We Are Not Statistics: The Deliberate Erasure of Palestinian Humanity that leads to world “leaders” staying still as thousands of children starve

It has been over a year since Israel’s invasion of Rafah, crossing what President Biden once called a “red line.” During this time, we’ve witnessed the systematic implementation of what Israeli officials are now openly calling “voluntary migration” – a sanitized term for the forced displacement of Palestinians from their homeland.

The evidence is undeniable. In March 2025, while a ceasefire was technically in effect, the Israeli Defense Ministry approved the creation of a special bureau specifically designed to promote Palestinian expulsion. Then in April, Israel revealed the “Morag Corridor,” a militarized strip south of Khan Younis that effectively cuts off Rafah from the rest of Gaza, reducing Palestinian territory by a fifth.

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Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, has publicly stated that their strategy includes “destroying infrastructure, blocking the entry of humanitarian aid, and promoting voluntary transfer.” This wasn’t a slip of the tongue – it was an admission of a plan that has been methodically executed over 19 months.

 

What’s perhaps most disturbing is the international response – or lack thereof. Despite the clear evidence of ethnic cleansing, despite the bombings of schools and hospitals, despite the deliberate starvation tactics, the world’s powers have remained largely silent. This silence persists even as Israel’s end goals have become explicit.

A brutal, systematic war is being waged on my people, in open view of the world, to deprive us of our land and our basic right to dignity. And yet, it seems, the global community has became numb to our suffering, our pain and the injustice we have been subjected to for many decades. Especially those in the West appear indifferent to what Israel, with the help of their governments, is doing to us. This is why Israel has been able to continue this genocide with impunity for 18 long months, and this is why no one even flinched when two of the most powerful men in the world casually used “Palestinian” as a slur on national television.

How did this happen? How did we get here? Since October 7, anyone who has access to social media has undoubtedly seen the mangled corpses of Palestinian children killed by Israeli bombs and bullets. They have seen the starvation, the desperation and the endless destruction. So how can they still turn a blind eye to this carnage? How can they still support politicians who are funding and facilitating a blatant attempt to exterminate an entire people?

 

The answer, of course, is dehumanisation. Many in the West, especially many in positions of power, do not believe Palestinian life has value – they do not see us as human beings. If Palestinians are somehow proved to be inherently violent beasts in a man-made cage, then our slaughter can be justified.

This dehumanisation obviously did not begin on October 7 but went into overdrive in the past 18 months. Palestinian voices were erased almost completely from political and media spheres. Us Palestinians were not only banned from speaking for ourselves in the public sphere but were yet again branded violent terrorists, beasts and savages for merely resisting our slaughter.

In this context, the relentless stream of images of death and suffering emerging from Gaza numbed outside observers to Palestinian suffering even further. Seeing these images, some doubled down on their belief that Palestinian suffering does not matter because we are all “violent” “terrorists” who cannot be controlled or reasoned with anyway. Others became desensitised to our suffering as an emotional defence mechanism. With a genocide being livestreamed on our phones, each life extinguished has become just another tally mark, another statistic in a war that seems without end.

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(If you are able, please consider a paid subscription so I can continue this work. This platform is one of the few ways I can generate income as I continue advocating for my people. Portion of all subscriptions will be donated to a relief organization.)

This atrocity fatigue, which has affected everyone, including those who truly care about Palestinians, also has had a heartbreaking impact on people who are currently in Gaza facing this genocide.

In a desperate bid to be heard, to make the world recognise their humanity and acknowledge their suffering, Palestinians themselves have been forced to commodify their grief. Fathers began to hold the bodies of their murdered children up to the cameras to say, “Do you see this?” “Do you understand what is being done to us?” In Palestine, private mourning becomes public spectacle. This dehumanising process – where even grief becomes a form of advocacy – further normalises Palestinian death in the public consciousness.

Alongside politicians like Biden and Trump, the party that is responsible the most for this dehumanisation and consequent desensitisation is Western media.

Beyond silencing, ignoring and at times wholly misrepresenting Palestinian voices, Western journalists and pundits have consistently been using language that implies Palestinians are not fully human and never truly innocent.

This malicious editorialisation of news from Palestine undoubtedly has increased in the past 18 months but has been shaping the narrative on Palestine for decades.

In Western reports, Israeli violence against Palestinians is always framed as a war against resistance groups branded as “terrorists” with no mention of the suffering of Palestinian civilians or the causes and conditions that led to the formation of these groups in the first place.

In these news reports, Israeli children are “killed” in “terror attacks”, and long essays are published, rightfully so, about their lives, their interests, their dreams and lost potential. They always have a name. Palestinian children, however, are almost never “killed” – they just “die”. Their names are rarely mentioned, their shattered dreams ignored. They are often reduced to a statistic, a footnote. More disturbingly, the often violent deaths of Palestinian children are routinely blamed on Palestinians themselves. Reports talk of “human shields”, “threats to security”, “earlier attacks and altercations”. They rarely even mention who fired the bullet or dropped the bomb that killed them – Israel.

This dehumanisation allows Israel to continue its genocide with impunity. Western media’s casting of Palestinians as inherently violent subhumans not only helps Israel blame them for their own deaths but also frame the armed resistance against its occupation and apartheid as “terrorism”.

Dehumanisation of Palestinians harms not only Palestinians but every single member of the global community. Erasure of the humanity of millions of people for the sole “crime” of being Indigenous to a land arbitrarily claimed by another also erodes our collective humanity and capacity for empathy. When any society becomes numb to the eradication of an entire nation and begins to see its members as “less than human”, it always leads to further violence and human rights abuses. When we accept a group to be less than human, we risk losing our moral compass, our ability to recognise and respond to injustice. Once dispossession, enslavement and slaughter come to be seen as acceptable when directed at one group of people, soon all rights, values and norms become meaningless.

This is why we must actively resist dehumanisation of Palestinians.

Palestinians killed by Israel in this genocide must not be reduced to statistics. They were all unique human beings with hopes and dreams. They were all loved by people who were left broken by their loss. And Palestinians who survive this genocide are not “subhuman” “potential terrorists”. If we cannot resist dehumanisation of Palestinians, we cannot bring an end to this greatest source of human suffering and injustice. To end this, we must recognise the Palestinian right to resistance, to self-determination, and to live free from occupation and never-ending drone strikes.

To break this cycle of violence and apathy, we must actively engage with the human stories behind the headlines. We must not ignore or hide from the boy who had to put his brother’s remains in a plastic bag, the father who went to register the birth of his twins only to return to find them bombed to pieces or the mother who had to watch her children burn alive. These are not just nameless characters in a story made up to shock us. They are real people.

If we, the Palestinians, do nothing, we are killed, our houses are demolished or taken, and the world looks away – refuses to see or care. If we resist, fight back, then it starts talking about the “two sides”. Does the world expect us to offer ourselves for murder without objection?