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'We Will Not Be Silent:' Hearing Stilled Voices of the Gaza Genocide
As Israel routinely murders the healthcare workers and journalists who witness its genocide, we must raise our own voices in protest.
Sep 08, 2025
In his last minutes of freedom before Israel Defense Forces arrested him, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, clad in a medic's white coat, walked alone toward two Israeli tanks. His captors awaited him amid the rubble of Gaza's Kamal Adwan hospital. An artist swiftly created a dramatic poster showing Dr. Safiya striding through the ruins of the hospital he directed. The artist, David Solnit, recently updated the poster's caption. It now reads: Free Dr. Abu Safiya Eight months in prison Dec. 27, 2024 - August 27, 2025.
Dr. Safiya had already endured agonizing losses at the Kamal Adwan hospital. In late October 2024, an Israeli drone attack killed his son, also a doctor. In a November 2024 attack on the hospital, Dr. Safiya was wounded by shrapnel, but continued working, insisting he would not close the hospital. He witnessed his colleagues being humiliated, beaten, and marched off to prison. By December 27, 2024, when Dr. Safiya's ordeal as a prisoner began, most hospitals in Gaza were nonfunctional.
On August 28, 2025, Dr. Safiya's lawyer, Ghaid Ghanem Qassem, visited him in the Ofer Prison. She reports he has lost one-third of his body weight. While imprisoned in in the Sde Teiman military Detention Center, located in an Israeli military base in the Negev desert, he showed signs of torture. Subjected to beating with electric shocks and batons, he sustained blows which may also cause him to lose his right eye. Yet his message remains intact:
I entered in the name of humanity, and I will leave in the name of humanity… We will remain on our land and continue to provide healthcare services to the people, God willing, even from a tent.
Regimes conducting a genocide have more than one reason to eliminate brave professionals attempting, life by precious life, to undo their inhuman work: Doctors not only seek to slow down the dying, but they, like the journalists the Israeli regime so frantically targets, are specially positioned and specially qualified to accurately report on the intensity and nature of Israel's extermination campaign. Silencing the citizens most capable of reporting on genocidal savagery is a key objective of genocide.
In one of the most egregious efforts to eliminate a key eye witness, Israeli naval forces, on May 10, 2025, killed 12-year-old Mohammed Saeed al-Bardawil, who, as a passerby alongside his father, had witnessed Israel's March 23rd pre-dawn execution of 15 unarmed emergency rescue workers. The murdered paramedics had driven their clearly marked ambulances to a spot where they intended to retrieve victims of an earlier attack. The bullets that killed them were fired over six minutes as Israeli soldiers advanced to shoot directly into the survivors' heads and torsos, afterwards using earth-moving equipment to bury their corpses and vehicles. On that day, Mohammed and his father were detained and made to lie face down near a burning ambulance. He is listed as a source in a well-documented New York Times video on the massacre, dated May 2. Eleven days later, an Israeli gunboat fired on his father's fishing boat, killing Muhammed in his father's presence off the coast of Gaza's southern Rafah governate.
Almost daily, new faces appear in an assemblage of photos showing hundreds of journalists Israel has killed.
It was two weeks ago, on August 25, that Israel killed Reuters camera operator Hussam Al Masri and 19 others, four of them also journalists, in a series of double-tap precision-guided aerial attacks on buildings and a stairway of the Al Nasser Hospital. Al Masri was easily targetable as he broadcast a live video feed from a Reuters outpost on a top hospital floor. Describing the second wave of the attack, Jonathan Cook writes: "And when Israel struck 10 minutes later with two coordinated missiles, it knew that the main victims would be the emergency workers who went to rescue survivors from the first strike and journalists—al-Masri's friends—who were nearby and rushed to the scene… Nothing was a 'mishap.' It was planned down to the minutest detail."
Snipers and weaponized drone operators routinely kill Palestinians who courageously continue to don bullet proof press jackets, set up cameras, and report on Israel's atrocities. Israel refuses entry to foreign journalists, and when brave, grieving, impassioned young Palestinians insist on carefully documenting their people's agony for Western news outlets, Israel carefully targets them using the traceable phone and broadcasting equipment necessary to their work, before posthumously branding them Hamas operatives. Craven Western officials watch from within Israel's patron states, discounting brown lives on whatever flimsy pretexts white authorities offer them. Almost daily, new faces appear in an assemblage of photos showing hundreds of journalists Israel has killed.
Healthcare workers and journalists who are still alive do their work amid struggles to prevent their families, their colleagues, their neighbors, and of course themselves, from deaths not just by direct massacre but by militarily imposed starvation and its handmaiden, epidemic disease. Surgeons speak of being too weak to stand throughout an operation. Reporters document their own starvation.
Palestinians long for protection, but even the prospect of United Nations mandated protective forces carries terrifying possibilities. What if "peacekeepers" assigned to monitor Palestinians collect data the Israelis will use to control them? Weaponized "stabilizing forces," equipped with US surveillance technology, could be used to target, imprison, assassinate, and starve even more Palestinians.
In the summer of 1942, in Munich, Germany, five students and one professor summoned astonishing courage to defy a genocidal regime to which we, reluctantly, have to look if we want to find a racist cruelty comparable to that currently seizing not just Israel's leadership but, in poll after poll, strong majorities of its non-native population. The students' collective, called The White Rose, distributed leaflets denouncing Nazi atrocities. "We will not be silent" was the final line of each leaflet. Hans Scholl, age 24, and his sister, Sophie Scholl, age 21, hand delivered the leaflets to their university campus in February of 1943. The Gestapo arrested them after a janitor spotted them disseminating the leaflets. Four days later, Hans and Sophie, as well as their colleague Christopher Probst, were executed by guillotine.
With Israel's nuclear arsenal capable of outkilling the Nazi regime over the course of a few minutes, and in the process inciting humanity's final war; and with its leadership and populace radicalized through decades of fascist impunity to the point of endorsing not just a genocide but multiple, preemptive military strikes upon most of its neighbors at once, we may well be arriving at the moment when, as a result of our having let Israel assassinate, with impunity, the reporters of its crimes, there will be no one in the outside world left to receive reports.
The silence we allow ourselves today may soon be involuntary, and absolute. Let us summon up a fraction of Dr. Safiya's, of young Mohammad's, of Sophie Scholl's and Hussam al-Masri's courage and speak while we can.
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Israel Massacres Gaza Children Fetching Water, Starves 13 More Palestinians to Death
"A child in Gaza shouldn't have to die for a sip of water," said one Palestinian American critic. "Families are starving, fleeing under bombs, with nowhere safe to go. Humanity is failing them."
Sep 02, 2025
Israeli occupation forces killed scores more Palestinians in Gaza on Tuesday, including 13 people who starved to death and at least 11 others—including seven children—massacred while collecting water in a so-called "safe zone."
The Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) said that at least 89 Gazans were killed in Israeli attacks throughout the embattled strip since dawn Tuesday, including 42 in Gaza City, where Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops are pushing ahead with Operation Gideon's Chariots 2, a campaign to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian exclave.
At least 11 Palestinians, including nine children, were killed in an IDF airstrike as they gathered water in al-Mawasi, an area where Israeli authorities encouraged people to flee ahead of the invasion of northern Gaza.
Earlier on Tuesday, the IDF's spokesperson for Arab media issued an advisory stating, "To all residents of the Gaza Strip, in preparation for the expansion of fighting into Gaza City, we remind you that the al-Mawasi area will witness the provision of better humanitarian services, particularly those related to healthcare, water, and food."
Responding to the massacre, Palestinian American journalist Alexandra Halaby wrote on X: "A child in Gaza shouldn't have to die for a sip of water. Families are starving, fleeing under bombs, with nowhere safe to go. Humanity is failing them. Demand a ceasefire. Demand aid. Demand justice."
Assal Rad, a media critic and scholar of Middle East history, posted a graphic photo of some of the slain children on X, quipping, "More Israeli 'self-defense' today in Gaza."
Also on Tuesday, GHM said it registered 13 deaths, including three children, due to starvation and malnutrition over the past 24 hours. That brings the total number of deaths from the Gaza famine caused by Israel to at least 361—130 of them children.
All told, Israel's 697-day annihilation and siege of Gaza have killed at least 63,633 Palestinians—most of them women and children—while wounding more than 160,900 others and leaving thousands more missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Experts say the actual number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces is likely far higher than the official GHM figures.
Israel's conduct in the war and Israeli leaders' statements of intent to destroy Gaza and its people are the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case. On Monday, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) joined the growing number of groups and individuals calling Israel's war on Gaza a genocide.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are also fugitives from the International Criminal Court, which last year issued arrest warrants accusing the pair of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.
Two more Palestinian journalists were also killed by Israel forces on Tuesday. Eman Al-Zamli was reportedly killed by IDF drone fire while fetching drinking water near the Hamad City neighborhood, north of Khan Younis. Rasmi Salem of the Manara Media Company was killed in an IDF strike on Abu al-Amin Street near al-Jalaa Square in Gaza City.
According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), United Nations experts, and Gaza officials, between 210 and 275 Palestinian media workers have been killed by IDF bombs and bullets since October 2023.
On Sunday, dozens of Lebanese journalists and others rallied in Beirut's Martyrs' Square for a sit-in protest to express solidarity with Palestinian colleagues killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
"Journalists are being killed in Gaza because they show the world what they see with their own eyes," Walid Kilani, Hamas' media official in Lebanon, told the demonstrators, according to L'Orient Today.
The Beirut rally followed a Saturday silent protest march for slain Palestinian journalists held in the Swedish cities of Stockholm and Göteborg, and an open call by more than 200 advocacy groups, media outlets, and journalists for Israel to let foreign reporters into Gaza.
"At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no one left to keep you informed," said RSF.
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Israel Bombs Gaza Hospitals, Killing and Wounding Dozens of Palestinians
"Attacks on hospitals must stop," said the head of the World Health Organization. "The aid blockade must end to allow immediate entry of food, medicines, and equipment."
May 13, 2025
U.S.-backed Israeli forces bombed two hospitals in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, killing and wounding at least dozens of Palestinians including patients, forcibly displaced people, medical staff, rescue workers, and a well-known journalist.
Early Tuesday, Israel bombed the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, killing at least two people including photojournalist Hasan Eslaih, who was receiving treatment after surviving a previous Israeli attempt to assassinate him last month.
Gaza officials said Eslaih, who was the director of the Alam24 News Agency, is at least the 215th media worker killed by Israel since October 2023. Eslaih lost a finger and was badly injured in an April 7 Israeli strike on a tent outside the same hospital in which numerous people were burned alive. More than a dozen patients were reportedly injured in Tuesday's attack.
"The burn unit was struck, 18 hospital beds in the surgical department, eight beds in the intensive care unit, and 10 inpatient beds were destroyed," World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said after the attack. "This is huge blow to the already overwhelmed health system."
"We repeat our call: Attacks on hospitals must stop," Tedros added. "The aid blockade must end to allow immediate entry of food, medicines, and equipment to support patients and the rehabilitation of hospitals. The best medicine is peace."
Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill said following the attack that "the U.S. is facilitating these war crimes and most Western journalists remain totally silent."
Later on Tuesday, Israel bombed a courtyard and surrounding areas of the European Hospital, also in Khan Younis, killing at least 28 people and injuring scores more. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) acknowledged the attack, claiming it targeted "Hamas operatives who were inside a command and control complex built within an infrastructure under the hospital."
British surgeon Tom Potokar was inside European Hospital when it was bombed. He said that "this is where kids with cancer are waiting to be evacuated and supposed to be 'deconflicted."
According to the Gaza Government Media Office, 38 hospitals, 81 health centers, and 164 medical facilities have been destroyed, damaged, or rendered inoperable since Israel launched its assault on the coastal enclave after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs condemned the strikes,
saying on social media that "these attacks are unacceptable and must end. Healthcare is not a target."
Attacks on medical facilities are war crimes under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
The Gaza Health Ministry decried "the repeated targeting of hospitals and the pursuit and killing of wounded patients inside treatment rooms," adding that such attacks confirm "Israel's deliberate intent to inflict greater damage to the healthcare system."
In the United States, the advocacy group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a statement that fugitive Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "bombs hospitals, slaughters Palestinian civilians, destroys homes, and seeks to starve and ethnically cleanse the population of Gaza, all in a brutal campaign to continue Israel's genocide and stay in office indefinitely."
CAIR added that U.S. President Donald Trump "must act to stop these crimes against humanity, which our nation has unfortunately enabled for decades, and finally allow the Palestinian people to live in peace and freedom."
IDF strikes have obliterated Gaza's medical infrastructure along with the rest of the densely populated strip. Last year, an independent United Nations commission found that "Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza's healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities."
The commission's report detailed hundreds of IDF attacks on Gaza healthcare facilities and the killing or wounding of around 1,700 medical workers, calling such killings "widespread and systematic."
Israel's 585-day onslaught and siege—which officials say has left more than 186,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing and millions more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened—is the subject of an ongoing genocide case brought before the International Court of Justice in The Hague by South Africa.
Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court, also in The Hague, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including extermination and starvation as a weapon of war.
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