There are days when death in Gaza seems to advance in silence, one life today, another tomorrow, as if horror were administered in small doses so as not to disturb the world’s conscience too much. And there are other days — like today — when violence bursts forth with the force of a tsunami, sweeping everything away in its path, brutally reminding us that the genocide not only continues, but has never stopped.
In the last hours, the Gaza Strip has once again been heavily bombed. The air strikes were directed at areas where displaced civilians were concentrated: refugee tents erected precariously after the destruction of entire neighborhoods, as well as buildings inhabited by families who have nowhere else to go. These were not military installations nor combat zones. They were spaces of minimal survival, struck despite being full of civilians.
The explosions hit improvised camps for the displaced and already damaged residential buildings, killing dozens of people, including children and women. Entire families were buried under the rubble or burned inside tents that were never meant to withstand a bombardment. The scene repeats itself: screams, mutilated bodies, hospitals overwhelmed or rendered inoperative, doctors forced to choose whom to try to save.
Speaking of “isolated escalations” or “sporadic flare-ups” is a distortion. What is happening in Gaza is not a series of disconnected episodes, but a continuous process of destruction of a civilian population. At times the violence decreases in intensity, but it never ceases. At other times, like today, it intensifies brutally, like a wave that strikes again before the body has recovered from the previous impact.
The available official figures must be read with a precision that rarely appears in headlines. More than seventy thousand Palestinians have been registered as dead only among those whose bodies have been recovered, identified and counted by health authorities. But that figure does not reflect the real magnitude of the catastrophe. Beneath the rubble of Gaza, around six hundred thousand people remain missing, buried under entire neighborhoods reduced to dust, without the possibility of rescue, without registration, without a name in any statistic.
This distinction is crucial. It is not a minor correction, but the difference between a visible tragedy and a mass annihilation in progress. Gaza is today a territory where death does not always leave a body behind, and where enforced disappearance occurs on an urban scale.
The genocide is not expressed only through bombings. It is also manifested in the systematic blockade of food, drinking water, electricity and medicines; in the deliberate destruction of hospitals, schools and sanitation systems; in the imposition of living conditions incompatible with human survival. International law is clear: deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction, in whole or in part, of a human group constitutes genocide. This is not a political opinion. It is a legal definition.
The alternation between days of “managed” violence and days of open slaughter is not a sign of restraint, but of a strategy of attrition. Pain sometimes arrives drop by drop, slowly eroding, and at other times falls with overwhelming force, like a tsunami that sweeps away entire neighborhoods in a matter of minutes. In both cases, the result is the same: a civilian population trapped, without real shelter, without effective protection, without a horizon.
Meanwhile, part of the international community continues to speak of peace processes, future negotiations and diplomatic balances. Each of these words sounds obscene when uttered at the same time that tents for the displaced and buildings inhabited by families who have already lost everything are being bombed. There can be no peace process while annihilation continues. There is no real truce when the dead continue to accumulate, whether visible or buried under tons of concrete.
This genocide is happening before the eyes of the world. It is not a secret, nor an isolated excess, nor an inevitable tragedy. It is a prolonged crime, documented and sustained over time. The difference between days of relative silence and days of open massacre does not change its nature. It only changes the intensity with which the pain becomes audible.
Today, Gaza is once again struck like an unstoppable tsunami. Tomorrow, perhaps, the horror will once again be rationed. But as long as this machinery of death is not stopped at its root, every day will be part of the same crime. And every silence, every relativization, every euphemism will continue to be a form of historical complicity.
