Mass funeral held in Gaza and other developments from across the Mideast
By Emilio Quesada · Reporting from Miami ·
The arithmetic of modern conflict is always a matter of bodies—who counts them, who ignores them, and whose ledger gets wiped clean.
The Weight of 112 Bodies, Recovered Three Years Too Late
The arithmetic of modern conflict is always a matter of bodies—who counts them, who ignores them, and whose ledger gets wiped clean. In Gaza City, the recent mass funeral for 112 Palestinians from the Abu Sharia and Hassayna clans was not merely a ceremony; it was a brutal accounting performed under the shadow of rubble. The details, reported by both BBC and apnews.com, are sickeningly precise: forty children, thirty women, seven people with disabilities—victims whose bodies were recovered from a residential block flattened during an Israeli strike on November 22, 2023. To find these remains after digging through rubble for 136 hours, as noted by apnews.com, is to confront the state-sanctioned erasure of life. The sheer scale—the cumulative toll of over 73,000 deaths, according to figures cited in the BBC report—is not a statistic; it is evidence of systemic failure.
When Diplomacy Becomes an Illusionary Tradecraft
The global stage, meanwhile, offers nothing but performative gestures and cynical negotiations. We are told by middleeastmonitor.com that Qatar is mediating peace talks between the U.S. and Iran, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggests a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz might be imminent. These pronouncements—of diplomatic solutions and normalized positions—are nothing more than smoke designed to obscure the fundamental failure of deterrence. While the world debates whether a cargo ship was hit by an "unknown projectile" in the Gulf, real lives are being extinguished under the pretense of self-defense. The focus on temporary maritime routes or sanctions relief is a profound abdication of moral and legal obligation.
From Gaza to the Congo: The Mechanics of Extermination
The mechanics observed in Gaza—the systematic targeting of densely populated residential areas, resulting in mass civilian death—are not unique aberrations; they are predictable patterns of ethnic cleansing. When we observe a state apparatus mobilizing its forces against a defined group perceived as an existential threat, using overwhelming force to achieve demographic engineering, the historical precedent is inescapable. The pattern mirrors the Rwandan genocide: the rapid, state-sanctioned mobilization of civilian populations to execute systematic extermination against the Tutsi ethnic group. This shared mechanism—the dehumanization and subsequent physical removal or elimination of a defined population—is what matters. To suggest that Gaza operates outside this horrific historical continuum is not merely naïve; it is criminally negligent.
The international community, with its endless talk of "diplomatic solutions," has failed to recognize the lethal pattern unfolding before it. The law does not cease to exist because the headlines change from Beirut to Hormuz. When a nation’s word becomes nothing more than collateral damage in geopolitical maneuvering, and when humanitarian organizations like the ICRC are relegated to merely providing shovels and body bags, we have passed the point of mere conflict into pure criminality.