While Trump dreams of a Riviera over children’s bones, Israel is executing the first live claimed genocide in history.
There are crimes that humanity cannot name without trembling. There are silences that she cannot keep without condemning herself. Gaza, May 2026: We are at the crossroads of these two impossibilities.
There are some moments in history when ordinary words capitulate. Where the vocabulary of diplomacy, journalism, even literature, becomes indignantly insufficient in the face of what the eyes see and that the conscience refuses to integrate. We are in one of those moments. His name is Gaza. And for two and a half years he has been defying any attempt to reduce it to a “conflict”, a “crisis”, a “worrying humanitarian situation”.
What is happening in Gaza has a name. This name, the International Court of Justice pronounced it in January 2024 by ordering Israel to take precautionary measures against a “real and imminent risk of genocide”. Human Rights Watch assumed this name in 2024 by describing the deliberate deprivation of water as a “crime against humanity of extermination”. This name, specialists in the Holocaust and genocides established in the most respectable universities in the world have written, signed, published it. This name, I write it in my turn, without fear and without shame: genocide. And I add this to it, which is my own contribution to this verdict of History: this is the first genocide that its authors claim publicly, live, in front of the cameras of the whole world.
The Nazis hid their crimes. Israel claims them. That’s the difference. This is also what makes our time even more scandalous than the one that produced Auschwitz: because Auschwitz was done in secret and at night, while Gaza is being done in daylight, under satellites, in front of iPhones, live on social networks — and the world is watching.
The Riviera: a businessman dreams on a mass grave
We have to take Trump seriously. Not because he deserves intellectual respect, but because history has taught us that dangerous fools are not those we don’t listen to, but those we don’t listen to soon enough. And Trump said what he wanted to make of Gaza: a Riviera. Hotels. Beaches. Marinas. A real estate investigation into the bones of Palestinian children.
Its “Board of Peace” — this legal architecture intended to give a UN veneer to colonization — is empty of any funding four months after its creation, despite the billions promised by the member countries. An official had to be sent to Saudi Arabia in April to beg Riyadh to keep its billion-dollar promise. No one paid. Israel, on the other hand, continues to kill: at least 910 Palestinians murdered since the signing of the ceasefire that Trump presides over like a boxing champion presents a trophy that he has not won.
The governance structure he has imagined is a legal obscenity: a facade Palestinian authority placed under an Arab-American executive council, itself under the supervision of a “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump with absolute veto over all decisions — and without real Palestinian representation. This is the administrative Nakba: the Palestinians are being deprived even of their right to administer their own servitude. Their land is being stolen from them. We’re stealing their water. Their children are being stolen from them. And they are robbed of the fiction of their own governance.
Let’s add this, which the chancelleries do not dare to say: the recent divergence between Trump and Netanyahu on Iran is not a rupture. It’s a shareholder disagreement over the timing. Trump wants his diplomatic deal with Tehran. Netanyahu wants his all-out war to consolidate his internal power. Both want the same thing for Gaza: a land without Palestinian resistance, left to colonization, renamed Riviera and open to Gulf investments. The personality conflict must not mask the convergence of program.
Futuricide: killing a people until its future
A French researcher has recently forged a word that deserves to be included in all dictionaries of contemporary horror: futuricide. It designates the systematic destruction not only of a people, but of everything that would allow this people to have a future: its schools, its universities, its hospitals, its archives, its libraries, its mosques, its churches, its cemeteries, its trees, its memory, its culture, its collective imagination.
The toll of Israeli futuricide in Gaza is staggering. All sixteen universities in Gaza have been destroyed or rendered inoperative. All of them. Not one was spared. Twelve museums. Hundreds of historical buildings. Archives that contained the memory of thousands of years of human presence in this strip of land. The World Bank has estimated the damage to cultural heritage alone at more than $300 million – a figure that does not reflect the loss, because the loss is not decipherable. We do not price the erasure of a collective memory.
And the trees. Space remote sensing shows that between 64 and 94% of Gaza’s vegetation cover – depending on the area — was decimated in the first twelve months of the war alone. The orange trees. The olive trees. The lemon trees. These trees that Palestinian families planted like we plant ancestors, like we inscribe a name in the earth. Shot, burned, uprooted by bulldozers. The Romans salted the land of Carthage to prevent any rebirth. Israel uses bulldozers, bombs and concrete poured into wells.
One hundred thousand cubic meters of raw sewage flows into the Mediterranean every day from the collapsed sanitation systems in Gaza. Israel has destroyed or damaged almost 90% of the water and sanitation infrastructure — desalination plants, boreholes, pipelines, sewage networks. MSF teams have documented Israeli fire on clearly identified tanker trucks. Two hundred and fifty agricultural wells have been destroyed or condemned. It’s not collateral damage. It’s a strategy. Thirst as a weapon. The earth as an enemy to be sterilized.
Children: the register of infamy
We have to write down the numbers. Read them slowly. Let them in.
64,000 children killed or maimed in two years, according to UNICEF. At least 1,000 babies among them. Twenty-eight children killed on average every day at the height of the war — the equivalent of an entire classroom massacred daily — whose bodies sometimes can only be found under the rubble, weeks later. During the ceasefire that was supposed to stop everything: a child killed every day, for a hundred days.
These children are killed in all the ways that human imagination has been able to conceive to destroy the flesh: airstrikes, suicide drones, sniper bullets, severe acute malnutrition, infections for lack of care, rats that bite in the tents of displaced people at night. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, 383 children were admitted to MSF’s nutrition centers in Gaza, 35% of whom suffered from severe acute malnutrition. Thirty-five percent. This means that one in three children who arrive at an MSF center is starving to death.
Children killed while waiting in line for food. Killed in medical clinics while waiting for nutritional supplements. Killed in their homes. Killed in their tents. Killed in the arms of their mothers. Killed, and their mothers too. UNICEF has asked the question publicly, from the Gaza Strip, to the UN Security Council: “How many other little girls and boys will still have to die? What atrocity will still have to be broadcast live for the international community to mobilize?”The Security Council responded by adopting resolutions that no one has implemented.
Killing witnesses: darkness as a complement to crime
Gaza is the deadliest conflict for journalists in the entire history of the twenty-first century. This is no coincidence. It’s not collateral damage. It’s a policy. As of April 9, 2026, 359 journalists had been killed in 916 days. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has explicitly written: “Israel’s war against Gaza is more deadly for journalists than any previous war”. According to Reporters Without Borders, Israeli forces deliberately targeted Palestinian journalists.
August 25, 2025: a double targeted strike on a building of the Nasser hospital in Khan Younès, where journalists from Al Jazeera, Reuters and AP were. A drone strikes. Help is arriving to evacuate the injured. Eight minutes later, a second strike on the same rescuers. Twenty dead. Among them is Hossam al-Masri, a Reuters photographer for decades. His fifteen-year-old son was there the next day, holding his father’s destroyed camerAugust 25, 2025: a double targeted strike on a building of the Nasser hospital in Khan Younès, where journalists from Al Jazeera, Reuters and AP were. A drone strikes. Help is arriving to evacuate the injured. Eight minutes later, a second strike on the same rescuers. Twenty dead. Among them is Hossam al-Masri, a Reuters photographer for decades. His fifteen-year-old son was there the next day, holding his father’s destroyed camera. This gesture of a child holding his father’s crushed camera is stronger than all the speeches: it is the memory that refuses to die even when we kill those who carry it.
Since October 2023, more than 400 humanitarian workers have been killed. More than 1,300 health professionals. March 23, 2025 in Rafah: 15 rescue workers, clearly identifiable in their marked vehicles, deliberately killed. Their bodies found in a mass grave on March 30. The Israeli government responded to this by announcing, on December 31, 2025, the prohibition of access to Gaza for 37 humanitarian organizSince October 2023, more than 400 humanitarian workers have been killed. More than 1,300 health professional
More than the Nazis: the right word in front of History
I know what this section will provoke as reactions. I anticipate them and I refuse them. This comparison is not a provocation. It is not the product of emotion or partiality. It is the result of a cold reading of facts, methods and intentions.
Academic specialists in the Holocaust and genocides — not activists, academics trained in the clinical study of the worst crimes of humanity – made the comparison. They noted that as of September 2024, while the death toll was much lower than today’s figure, Gaza had already exceeded in proportion of civilian casualties most of the conflicts of the last seventy years – Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Syria, Yemen included. 70 kilotons of explosives dropped on 365 km2: six times the Hiroshima bomb, on a territory six times more populated than was this Japanese city.
But here is what the Nazi comparison specifically illuminates and that we must say without detours: the Nazi extermination was organized in secret, hidden behind bureaucratic euphemisms, publicly denied by its authors. The SS officers were ashamed — not of their crimes, but of what their public knowledge would do in their image. That is why Himmler was telling his men that this secret should be taken to the grave.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in front of the cameras: “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly”. Minister Ben Gvir published on social networks a video of activists kneeling, handcuffed and humiliated, like a trophy. Members of the Knesset voted for the permanent settlement of Gaza. Israeli soldiers filmed their own destruction and shared it with pride. No secrets. No shame. No understatement. Here’s the difference: the Nazis hid their crimes. Israel claims them.
This reversal — the public claim of the crime – constitutes a qualitative mutation in the history of human barbarism. It means that we have crossed a threshold: the one where the executioner is no longer afraid of the gaze of the world. And if the executioner is no longer afraid, it is because the world has already abdicated its function of witness.
Starvation: the perfect crime, the crime without noise
There are the deaths that the bombs cause. Noisy, visible, photographable. And there are the deaths that hunger causes. Silent, slow, invisible. Gaza undergoes both simultaneously — and it is the combination of the two that defines the method: we kill quickly those who resist, and we let those who survive die slowly.
The number of food aid trucks entering Gaza fell from a weekly average of 4,200 to just 590 after all crossings were closed in February 2026. Five major humanitarian organizations – including Oxfam, Save the Children and the Norwegian Refugee Council – published a joint assessment in April: the ceasefire plan is a failure. Palestinians continue to suffer extreme deprivation, hunger, injuries and human losses. No Western government has taken up this assessment as an action program. We read it. We filed it. We’ve moved on.
Malnutrition is now the leading cause of death in Gaza, especially among children. The spread of rodents — those rats that infest tents, bite babies, contaminate food supplies — has become an additional public health crisis. The collapse of the sanitation systems has flooded the alleys of Gaza with sewage: 44% of medical consultations in Gaza concern waterborne diseases. Drink the water that kills. Eat what’s left. Survive in the rubble of everything that allowed to live. This is what Gaza is in May 2026.
The colonizability of the world: the real scandal
Malek Bennabi — this giant of thought that Algeria generated and that the Arab world has not yet read enough — had theorized the concept of colonizability: this inner disposition, this flaw in the consciousness of a civilization, which makes it available to its own domination. Colonizability is not just about being colonized. It is the fact of accepting one’s own servitude, of administering it, of ending up protecting it against those who would like to get out of it.
The Arab world of 2026 is a textbook case of colonizability. Its governments keep their embassies in Tel Aviv. They maintain their air lines to Israel. They are signing, or planning to sign, Abraham Accords that Trump presents to them as a good deal in a global pact on Iran. Riyadh and Doha have been put on notice by Trump himself: normalize with Israel or be excluded from the Iran agreement. This is diplomatic blackmail in its rawest form — and several Arab capitals are preparing to give in.
Meanwhile, Gaza. Meanwhile, 72,700 died. Meanwhile, 64,000 children killed or maimed. Meanwhile, 359 journalists murdered. Meanwhile, culture, memory, water, trees, universities, hospitals: everything is destroyed.
And the West? He turned the word “complexity” into a shield against the truth. “The situation is complex.”No. She’s not. It is simple. A state systematically bombs a civilian population locked up in a dead-end territory, destroys its sources of water and food, kills its doctors and journalists, razes its universities and its heritage, and claims all this publicly. It’s simple. It’s a crime. And to refuse it is to be an accomplice.
Ibn Khaldun taught us this: empires do not fall under the blows of their enemies. They collapse from the inside, when their assabiyya — their sense of the common good, their moral cohesion — corrupts to the bone. The West is experiencing this decomposition. A West that has spent two centuries proclaiming human rights and that cannot pronounce the word genocide when it takes place under its satellites is a West whose assabiyya is dead.
Appeal to humanity — before it’s too late
I am not writing for those who already know. I don’t write for the convinced. I am writing for those who are still hesitating, who think that international politics is too complicated for them, that what is happening in Gaza is far away, that their voice does not count, that History is being written by forces beyond them.
I write to tell them: History is always written by ordinary people who refused to be ordinary at an extraordinary moment. The French resistance fighters were teachers, bakers, cheminots, students. The activists of the American civil rights movement were pastors, high school students, seamstresses. Nelson Mandela was a lawyer whom the world had sentenced to life in prison. And Rosa Parks was a tired seamstress who refused to get up on a bus.
Refusal is always possible. It starts with the smallest and largest gestures at the same time.
Boycott. The BDS – Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions – is not a radical posture. This is the only non-violent lever that history has validated to constrain an apartheid regime. It worked in South Africa. It can work here.
Protest. Taking to the streets is not symbolic. It’s political. Governments count protesters as they count votes. Tens of thousands on the streets of Brussels, London, Paris, Algiers, Beirut, Jakarta, Buenos Aires: it changes the electoral equations. And the electoral equations change the policies.
Demand. Your elected officials, your mayors, your ambassadors, your universities, your pension funds: the severance of all economic, academic and diplomatic ties with a state recognized guilty of crimes against humanity by the highest international legal bodies. Demand the execution of ICC arrest warrants. Require aid trucks to enter without restriction. Demand that your country stop selling weapons to a genocidal state.
To testify. Not to be silent in dinners, classrooms, mosques, churches, synagogues, neighborhood meetings. Name what is happening. Correct the one who says “conflict” when it is necessary to say “genocide”. Name the assassin when he kills. Language is a political act.
Gaza is burning.
The world is watching.
And in that still gaze,
the verdict of our time is being played out.
Gaza is not a cause.
Gaza is a mirror.
And this mirror reflects back to us today the image of what we really are.
