Hind Rajab was five years old when she, after witnessing the killings of six of her family members, was herself murdered by members of the IDF on the 24th of January 2024. This – if anything – should have been the line; Hind’s story should have inspired some sort of spine to take root in our leaders to get Israel to stop its campaign of genocide. 

It’s August 2025 now, and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) released a statement declaring that “the worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out” within the Gaza strip. What this means is that, even if food aid was delivered right this second, malnourished Palestinians – many of them children, including Zainab Abu Halib, who weighed less at death than when she was born – would be at risk at death from a condition called refeeding syndrome if they were to consume food, and because of Israel’s continued blockade of medical supplies and destruction of Gazan medical infrastructure, these people will likely not see the care they need to nurse them back to anything close to a stable condition.  

What land that Palestinians do have within Gaza, what food they have, is constantly under siege by Israeli quadcopters that are equipped with explosive munitions and incendiary weapons (flamethrowers) to relentlessly inflict devastation upon these people.  It’s only now, at the point where this genocide has become terminal, are we starting to see the institutions around us pretend to give a shit. You can tell that platforms like Stuff have gotten the international ‘Permission to Care’ package when they’re putting out articles like ‘We want to hear from Kiwis what they think of Gaza’, when for months they could have taken a definitive stand and joined activists in pressuring our politicians to recognise Palestine as a state, and recognise the events for what they are: A genocide. 
Their article calling for kiwi puff pieces was buried beneath three stories of Winston Peters geriatrically waffling about whatever the new ‘Woke’ thing is to be targeted.  
 
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I was talking to my longtime friend Usayd, who, between working on his far-future Mil-SciFi story Dabbat, participates in the Pro-Palestine movement in Canada. We were talking, as we have a few times, about the bleakness of the whole situation, and he said a few things that have stuck with me: 
 
“I don’t even wanna say ‘yea, we’re really gonna let it happen’.” 
 
I just can’t believe I’m living through a time where this sort of thing is going on unimpeded. 
 

“It’s going exactly as it always does. I don’t even know if they can pull an Afghanistan, that was a really unique thing. I don’t even like this sort of analysis of it. Like I’m grading my people on their ability to fight through Famine.” 

It’s, like, what words are there left to say – It’s not like they have any impact on the Zionist entity, talking about how bad the whole thing feels just starts to feel like it appears as moral masturbation at some point. But it’s not. But – yea.  
 

“A thought I had was that it’s so bad that when you hear the denial or minimization of how bad it is, when you hear the propagandistic reframes and outright reality refutation; ‘There has been zero proof of starving children!’, or, ‘There is no genocide!’. I really, sometimes, want to believe it. And of course I can’t, and I don’t want to, but very briefly I am attacked by this need to imagine a world where these quacks are right, and smile to myself; Yea, that would be pretty good, wouldn’t it? Like if only all the bullshit you’re trying to gaslight me with was true, that would be great, actually.” 
 

And it would be great, if completely spineless vultures like Sean Plunkett who retweet obituaries about ‘Fallen IDF heroes’ and jokes about ‘Mass Anorexia in Gaza’ were right about there not being anything. But there is, and our government is pussyfooting around it. And they expect you to sit there and be like ‘Oh it’s so bad over there but Hamas! Hamas! Hamas is so bad!’ Because they need a brown bogeyman to pin the blame on, even as they try to come to some sort of two state solution, it can never really be the settler state’s fault, at the end of the day it will be the ‘third world barbarians’ who were the instigators that had to be tamed. Hamas and other resistance groups which the West broadly labels as ‘terrorists’ are the only organizations which have actually stood up to and done anything to harm the Zionist war machine. Not the UK, who have labeled an activist group a terror organisation; not Australia, not Aotearoa New Zealand, not Canada, and certainly not the United States, who have been adamant in their defense of Israel on the world stage.  

 
Hind Rajab would have turned seven years old this year. Atef Majd Atef Darwish, Jory Murad Ammar Barash, and Zainab Abu Halib never even reached their first birthdays, and these are just a few of the names. Every thirty minutes a child is killed in Gaza, and it’s only growing.  

Pressure your local MPs to embargo Israel.