Niamh Ni Bhriain writes:

Abdullah Ahmed Jihad al-Hasani, a baby boy, not yet one year old. Masah Mohammad Hamza al-Rifi, a baby girl, not yet one year old. Celine Ahmed Mufid al-Yaziji, a baby girl, not yet one year old… a baby… not yet one year old.

Somebody’s whole world, gone in an instant.

In Amsterdam, as the first winds of autumn swept through the city, the names of 69,000 people killed in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza were read aloud, one after the next, day and night without pause, for five full days.

It is a staggering death toll, yet one that is vastly incomplete and already outdated by the time the final name was read.

Applying the calculation used by the Lancet medical journal in a 2024 article, a more accurate figure may be as high as half a million people, but it is likely higher. This would mean that the Israeli-US-European axis of genocide has killed about a quarter of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.

This is the holocaust of our time. [Continue reading…]