622 Days of Normalized Genocide: An endless massacre… And an audience without shock

Alaa Karajah, TV presenter and Writer

Photos: Saher Alghorra / Zuma Press

We count the days as we count the victims numbers ticking upward while everything else stands still. For 622 days, nearly 60,000 martyrs have fallen, and with them, the world has failed the test of human conscience.Tents and hospitals have become graves; the displaced bombed in their shelters, the starving gunned down as they awaited aid. Medics and journalists were targeted before the lens of the camera. Entire families erased from civil records. Corpses torn by stray dogs in the streets. Infants died beneath the rubble of hunger, of cold. Shall I go on listing the crimes the occupation commits against the Palestinian people? I shall not Israel’s crimes defy enumeration.

Daily atrocities unfold as the world watches and grows eerily accustomed to the slaughter of Palestinians with chilling indifference.

Let us trace the psychological arc of public sentiment toward the Israeli war on Gaza since it erupted in October 2023. At first, there was shock then outrage then helplessness.But soon, a shift occurred: a quiet surrender to reality, a reluctant submission, then apathy, and eventually acceptance. The world averted its gaze from a crime that was and still is unfolding. Life went on, as genocide played in the background. This is where humanity truly fell and ended.

What happens when people are killed every day and no one cares? We are no longer facing helplessness, we are facing consent, even complicity. The daily killing of Palestinians has become a mundane element of the global news cycle, just another note in the dreary rhythm of the world.

Lately, a pivotal scene from a film I watched long ago, The Beach (2000) keeps resurfacing in my mind. A group of people were living an idyllic life on a secluded, serene beach. Then, without warning, a shark attacked some of them as they swam leaving a few half-alive, half-dead. At first, the group was consumed by shock, anxiety, sorrow, and rage.

They argued over whether to save the injured, but in the end, most chose self-interest over compassion. Their leader said, “If we send them to the city, others will find out about the beach.” The shark attack was brutal, jarring but it wasn’t the worst thing that happened that day. The real horror came afterward: an emergency meeting around a wooden table once used to plan games and leisure, now repurposed to debate who would live and who would be left behind. Someone suggested, “Let’s move them far out into the wilderness.” And so it was.

The wounded were taken to oblivion. No one followed. Silence was necessary to preserve the “social balance.” Their moans never reached the others; their pain never disrupted the rhythm of communal life. A few days passed and everything returned to normal, as if nothing had ever happened. This is not a fictional tale of ordinary people who failed. It is the story of a society that succeeded in making failure a system. In this system, pain is recycled into “background noise,” and survival belongs only to those who do not disturb the peace with a cry for help. Today’s tragedy is no longer just about people being slaughtered.

It is about the normalization of that slaughter and the ability to coexist with it. This is the savagery of modern society: where inhuman decisions are wrapped in the language of “interest” and “order,” and catastrophe is reframed as a mere administrative glitch in a system that has lost its moral soul. Blaming the besieged victim becomes easier than confronting the perpetrator.

The commodification of Palestinian death.
After two years of relentless killing, Palestinian blood has become a consumable commodity. How did we get here? Those who normalize genocide do more than erase the victim’s body they strip it of meaning. They turn it into a spectacle. A passing “banner” in a scrolling news feed. Through repetition, the exceptional becomes routine. And the monstrous becomes mundane. As Palestinians and media professionals, we follow the news and unfolding events every single day. In the corridors of television studios, silence roams dense, heavy like the ugliest form of noise. Our colleagues’ faces fade, wither, worn down by both physical and emotional exhaustion. We suffer invisible tremors small psychological concussions that go unseen, but accumulate with time. Everyone here knows: this job is no longer about chasing stories or writing reports. It has become a desperate attempt to rescue our humanity from erosion. We keep working to protect ourselves from growing numb to the killing from seeing it as just a number, a photograph, or a headline flashing across the screen.

People say to us, “You’re journalists. You must be used to it.” But the truth is we are not. And we never will be. To become used to this is to die inside. Numbness is death. Numbness is complicity.

When I first began my career in journalism, I often turned to passages from the writings of Palestinian thinker Edward Said words that offered a tool to eclaim our narrative. He wrote: “True intellectuals are those who choose to speak the truth to power, not to serve power at the expense of truth.”

Today, I realize that what we are living through is not merely a physical extermination, it is an extermination of the right to speak. We are not only being killed in the field. Our voices are being silenced in the news. Our context distorted in reports. Our memory assassinated in the language used to reframe us to the world. This is why we persist in carrying out our duties ethical before professional. Not because we believe the world will awaken though we still hope it might—but because we cannot bear to be killed twice: once by bombs, and once by forgetting.

We write from afar far from Gaza but we are inhabited by all that it holds, and by all who have survived it. Months ago, I visited Wisam, a 26-year-old woman from Gaza, wounded and recovering in a hospital in Doha. Qatar had received a group of the injured from Gaza, and I met several of them as part of an effort to offer support and solidarity. I thought I had seen, or at least heard, the worst of stories until I met her. Wisam is a gifted artist, once working in interior design but her dream was never given the chance to bloom.

In the first week of the war, an unexpected Israeli airstrike, a single missile, and a barrel of fire hurled from the sky leveled her family home in Tel al-Hawa, Gaza. Fifty souls, residents of the building and its neighbors, ascended as martyrs. Only Wisam survived, shielded by the distance of one room from the blast’s center. But survival came at a cruel cost. She didn’t just lose her entire family; she lost both legs above the knee, and her right arm, the hand with which she once painted windows that opened to life. Wisam remains a wound carved into the face of this world. What deepened the tragedy even more was that the bodies of her family still lie beneath the rubble, unrecovered, because there weren’t enough tools or means to lift the ruins.

Her father and mother were martyred. Her brother Mohammed, 23 years old, her brother Mustafa, 30, along with his wife and daughter. Her cousins’ children gone. Only her sister Widad survived because she had been caring for their grandmother in Jabalia Camp, where she had lived for years. Another sister, Wafaa, had long been married and lived elsewhere. Wisam lay in intensive care, unknown and unnamed no one knew she was still alive. And when she finally opened her eyes after surgery in the hospital room, she asked, “Where is my family? What happened to me?”

Wisam says, “I didn’t know I had lost my limbs. I couldn’t feel anything.”She realized, from the eyes around her, that the loss was immense and the pain even greater. “I saw it all in my sister Widad’s eyes, in her tears. She tried to lie, but her face, her collapse, told me everything. I knew then that everything was gone. No home, no family, no memories, not even my work.”She had lost both legs, and her right arm, the hand she used to draw. “Any architect knows we need both hands in this field.” She recalls, “At that moment, I felt like everything had been destroyed: my limbs, my work, my stance, my future, my art.”But today, Wisam says:“Gaza is our city… We love it. And it will rise again even if it takes many years, it will return. And we will return to it.”

In the next room lay Yahya, a fourteen-year-old boy who had lost both legs in a bombing on al-Shuja’iyya neighborhood. He smiled as I approached. I sat beside him. He said softly, “I’m not sad that I lost my legs. I just… I just wanted to play football again. Not a lot, just a little.” In another room was little Marah, nine years old. She whispered to her mother, “I don’t want to sleep because I don’t want to dream about the bombing.” She fought to stay awake, resisting exhaustion and sedation trying to outrun her nightmares.When I spoke to another wounded young man from Gaza, in his twenties, he had lost his sight in a bombing that struck his home. He told me: “I was screaming under the rubble not just from the pain, but from the fear that I might die and no one would know.” That sentence echoed in my mind for days: To die, and no one knows. This is not just a phrase. It is the very definition of annihilation: to be erased so completely that no trace remains, not even a witness.

The manufacturing of indifference…and the collapse of meaning
Hannah Arendt spoke of “evil when it surpasses understanding” of the moment when crimes become unbearable not because they are hidden, but because they are repeated to the point of numbness. Genocide, as Arendt explains, is not merely mass killing it is the dismantling of thought itself, the destruction of the world’s moral compass. And this is precisely what we are living through today: a global scene paralyzed by apathy. Hospitals bombed. Children targeted. Executions carried out in the streets no longer provoke outrage.Worse still: they no longer surprise anyone. Amid this terrifying human misery and under the weight of overwhelming images and information has modern man lost the ability to be moved? Is this ability to step over corpses? without even slowing our pace the most dangerous form of banality that Hannah Arendt warned us about? A banality not born of ignorance, but of saturation where evil no longer shocks, because it has become routine.

After World War II, the world stood stunned before the horror it had witnessed. The death toll was read with disbelief over 70 million lives lost. It was as if humanity looked into a mirror it no longer recognized, its features utterly deformed. How could a man do this to his fellow man? That was the question of the age. Amid this collective shock came Stanley Milgram’s experiment in the 1960s, unveiling something even more unsettling: that under the command of authority,humans are capable of obedience even if it leads to the death of others.

Today, Gaza lives through a continuous hell. Children are killed in front of cameras. Entire families are wiped out beneath the rubble of their homes. Israel wages systematic violence, while Western nations who once wept for the victims of the Holocaust now maintain a silence that borders on complicity. We are witnessing a modern reenactment of Milgram’s experiment: leaders give the orders, the public finds justification, and Palestinian blood is spilled upon the altar of double standards. The true shock today lies not in the crime itself but in our capacity to coexist with it. As if the world has chosen to forget the lessons of the past only to reproduce them, in all their horror.

Genocide as a Linguistic Act Before It Is a Physical Crime
What happens in Western newsrooms and even in some Arab media platforms is not mere neglect. It is a deliberate re-engineering of the narrative.

Massacres are reframed as “responses,” the killer is cast as a defender, and genocide is compressed into a bland news ticker: “Several Palestinians killed in an Israeli airstrike.” As Edward Said once wrote, “Domination does not stop at the destruction of the body it also subjugates the narrative.” Through this linguistic act, the Palestinian is stripped of humanity, rendered a natural occurrence, like a weather update or a traffic report. This is what frightens us even more than the killing itself: the fear that it may become a habit, a background noise that draws no attention. The killer no longer hides. He organizes his crime, announces it, and demands the world understand it. Bureaucracy, technical terminology, press conferences they have all become tools to beautify brutality. As if killing were an administrative task.

The Normalization of Genocide as an Epistemic System
I came to understand, later, that the most dangerous thing we face is not the act of killing itself, but the language through which that killing is delivered. Genocide is restructured into a narrative that can be swallowed. The massacre is fragmented, detached from its roots, and packaged into terms like “conflict,” “escalation,” or “response to a threat.” In doing so, the global conscience is granted permission to resign and to grow accustomed. The normalization of genocide does not begin with the bombs it begins with words. When terms like “precision strikes,” “legitimate targets,” and “collateral damage”are repeated, they serve as bleach for the blood, a polishing of death until it becomes palatable. In this war though everything around us urges despair
we cannot afford the luxury of surrender.

Journalists have become the guardians of voices abandoned by the world, because they believe it is their duty to tell the truth. Just like the sole survivor the one who, alone, must carry the burden of recounting what happened to the world. And what makes it all the more painful is that these journalists are forced, every day, to carry out their work with professionalism: to craft headlines, choose the right images, adhere to journalistic standards even as every human standard is being crushed before their eyes.

The crime Israel is committing is no longer confined to the act of killing itself or the use of precision-guided bombs. It lies, more insidiously, in making us accept daily slaughter as part of the news cycle in normalizing genocide, and conditioning the world to grow used to it. To hear, day after day, of a hundred people killed as if we were hearing a weather update. To see images of corpses and scroll past them while thinking about what to have for lunch.

Israel tested the conscience of the world in Gaza and when it failed that test, it grew bolder in her cruelty toward anyone who dared confront her. The world does not act. Israel knows this. And so it does as it pleases, without consequence. Because there is nothing she fears more than a living, breathing conscience and she works each day to silence it.

I do not, for a moment, diminish the courage of free peoples, those who stood and still stand crying out for justice in Palestine. But that, it seems, has not yet matched the scale of the crime being committed.

Every night, the same questions haunt me:
– Who holds the killer accountable?
– Who returns names to the dead?
– What if these victims had fallen elsewhere in the world?
– Would we have waited for 60,000 to die before we acted?
– Would the murderer have been left free to justify, and to be justified?
– Would we have needed images of torn limbs to be convinced that a crime had taken place?
– And what will we say to our children in the future, when they ask us what we did in the face of injustice and evil?