On 10 October, we will mark the 1 100th day since the genocide in Gaza began. We count because the passage of time has become a searing accusation: how many children have they killed today? Each day represents another day in which governments could have acted, another period of Palestinian life spent waiting for the world’s promises to mean something. Never again was never meant for everyone.
These 1 100 days belie the true Palestinian story. Behind them lie 78 years of dispossession, homes lost, families scattered, land taken and generations born into an exile they did not choose. To begin the history in October 2023 is to deny Palestinians their past, and hide their histories behind a singular event that happened on a specific day instead of the almost eight decades of struggle. It is akin to thinking that freedom came to South Africa on 27 April 1994. In 1947, more than 750 000 Palestinians were uprooted from their homes. The Nakba broke apart a living, closely knit society, separating people from their towns, villages, livelihoods and from one another. What followed was the long experience of being denied the right of return while maintaining a lifelong attachment to places that official maps and Zionist political speeches could not erase. The children and grandchildren of the displaced inherited the loss but inculcated within that loss the demand for justice.
The occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in 1967 imposed further layers of control. Settlement expansion, restrictions on movement and the blockade of Gaza narrowed the space in which Palestinians could live their lives. Ordinary ambitions — to study, to farm, to travel, to raise children or visit family regionally or abroad — became entangled with decisions made by an occupying power to which they were subjected but which they could not hold accountable. These decades belong together. Dispossession did not become a fait accompli when occupation started. Occupation did not end when Gaza became the site of mass destruction. The older injuries remained, festering inside the newer ones. For families already displaced, another order to leave carries with it a history that the language of the current evacuation cannot contain.
Yet still, Palestinians have made lives. They have taught, written, planted, argued, loved, organised and cared for one another. Any account that sees them only through their suffering repeats a smaller version of their erasure. They are a people with political aspirations, disagreements, skills and the right to shape their own future. Solidarity begins by recognising their full humanity, including their agency and authority to speak about their own liberation. The genocide in Gaza must be understood against this history. In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. It identified killings, serious bodily and mental harm, the deliberate destruction of conditions necessary for life, and measures intended to prevent births. These findings concern the destruction of a people’s ability to survive and continue as a community.
There is something profoundly perverse about requiring Palestinians to keep demonstrating the seriousness of their suffering while the world debates whether the evidence is finally enough. Testimony is gathered. Reports are published. Families explain what happened to them. Somewhere beyond the ruins, another institution asks for more time to make a decision, more time to come to some conclusion, or worse, to even ask the Palestinians to be patient.
International law and treaties provide no excuse for such delay. The duty to prevent genocide arises when a state knows, or should know, that there is a serious risk of it. Governments must use the means reasonably available to them to help prevent it. They cannot wait for a final judgment and then claim that, until its arrival, their hands were tied. Prevention has meaning only while there are lives left to protect.
The same is true of occupation. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory was unlawful and must end as rapidly as possible. It also made clear that other states must neither recognise that situation as lawful nor help maintain it. There is a plain demand beneath those words: governments must examine what their own relationships, transactions and policies enable.
This is where silence becomes complicity in the moral and political life of the world. Responsibility is not distributed equally. A person struggling to survive does not possess the power of a government that supplies weapons, a company that profits from military or energy contracts or an institution that controls substantial investments. The greater the capacity to influence events, the less credible is the claim of helplessness. Nor does silence always sound like silence. It can take the form of carefully expressed concern, repeated so often that it becomes a substitute for a decision. A government can acknowledge suffering while preserving the relationships that help sustain it. The words register sympathy; the policy communicates permission and complicity. Such permission emboldens the Israeli state. When grave violations bring no meaningful cost, its leaders have reason to believe that the next violation will also be tolerated. Each unfulfilled warning makes the next warning easier to dismiss. Impunity becomes an expectation around which policy can be built.
The damage extends beyond Palestine. A global order depends, at the very least, on the belief that there are limits to what the powerful may do to the vulnerable. When those limits dissolve around a favoured ally, every promise of protection becomes less credible. Other governments observe what is tolerated. Other vulnerable peoples learn how little a recognised right may offer when those expected to defend it choose their alliances instead. For much of the formerly colonised world, this is a familiar experience. Universal principles have too often been proclaimed by powers unwilling to accept the same restraints themselves. Palestine exposes that contradiction with devastating clarity. The answer must be to make those principles real through consistent action. Abandoning them would leave people facing domination with fewer protections still.
Global solidarity matters because power operates across borders. The decisions that sustain an injustice may be taken far from those who suffer it. People elsewhere therefore have work to do where they live: in their parliaments, workplaces, universities, religious communities and financial institutions. They can press for an end to arms transfers that enable atrocities, challenge investments that sustain occupation, support accountability and insist that Palestinian freedom remains a political demand rather than an indefinitely postponed aspiration.
For South Africans, that responsibility carries particular weight. International solidarity helped widen the space in which our own liberation struggle could advance. Its force came from people making apartheid a matter of consequence in their own societies. Remembering that history should sharpen our willingness to act. Solidarity also requires staying power. Public attention moves on to the next story, the next crisis, the next fix. Outrage fades while the doom-scrolling remains. The work must continue beyond a march, an anniversary or a moment of intense coverage. It must include support for Palestinian institutions, the preservation of Palestinian testimony and sustained pressure on those with the power to change policy.
Above all, its measure must be that of Palestinian freedom. Food, shelter and medical care are urgently necessary. Palestinians also have the right to live without having their survival negotiated by others, to rebuild without the threat of renewed destruction, and to determine their future in their own land.
On this 1 100th day, we should remember those killed as people whose lives belonged to them, whose futures were taken. We should listen to those who remain, including when their demands exceed what our governments find convenient.
Seventy-eight years of dispossession have already asked too much of Palestinian endurance. Every government and institution with the means to act must now be judged by what it does with that power. Every one of us who claims solidarity must ask what we are prepared to sustain after this anniversary passes. Palestinians are entitled to a future that should not have to be counted in days of catastrophe. The global demand should be: not another day longer!
Sunny Morgan is an activist