Physical Destruction in Whole or in Part

I GREW UP during the civil war in Lebanon. With my parents and brothers, I endured the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 and recall what we thought was the unsurpassable violence of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006. But nothing I or anyone I know have seen bears even a passing resemblance to what we are helplessly watching unfold in Gaza today.

Since October 7, the Israelis bombing the Gaza Strip have killed more than 11,000 people, including almost 5,000 children. The true, horrific scale of these numbers—of the calamity being methodically inflicted on an entire population as the world watches on—becomes even clearer when considered in relative terms. In three weeks, Israel has killed more civilians than the Russians have killed in almost two years of total war in Ukraine, a country with twenty times Gaza’s population and a land mass over a thousand times its size.¹ Save the Children reported that Israel has killed more children in the first three weeks of bombing Gaza than were killed annually in all conflict zones across the entire world since 2019.² And that was about two weeks and 2,000 children ago. On an average day in Gaza, Israel kills 136 kids. Twenty-eight thousand Gazans, including more than a thousand children, have now been injured, and countless more are entombed alive or dead beneath the rubble of destroyed apartment blocks. Entire multigenerational families have been wiped out: grandparents, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, and children. Every one of them has a name, a family, a face, a voice, a smile, a laugh. Already, in absolute or relative terms, these numbers strain our moral and intellectual capacity to comprehend the scale of the loss and harm. And the end is nowhere in sight.