Selma Dabbagh

Israel has assassinated a record number of Palestinian journalists, refused to allow international reporters to enter Gaza, imposed internet blackouts during its most bloody assaults, asked Meta to take down more than thirty million social media posts, and allocated $150 million for its 2025 hasbara (propaganda) budget, a twenty-fold increase on previous years. And yet, despite all these efforts, global public opinion is turning against it.

The Hio, which Carlo Pérez Osorio was sailing on with seven other passengers, was intercepted in international waters by Israeli armed forces in the early hours of this morning. The last contact with the boat was at 03:23. According to the Global Sumud flotilla tracker, all but two other vessels have either definitely been intercepted, or are assumed to have been, by Israeli forces. The boats are said to have been sprayed with skunk water, rammed, attacked by drones and boarded by armed soldiers. The fate of many passengers is still unclear. Demonstrations in Belgium, Greece, Italy, Spain and the UK began last night to protest against the interception of the boats, and against the interception of the transfer of humanitarian aid, an act prohibited under the ICJ ruling of January 2024 in South Africa v. Israel.

Democratically elected governments in the UK, the US and the EU are enabling a genocide by supplying weapons (and other forms of support) to the perpetrators. This could stop tomorrow. More and more people globally are recognising that, and doing something about it.

‘I am no longer able to process what is about to happen.’ The message from my friend Ghassan Abu Sita gets stuck in my head, going round and round, hanging between me and the sunny London streets, making me wonder again what I could be doing that I am not doing to try to stop this. What is happening has been clearly announced by the Israeli government: the eradication of Gaza City, of the north of Gaza. The displacement once again of a population that has been expelled multiple times with nowhere to go, with crippled access to food, water, shelter, the internet. More journalists and civil defence workers killed. More hospitals bombed. More young men killed by sniper fire as they try to reach aid or return with it to their families.

Trauma centres in Gaza are recording the questions that children are asking: when it rains will we drown in the tent? When they bomb the tent, will we burn? Why do they always bomb us? I don’t want to die in pieces. Will the dogs that ate the dead bodies of the martyrs turn into humans? Do children who have their legs amputated grow new legs? Do the Israeli pilots who bomb children have children?

Malak Mattar’s monumental 2024 black-and-white painting inspired by Guernica is entitled No Words (… for Gaza). A photographer told me he has aerial images taken in May 2023, October 2023 and May 2025 which say it all. Some things are incommunicable through words. But words are all that some of us have.  

I asked Raji Sourani of the Palestine Centre for Human Rights if it was true that Gazans can hear the difference between a British drone and other drones. ‘Hear the difference?’ he replied. ‘You can read the writing on them.’

I woke up yesterday morning to a message from a friend in Karachi. It just said: ‘They’ve started again.’ I did not wonder who ‘they’ were. He could only have been referring to Israel. And I knew what they must have started again: mass killing in Gaza. The fact that he had sent me a message meant the bombing had to be much heavier than it had been for the weeks since the 20 January ceasefire. I sent a message to my friend Marwa in Gaza to see if she was OK. ‘Hamdulillah we are fine.’ Only then did I check the news.

The British brought the system of administrative detention to Palestine when they were the mandatory power. The rules also authorised military courts, restriction of movement, censorship, the expropriation and demolition of houses, arbitrary searches and curfews, and were used by the British against both Palestinians and immigrants of Jewish and other religious backgrounds. Despite many of its founders being caught on the wrong side of these laws, Israel adopted them in 1948 and has strenuously resisted attempts to modify their provisions.

On 9 February, two branches of the Muna family’s bookshops in East Jerusalem were ransacked by Israeli police. They entered in civilian clothes, used Google Translate to decipher the titles of the English language books and confiscated box loads, picking out in particular any with a Palestinian flag on the cover. CCTV images show black bin bags being filled with books to be used as evidence against the Munas. The police arrested both Mahmoud (in front of his eleven-year-old daughter, Leila) and his nephew Ahmad, and took them to the notorious Moscobiyya interrogation centre in West Jerusalem.