Amsterdam, 6 March 2026
Last month, I read a headline that didn’t sound real. It said that thousands of Palestinians in Gaza had been evaporated. Not displaced. Not injured. Not killed. Evaporated.
It turns out that the Israeli regime used US supplied thermobaric weapons that don’t just explode. They inhale. They suck the oxygen out of a space and then they ignite it. This produces a fireball which reaches up to 3000 degrees celsius. In that kind of heat, concrete cracks, steel bends. And human bodies inevitably, horrifyingly, evaporate.
This is not science fiction. This is real and it is now and it is Gaza.
For the last two and a half years, Gaza has been subjected to a brutal and ongoing genocide. It has endured roughly six times the explosive force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, concentrated on an area less than half the size of Hiroshima. The devastation has been all encompassing.
When the October 2025 ceasefire was declared, I think there was a collective feeling of relief. But what soon became very clear was that the ceasefire in Gaza, as so many ceasefires with Israel have been, was a diplomatic sham- a tool to make sure Gaza slips out of the headlines and for the genocide to continue under the guise of diplomacy. And indeed, the Israeli regime has violated the ceasefire every single day, killing Palestinians every single day and limiting aid every single day. Since the US and Israel’s bombing of Iran, the Israeli regime has closed all the border crossings and stopped completely that trickle of aid.
Meanwhile, Trump’s disgustingly named Board of Peace has come up with dystopic plans for concentration camps in Gaza, where communities will be constantly surveilled, their biometric data collected, calories counted, healthcare and education controlled. All under the watchful eye of colonial overlords. The contracts for building these concentration camps will be sold to the highest bidders. This is what the Trump administration has laid out for the future of Gaza. And while they draft this dystopian future, they are erasing the past two years.
There is no talk of justice. No pursuit of accountability. No investigations into the thousands of massacres. Instead, there is an effort to bury it all. To push the rubble into the sea, along with the thousands of martyrs still trapped beneath it and to demand that we forget what was done in Gaza.
But people will not forget. There is no going back from this moment. We have seen too much and we have experienced too much. Comrades have paid a heavy price for their solidarity, they have been imprisoned without trial for disrupting the production of arms, they have been fired from their jobs for speaking out and they have been expelled from their universities for organising protests.
And still the movement has grown. Millions have marched across continents. University campuses have shut down, workers have gone on strike. There is international recognition that the Palestinian struggle is a just one and public opinion has shifted in ways that would have been difficult to imagine even a decade ago.
And we should hold that. It matters.
But we cannot let that fact comfort us too easily, because it sits alongside a contradiction we are obliged to confront. The reality on the ground in Palestine has become exponentially worse. The genocide in Gaza has not ended. And the Israeli regime has expanded and accelerated its assault on Palestinian life and land across all of colonised Palestine and beyond. So we must ask ourselves honestly: how do we reconcile a global movement of unprecedented scale with conditions on the ground that continue to deteriorate? It is a question we cannot afford to avoid.
The answer lies in understanding one thing clearly: Gaza is not an isolated tragedy. It is the epicentre of global politics.
There is a reason why governments are willing to repress their own citizens for protesting against the actions of a foreign state. There is a reason why corruption scandals so consistently trace back to weapons manufacturers and private security companies involved in genocide. There is a reason why politicians face not just criticism, but career-ending pressure, simply for standing for the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. People across the world are beginning to understand the connections. Today it is undeniable: what is happening in Palestine is about all of us.
President Gustavo Petro of Colombia said that what we are witnessing in Gaza is a rehearsal for the future. That future is already here.
We saw it in the brazen violation of Venezuela's sovereignty- the illegal capture and kidnapping of a sitting president. We see it in the renewed sanctions designed to starve the people of Cuba into submission. We see it with the US and Israel’s war on Iran. We see it in the AI companies implicated in the genocide in Gaza, now deployed by ICE paramilitaries on the streets of American cities. We see it in the weapons industry- who’s profits peaked during the genocide and are peaking now-, the private security sector, the surveillance architecture- all expanding through war, all finding new markets, new laboratories, new populations to test themselves on.
Because that is what we must understand. The architecture being tested on Palestinians does not stay in Palestine. It travels. It is exported. It becomes precedent.
This is a system functioning as designed. But this system didn’t build itself- it comes after decades of complicity by states, corporations and individuals.
I am certain that the genocide in Gaza will define our generation and the generations that follow. We are living through a historical rupture. The question is not whether this moment will shape the future. The question is how. And the answer to that question depends on what we do.
Solidarity is important but in today’s world, we need more. The task at hand is radical transformation. To convert moral outrage into political power. To convert mass mobilisation into structural change. To build the institutions, the alliances, and the political will that make genocide impossible- not just unpopular- now and forever.
Now more than ever it is clear that freeing Palestine means freeing the world. There is no more waiting. Because we cannot live in a world where regimes are permitted to evaporate human beings. Not ever again.
