Gaza's genocide is being broadcast live and reporters are paying with their lives

For more than 700 days, Israel has waged a devastating campaign against Gaza whose scale and brutality leave little hope or a war sign of ending.

- WAEL AL-DAHDOUH

One need not scrutinise statistics or reports to grasp the consequences; there is simply nothing left of the place I once called home.

I was born and raised in the al-Zaytoun district of Gaza City. We shared our neighbourhood with refugee families forced to flee by the Nakba of 1948 - the catastrophe marked by Israel’s occupation and the expulsion of countless Palestinians from their towns and villages. The Nakba was not a chapter that ended in 1948, but an ongoing reality for every Palestinian, rooted in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and perpetuated by decades of displacement, occupation, and denial.

Since the Nakba, Palestinians have endured repeated wars, occupation, and the steady erosion of territory - first in 1948, and again after 1967, with the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Israel, unsatisfied with the 78 per cent of historic Palestine it claims, continues to expand into and annex the remaining Palestinian lands. At every turn, the world is confronted with a fundamental question: how much suffering, dispossession, and destruction must Palestinians endure before justice prevails?

As a seasoned journalist, I have covered numerous wars and endured long and harsh suffering in Gaza for more than three decades. Yet nothing could have prepared me for the conflict that has raged for the past 23 months, unparalleled in scale and impact, marked by tragedies beyond anything I have witnessed before.