As diplomats gather in plush halls to unveil yet another ‘peace board’ and yet another ‘reconstruction plan for a future that Palestinians are never allowed to reach, Gaza continues to bleed quietly in the background, increasingly absent from headlines. More than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since October 2023. Attacks continue across Gaza. People continue to be killed, day after day, even under what is cynically termed a ‘ceasefire’. When bombs still fall, when civilians still die, when hospitals remain under siege, what fire exactly has ceased? Nearly 80 per cent of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Winter has turned displacement into a slow death sentence, with around 1.3 million people without proper shelter and exposed to sewage and contaminated water. Pregnant women and newborns, already the most vulnerable in any crisis, are paying the highest price for Israel’s unrelenting assault and blockade. Hunger remains a weapon. While famine is said to have ‘eased’, food remains unaffordable and scarce. One in four Gazans survived on just one meal a day as recently as November 2025. Over one-third of pregnant women screened by the UN were acutely malnourished. Babies are being born underweight in alarming numbers, many without access to specialised care. And yet, the world speaks not of starvation or suffocation but of ‘reconstruction’, as if Gaza is a building site waiting patiently for architectural plans rather than a graveyard waiting for justice.
At Davos, President Trump unveiled his much-publicised Board of Peace, wrapped in the language of diplomacy and economic revival. But as UN officials themselves have insisted, Gazans cannot wait for conferences and committees. What they need is immediate relief from a humanitarian catastrophe that Israel continues to manufacture daily through bombing, blockade and bureaucratic strangulation. Even under this supposed ceasefire, people are still being killed. UN agencies have been blocked from bringing in supplies. UNRWA, the backbone of humanitarian assistance in Gaza, has been systematically targeted, delegitimised and now physically attacked. Its headquarters in East Jerusalem were stormed and demolished by Israeli forces.
More than 60 per cent of Gaza’s health facilities are now non-functional and only 15 per cent can provide emergency obstetric care. Neonatal units are operating far beyond capacity, with up to three babies sharing a single incubator. Half of the essential maternal and child health medicines are out of stock. These are not the conditions of a post-conflict society awaiting reconstruction. And while Gaza fades from the world’s urgent attention, Israel continues to expand its violence elsewhere. In the West Bank, military operations, settler violence and movement restrictions have created another slow-burning crisis. And despite all this, global focus has shifted from Gaza’s ruins to conference rooms. The most dangerous lie today is not that peace is possible, but that it is already underway while Gaza burns. There can be no reconstruction while bombardment continues. There can be no ceasefire when civilians are still being killed. And there can be no moral legitimacy in any international effort that refuses to name Israel’s actions for what they are: a sustained, shameless assault on an imprisoned population, amounting to genocide. Gaza is the central moral test of our time. And the world has largely failed it.
