East hellscape was playing out here in Ireland

Imagine if the carnage of Middle

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unbelievable, Until the jolting realisation of my own inertia 70 years on.

Take out your phone or open the newspaper. Look again at the photo essays from Gaza. Absorb the calamity in every freezeframe. Observe the misery in every pixel, the hopelessness, despair and viciousness.

One I saw this week squats in my skull.

A panicked, dust and blood-covered parent, a limp young body in his grasp, searching for assistance. His eyes imploring, begging, unable to compute.

See how the ravages of the past two years have rewritten the maps of every face. Every son and daughter of Gaza has witnessed events nobody ever should, things that, once seen, can never be unseen.

Every minute of every day is worse than the worst nightmare we have ever known.

The only hope is that by shouting at the top of our voices to those in power we might inch toward an awakening, enable the tormented to escape the stranglehold of the dark.

At the very least, we are duty-bound to try. Human senses can be neutered by a constant barrage of bad news or by the distance between us and them, the fact this massacre is taking place in a land the vast majority of us have never visited.