'We Will Not Be Silent:' Hearing Stilled Voices of the Gaza Genocide

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.