One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

by Omar El Akkad

On October 7, 2023, armed groups led by Hamas’s military wing launched a coordinated attack on multiple cities near the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Fighters killed 1,195 people, of which 815 were civilians, according to an analysis by Agence France-Presse, including at least 282 women and 36 children. They abducted more than 250 people. It was a bloodbath, orchestrated by exactly the kind of entity that thrives in the absence of anything resembling a future. Immediately afterward, Israel began a campaign of obliteration throughout Gaza. Almost all the region’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced. Virtually every school, hospital, and university was either damaged or destroyed. The deliberate withholding of aid and destruction of infrastructure have resulted in widespread famine and death by disease. Over and over, residents were ordered from their neighborhoods into “safe zones” and then wiped out there. Some people are afforded precision in death, but not these: there is no accurate count of the murdered. There may never be.