Hell on Earth

An unhappy Christmas around the world.

Photo by mohammed al bardawil on Unsplash

This holiday season has not been a particularly happy one for millions of people around the world. The war in Gaza continues to dominate headlines, and for good reason: Nearly two million Palestinians are displaced, and some 20,000 have been killed, most of them women and children. The scale of human suffering is enormous, and for the millions of people around the world who have only known warm homes and physical safety, unimaginable.

For many people, and especially for young Americans, this war has been radicalizing. Protesters in New York and other major cities demanded that there be no Christmas as usual when Hell is being rained down on the holy land. Opposition to Israel’s tactics have grown, including from once-stalwart friends. In his Christmas Day address, the Pope decried the “appalling” violence against Palestinian civilians.

Humanitarian organizations are also warning of widespread famine and disease if this war continues, and if access to refugees remains difficult. Already, close to 90% of Gazans are displaced, and with cities turned to rubble, it’s unclear how and when people will be able to return to their homes. Far-right members of the Israeli government are suggesting that the goal is to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza, into Egypt or other neighboring countries. In the meantime, conditions in the squalid camps Palestinians have been pushed into are worsening, and a tepid UN resolution calling for more humanitarian aid doesn’t solve the fundamental problem that it’s awfully hard to deliver aid when you’re being shot at and shelled. And so the people of Gaza are facing down imminent starvation:

The UN’s hunger monitoring system, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), issued a report saying the “most likely scenario” in Gaza is that by 7 February “the entire population in the Gaza Strip [about 2.2 million people] would be at “crisis or worse” levels of hunger.

“This is the highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity that the IPC initiative has ever classified for any given area or country,” the report said.

The IPC warned that by 7 February about 50% of the population are forecast to be in the “emergency” phase – defined as very high acute malnutrition and excess mortality.

The IPC has a five-stage system for assessing food crises and its report said that in Gaza “at least one in four households”, over half a million people, would be facing phase-five catastrophic conditions.

The conditions are so dire, and the Israeli government so immovable, that humanitarian organizations are inching closer to accusing Israel of using “hunger as a weapon of war.”

Gaza also doesn’t have enough hospitals to treat the many who are wounded or ill. According to the World Health Organization, there are no functional hospitals left in northern Gaza. In the south, there are just nine, and those are only partly functional. And yes, part of the reason for all of this is Hamas, a violent terrorist group that hides among civilians and burrows under crucial infrastructure; it could have spent aid dollars on actually helping Palestinians rather than building tunnels and lining its leaders pockets; it could surrender tomorrow and save many, many lives. But Israel also has agency, and its leaders make choices about how the country conducts this war. The aim of eradicating Hamas is a legitimate one — I am not a person who was calling for a ceasefire on Oct. 8th — but legitimate aims don’t justify any and all means, and certainly don’t justify an ill-planned incursion, borne of vengeance, with a likely unattainable goal and no longer-term plan for peace and stability. Some costs are simply too high no matter the aim. And when you tally up the price paid by Palestinians — close to every single person pushed out of their home, 1 in every 100 dead, mass hunger, the razing of entire cities, virtually no medical care, a humanitarian crisis compounding a conflict, generations of children traumatized and determined to exact revenge — it gets awfully difficult to say that it’s worth it.

And now, winter, with cold temperatures and heavy rains. People are damp and freezing, piling into thin tents. Bathroom lines can be hours long, and you can imagine the conditions of a single toilet shared by hundreds of people. Women and girls can’t get basic menstrual hygiene products, are birthing babies in hellish conditions without painkillers, are having C-sections without anesthesia, are almost certainly dying wholly preventable deaths. Clean water is scarce, and so people are drinking and bathing with whatever fetid water they can find.

It is Hell on earth. Human beings cannot live long like this.

It’s also not the only Hell on earth.