Gaza: The Global Crime Scene

The rubble, the disfigured earth, and the concrete in Gaza are not like any in the world, for they ooze the smell of death, of decomposing bodies, and of genocide. The stench of decomposed bodies fills the air, and the sound and the feel of death, the drones, the airplanes, and the bombs, are never far away. Death punctures the air as a needle bursts a balloon; death is expected at any moment. In Gaza, there is a particular quality to this dust, to the smell, and to everyday activity. It is not the dust of demolition or the dust of an earthquake, neither the residue of an accident nor the byproduct of nature taking its course. It is the dust of homes that were lived in until the moment they were destroyed, the dust of schools and hospitals, of bakeries, mos-ques, and churches, of bedrooms where children slept, and kitchens where life unfolds. When the wind lifts it, it carries with it the particulate matter of a people, ground down and scattered, and anyone who has stood in it knows that this is not ordinary ruin. It is the physical sediment of a crime that the world has watched and chosen not to name; assisted, financed, and did not stop—it is the crime of genocide.

If this were any normal murder investigation, the physical evidence would be preserved, the crime scene would be protected, and all witnesses would be identified, both for immediate consideration and for the slow, patient work of reconstructing the details of the crime. The investigators would cordon off the area with yellow tape, photograph it, catalog every fragment, and trace the chain of causation back from the body to the hand that pulled the trigger and the mind that gave the order. Indeed, for those of us accustomed to watching crime movies and television shows, we can list the steps and identify the gaps in any investigation. We know the rhythm of it. We know that motive matters, that words spoken are entered into evidence, that opportunity matters, that the weapon must be found, and that the timeline must be established. We are fluent in the grammar of justice as entertainment. But how do we approach Gaza, and what do we do with the crime of all crimes, genocide, and how do we investigate it and bring those responsible to justice when the crime scene is not preserved but actively expanded, when the evidence is not protected but bombed again and again, and when the witnesses are not interviewed but buried, including 172 journalists?

A young Palestinian boy in shock after an Israeli air strike in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, on May 2023 © IMAGO / Nur Photo

In all honesty, Gaza is the global crime scene, and the world leaders are all accomplices to the crime. It is both the Arab and Muslim crime scenes. It is the humanist crime scene, the UN and Geneva Convention crime scene, the IMF and World Bank crime scene, the FIFA and Eurovision crime scene, the university leadership crime scene, the Epstein Class crime scene, and the global Tech and scholarly associations crime scene, the one where the powerful and the connected reveal what they are willing to permit. Gaza is not like the war movies or the Hollywood-produced dramas about a distant past event, the ones that attempt to rewrite history at a safe remove of decades, when the danger has passed, and the verdict is already comfortable. Gaza is not a memory, and it is not an allegory. It is a live-streamed, methodical crime of all crimes, broadcast in real time, that is undoing the world as we know it. We do not have to wait fifty years for a documentary to tell us what happened. We are watching it happen on the screens in our hands, in high definition, with the timestamps still fresh, and the watching has not stopped it. That is the new and unbearable fact of our age; that visibility, which we were told would be the safeguard against atrocity, has become its companion. The cameras did not prevent the killing. They merely recorded it for an audience that scrolled past. All the technology and evidence-collecting tools at our disposal have been turned on the victim, and George Orwell’s 1984 erases and rewrites what is taking place.

For Palestinians, narrating the genocide, the nearly three years of non-stop murder spree and destruction, in order to convince a complicit world of what is happening, is so abusive that it does not deserve another written sentence. We are past the point of evidence and are past the point of proof. The demand that we describe our own annihilation in ever more vivid detail, as if the problem were a failure of communication rather than a failure of conscience, is itself a form of cruelty. The world is not confused about what is happening in Gaza; instead, it has decided on which side of the genocide it stands and whom to protect.

Writing at a time of genocide is an act of resistance, an act of defiance in the face of annihilation, and an act of love to those who died, and those living awaiting death. It is the creation of a shared global community for the Palestinians, a community that refuses to surrender, that refuses to let the record be written only by the killers and their patrons

So, this essay is not addressed to the unconvinced, because the unconvinced have made their choice and dressed it in the language of complexity, global balance of power, and economic interests. This essay is written by and for the Palestinians, who have been left all alone to face the Israeli death machine, supported by the enormous American death machine, financed and supplied with replacement parts and equipment by the death machines of the European Union and the United Kingdom, and shielded, supplied, nurtured and defended by countless Arab and Muslim states and elites who traded Palestinian death and buckets of their blood for access and entry into the global Zionist world culture, for a seat at the table, for the Abraham normalization deals and the investment opportunities, for concerts and festivals vacated of meaning and the photographs with “the powerful”.

Palestinian women at the site of an Israeli strike on a house in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, on July 2024 © IMAGO / Nur Photo

Writing at a time of genocide is an act of resistance, an act of defiance in the face of annihilation, and an act of love to those who died, and those living awaiting death. It is the creation of a shared global community for the Palestinians, a community that refuses to surrender, that refuses to let the record be written only by the killers and their patrons. To write is to insist that we were here, that we are here, that what is being done to us has a name, and the name is genocide and complicity of so many in it. If someone wants to read about how bad the genocide was and how bad it remains, then let me say plainly that it is far too late for the autopsy and the medical determination; the actual doctors and medical establishment in Gaza have been pulverized. The body of evidence is not waiting on a coroner, for he/she was murdered on the way to the crime scene or while waiting in the hospital.

The world continues to move on, and the World Cup is upon us, and more people, including a large number of Muslims, will be far more upset and far more emotional because their national team or their tournament favorite lost a game than they have ever been about Gaza, Lebanon, or Iran. The coverage will be twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Every aspect of the World Cup is analyzed: the stars’ haircuts, the fashion, the impact of a injury, who is up and who is down in the rankings, the managerial decisions, and the contested penalties. There will be panels, pundits, and endless replays after the World Cup, but nothing about the Genocide and countless Palestinian football players murdered by the Israeli death machine. After the World Cup, Gaza will still be facing genocide, alone, with no one coming to open the gates or count the bodies, those visible and those that have evaporated.

Writing at a time of genocide is an act of resistance, an act of defiance in the face of annihilation, and an act of love to those who died, and those living awaiting death. It is the creation of a shared global community for the Palestinians, a community that refuses to surrender, that refuses to let the record be written only by the killers and their patrons.

There is a grotesque symmetry in this from which we should not look away. The same screens that can be saturated with the microscopic choreography of a football match don’t have room, somewhere in their margins, for the mass killing of a people, and the killing receives less analysis than a substitution in the seventieth minute. The capacity for attention exists, the infrastructure of caring exists, but it is simply directed elsewhere, by design and by appetite, toward the spectacles that demand nothing of us. To mourn a lost match is to feel something safely, an emotion with no consequence and no demand. To mourn Gaza would require an accounting, a reckoning, and the accounting is precisely what is being avoided so no one faces the consequences.

This essay is not about theology, for we are past Islamic theology and past the pontification of those who deem themselves important because they have many followers on social media, because they have a big television show, or because they have been appointed to a fatwa council, or installed in an endowed chair of insignificant importance. I have heard all of the excuses from the religious and the not-so-religious on matters related to Gaza, and I have grown weary of cataloging them. How do you respond to someone who is prepared to state that the population of Gaza is being punished by God because of its sins? How do you respond to the one who says that the Palestinians rebelled against legitimate authority and therefore deserve what they are getting, as if the bombing of a child in their sleep were the considered judgment of heaven on a question of governance? How do you respond to the one who counsels that they must suffer in silence and endure until they are delivered from their conditions, as if patience were a strategy and not a sedative administered to the dying?

How do you respond when someone insists on a Friday sermon devoid of Gaza and expressing discomfort with using the term genocide, even though the person has no qualifications on the subject?

These are not theological positions. They are alibis wearing the robes of theology. They take the vocabulary of faith, of misplaced text, of sin and punishment, and patience and divine will, and they bend it into a tool for excusing the inexcusable and weaponize it to bludgeon the victim anew. The idea that the Muslims of the world, who number two billion and are increasing, are unable and unwilling to provide any meaningful support for the Palestinians, with the exception of Iran, the Shia of Lebanon, and the Yemenis, while the Sunni states have not merely been silent but have actively extended logistical support, conducted joint military operations, and shared intelligence with the Israeli death machine, is a fact that no sermon can survive. Two billion people, the numbers are recited with pride at every opportunity, in every speech about the rising tide of the faithful, and yet when the test came, the numbers meant nothing. A quarter of humanity could not, or would not, open a single gate and stop the flow of support for the Israeli genocide machine.

Writing all of this down is not to expect it to move the unmovable. It is to refuse the erasure that the killers and their partners are counting on. They are counting on the World Cup, the next music festivals, and another big-time economic project to erase the crime. They are counting on the next news cycle, the inflation, and the one after that

Gaza and the Palestinians have been left alone, and Islamic law and theology have been weaponized against them, used on the one hand to justify the genocide and on the other to excuse inaction and sermonize silence. This double movement is the genuine scandal. The same tradition that should have been a wellspring of solidarity has been drained and repurposed into a permission slip for abandonment. The Arab and Muslim airspace was wide open for Israel’s flying death machines and trips and hotel rooms for rest and relaxation for perpetrators of the genocide, while all were closed for the Gazans!

Consider the bare facts, stripped of rhetoric. Not a single Muslim-Arab country has cut diplomatic relations with Israel in the aftermath of the genocide. Not a single Muslim-Arab country has recalled its ambassador in the face of genocide. Not a single country has cut economic relations or trade with Israel across nearly three years of a non-stop murder spree. These are not difficult or costly gestures; they are symbolic at best and don’t rise to the level of what Islam calls for in terms of justice. They are the minimum, the most basic and symbolic expressions of disapproval available to any state, the things countries do over far smaller disputes, on fishing rights, loss of a football game, border incidents, and diplomatic insults. And not one was willing to do even this while thousands of babies, women, and men faced mass slaughter.

On the contrary, what we find is the opposite of protest. We find expanded levels of cooperation, joint military operations, open supply pipelines (oil supplies, replacement equipment, and fruits and vegetables), and increased trade and tourism at the very moment when other parts of the world, including populations with no historical, religious, or ethnic ties to Palestine, are speaking out and organizing on a regular basis. Students in distant cities are occupying their campuses. Dock workers are refusing to load shipments. Ordinary people with nothing to gain are marching week after week in capitals that have no stake in the matter except conscience. Meanwhile, the states that claim Palestine as a brother, that invoke her in their Friday prayers and their national mythologies, have deepened their embrace of the power that is killing her. The contrast is not subtle; it is a verdict on a whole order of governments and a whole apparatus of official religion, and the verdict is guilt.

The destroyed conference hall of the Islamic University in Gaza City, on March 2025, due to Israeli airstrikes. © IMAGO / Nur Photo

There is, of course, an architecture of law that was supposed to exist for precisely this moment. There are courts in distant cities, conventions signed and ratified, institutions built on the ashes of the last great catastrophe, with the solemn promise of never again. We were told that the law would stand where men failed, that the machinery of justice, however slow, would eventually turn. But the law, it turns out, is only as strong as the will to enforce it, and the will has been absent. Findings are issued and ignored. Orders are handed down and defied. The institutions speak, and the killing continues, and the gap between the word of the law and the fact of the bombing grows so wide that the law itself begins to look like another form of theatre, a ritual of concern performed for the benefit of those who wish to feel that something is being done while nothing is being done. For the Palestinian, this is perhaps the most disorienting betrayal of all, because it is the betrayal of the very idea that there are rules, that there are limits, that there is a floor beneath which the world will not allow a people to be pushed. There is no floor, and we have learned that there is no floor for Palestinians, only graves, and the world is supplying the shovels, and the digging is deeper.

And still the witnesses must speak. This is what the architects of forgetting cannot fully control. The child who survived the strike that took their family, speaks. The doctor who worked by the light of a phone in a hospital without power, speaks. The father, carrying what remains of his son in a plastic bag, speaks. Those of us in the diaspora speak and are witnesses for God, not for the “international community”, not for the “Arab and Muslim World leaders”, and not for the elites of the global human rights order. The witnesses, all of them, speak in fragments, in voices broken by what they have seen, and their testimony is the one part of the crime scene that cannot be bulldozed, because it lives in memory and is carried wherever the survivors go. A true investigation would begin with them, would treat their words as the sacred record they are, would build the case patiently from the ground of their suffering upward to the heights of those who ordered it. That investigation may never come from the institutions that were supposed to provide it. So it must be conducted by us, in writing, in poems, songs, and theatre, in remembering, and in the stubborn refusal to let the testimony fade.

Writing all of this down is not to expect it to move the unmovable. It is to refuse the erasure that the killers and their partners are counting on. They are counting on the World Cup, the next music festivals, and another big-time economic project to erase the crime. They are counting on the next news cycle, the inflation, and the one after that.

So let us return to the crime scene, because that is where this began and where it must end. In a true investigation, we would name the principal and the accomplices, the financiers and the suppliers, the lookouts and the fences who move the stolen goods and hide the bodies. We would not allow the loudest mourners to escape scrutiny simply because they wore the right clothes and said the right words at the funeral. The Israeli death machine pulled the trigger, but it did not act alone, and the indictment that history will write cannot stop at the hand that held the weapon. It must extend to the governments that armed it, the parliaments that funded it, the media that sold it as self-defense and demonized the victims, the diplomats that shielded it from accountability, and the brothers in faith and blood who, when the moment came, chose access over solidarity, entertainment festivals and silence over their own people. The crime scene is global, and so is the list of the complicit.

And still the witnesses must speak. This is what the architects of forgetting cannot fully control. The child who survived the strike that took their family, speaks. The doctor who worked by the light of a phone in a hospital without power, speaks. The father, carrying what remains of his son in a plastic bag, speaks.

Writing all of this down is not to expect it to move the unmovable. It is to refuse the erasure that the killers and their partners are counting on. They are counting on the World Cup, the next music festivals, and another big-time economic project to erase the crime. They are counting on the next news cycle, the inflation, and the one after that. They are counting on exhaustion, on the slow dimming of attention, on the comfortable forgetting that has always followed mass death once the cameras find a new subject. They are counting on the day when Gaza becomes a distant past event, safe enough for a Hollywood treatment, a tragedy with a tidy moral story and no living defendants. This essay exists to make that forget-ting a little harder. It is written so that when the autopsy is finally permitted, when the determination is finally made, the record will already say what those of us who stood in the dust always knew.

Gaza is the global crime scene, and the evidence is everywhere. The witnesses, those who survived, are still speaking, and those dead have names, faces, and families to speak on their behalf. And the question that remains is not what happened, for we all saw what happened, but whether the world will ever find the will to call it by its name and hold to account the long chain of hands that made it possible. Gaza is the first fully live-streamed genocide and the most denied and obfuscated.