions of life. This is not a war in the traditional sense, but a blatant collapse of the human rights system, in full view of the world and through its complicity in silence.

The right to life, housing, and shelter has turned into a daily nightmare. More than a million displaced people live in tattered tents that do not shield them from the winter cold or summer heat, while the homes that were uprooted stand as witnesses to the ongoing policy of keeping Palestinians displaced in their own homeland. The world still treats reconstruction as a political bargain rather than a legal and ethical obligation, and negotiations continue over “humanitarian” areas that lack any capacity to restore life. The deadly winter exacerbates the harsh scene, and suffering has not ceased since the first day of the aggression.

Since the onset of the attack, the sector has become a stark model for exercising unlimited power. Homes, hospitals, schools, electricity and water stations, and even areas that Israel declared “safe” did not escape direct bombing. The destruction was not a secondary result but a political choice aimed at dismantling society and stripping it of the capacity to survive. International humanitarian law, which was established to protect civilians, has found itself suspended amidst the rubble of cities, unable to impose any protection or accountability.

The picture of the crime would not be complete without discussing mass arrests and enforced disappearances. Thousands of Palestinians have been arrested without charges, and thousands more have been forcibly disappeared, with their families unaware of their fate, whether they are alive in prisons or under the rubble. The conditions of detention are harsh, with numerous documents revealing systematic torture and humiliation, turning the detainee into a tool for destroying the will of the captive, all marketed under the banners of “security necessity,” while political cover is given to those committing these violations, in a paradox that reveals the depth of international complicity.

The scene is completed in the public health file, where patients and the injured face deliberate deprivation of treatment and medical care, while cancer and chronic disease patients survive on remnants of limited medication, with hundreds losing their lives due to drug shortages. Diseases, epidemics, malnutrition, and anemia spread among children, while all existing health systems collapse, turning Gaza into a space of slow death affecting all civilians.

The tragic scene deepens even more when we reach the issue of displacement and obstructing reconstruction. To this day, Israel maintains policies aimed at entrenching a new reality in Gaza, a reality devoid of homes, shelter, and the ability to return and stabilize. The disruption of reconstruction is not a technical or economic decision, but an extension of the war itself, part of a political project aimed at pushing the population towards forced exit by making life in the sector unlivable. More than a million Palestinians live today in tattered tents and harsh conditions unworthy of human beings, while the right to housing and shelter, foundational to every rights system, remains suspended between the rubble and closed crossings.

This reality is not merely a humanitarian crisis, but a coercive engineering of Palestinian life; a collective punishment where war is waged with multiple tools, from bombing and starvation to sieges, displacement, obstructing reconstruction, and deprivation of treatment, with the geography and demographics being forcefully reshaped. In the absence of international accountability, the silence of the world turns into a tangible partner in the continuation of the crime, and human rights remain mere rhetoric devoid of meaning when the victim is Palestinian.

For Gaza, International Human Rights Day is not a celebratory occasion or a symbolic memory. It is a shocking moment that reveals the magnitude of the gap between what the world claims and what it actually practices, showing that human rights have become a selective privilege granted to some peoples while withheld from others, with Palestinians continuing to pay the highest price for the silence of the international community.

Despite this, Gaza, despite the open wounds, rubble, and destruction, witnesses a will to live that does not break. Resilience here is not just a slogan but a daily act of resistance against policies aimed at erasing existence itself. Perhaps this insistence on living amid all this death is the last remnant of true meaning for human rights in a world that leaves the victim alone before the war machine.