https://jakarta.ninkilim.com/articles/israel_the_nadir_of_humanity/en.html
In the long and blood-soaked ledger of human cruelty, few moments rival the horror unfolding in Gaza. This is not a war — it is the collapse of moral order. Hospitals have become execution grounds. Children are amputated without anesthesia. Patients are burned alive in their hospital beds. These are not accidents. These are not “collateral damage.” These are crimes against humanity, carried out with deliberate intent, by a state emboldened by impunity and shielded by global silence.
The image of 19-year-old Sha’aban al-Dalou — tethered to an IV, burning to death on a hospital bed in Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital — is not an aberration. It is a scream. A single, searing frame that confirms what doctors, nurses, and survivors have been pleading for the world to see: that Gaza’s hospitals are no longer sanctuaries of care — they are theaters of massacre. Sha’aban was not a fighter. He was not a threat. He was a young man, a student, a patient — incinerated where he lay. This is cruelty by design.
Al-Ahli Arab Hospital was bombed in October 2023, killing between 100 and 471 people in a single blast. The destruction of Al-Shifa, Nasser, and other medical centers followed. These hospitals — once symbols of resilience — now lie in ruins, their operating rooms silenced, their halls littered with ash and body parts. Surgeons are forced to amputate the limbs of toddlers without painkillers, because anesthesia is blocked. This is not warfare. This is systematic barbarism, aimed at the most vulnerable.
The people of Gaza are enduring a campaign of annihilation. Doctors are forced at gunpoint to abandon their patients. Premature babies are left to die, rotting in powerless incubators. Families displaced into makeshift tents are annihilated in their sleep by bombs that cost more than their lives ever will in the eyes of their executioners. The starving are gunned down trying to reach food. This is not a military strategy — it is the targeting of life itself. It is an effort not merely to kill, but to erase a people, body and soul.
International law is not ambiguous. Yet Israel, armed with the myth of eternal victimhood and fortified by the complicity of powerful allies, desecrates those laws with brazen contempt. Over 65,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered in two years — nearly half of them children. These are not statistics. They are names, faces, stories — turned into ash. They are bloodstains on the conscience of the world.
And lurking beneath this machinery of violence is the Samson Option — Israel’s veiled doctrine of nuclear retaliation. It is a doctrine that signals not just militarism, but moral nihilism: a state so enthralled by its own impunity that it threatens global annihilation if cornered. That is not security. That is apocalyptic blackmail.
Some call this “self-defense.” But no threat, no memory, no trauma justifies blocking food, bombing aid workers, or forcing surgeons to cut into children without anesthesia. There is no calculus, no context, no cause that makes this acceptable. This is what a state becomes when it believes it is beyond judgment.
The image of Sha’aban al-Dalou — a young student of informatics, burned alive in his hospital bed — is more than evidence of atrocity. It is a psychological assault on the conscience of humanity. It is a wound inflicted not only on Palestinians, but on every person forced to witness what no human being should ever have to see. And yet the outrage must not be aimed at the image — but at the crimes that caused that image.
We are at the precipice. If we cannot name this evil, if we cannot reject it without qualification or euphemism, then we have lost not just Gaza — we have lost ourselves.
Let there be no confusion: this is not only a lament. This is a demand for vengeance — through law, through truth, through international judgment.
Every individual who participated in this campaign of devastation — every pilot who bombed a hospital, every officer who ordered the siege, every soldier who denied morphine to the wounded or fired on starving civilians — must be held accountable. Not as soldiers of a state. But as perpetrators of war crimes.
This includes:
Each of them must be named, arrested, investigated, and tried. Where evidence exists — or where confessions are given — they must be brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where justice does not answer to nationalism, but to humanity itself.
Let it be known: what has happened in Gaza is not policy. It is not defense. It is not response. It is a sustained campaign of extermination, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, and every principle of civilization we claim to uphold.
Ceasefires are not justice. Justice is trials. Justice is records. Justice is verdicts. Vengeance must come — not in blood, but in law. Not in hate, but in truth.
If the world refuses to act, then we are all complicit. If we allow this to go unpunished, Gaza will not be the last place where the sacred is defiled. The precedent will be set — that a state can bomb hospitals, starve children, and burn the wounded alive — and suffer no consequence.
That cannot be allowed. Not now. Not ever.