When Israel Defence Forces shelled the home of Quama, an eight-year-old Palestinian girl, and her family, the little girl was seriously injured. Because the IDF has been systematically devastating Gazas hospitals, her parents were unable to access a hospital with the necessary medical services. Quama was admitted to a maternity hospital which lacked both the services required to treat her injury, and the antibiotics to stop her leg becoming infected. So Quamas leg was amputated.

After the operation, the family walked many kilometres to reach Rafah, a designated safe zone at that time. When the bombing in Rafah began, Israel ordered them to evacuate, so they moved to another so-called safe zone. This happened on two more occasions, all the while carrying their traumatised child.

A spokesman for UNICEF, James Elder, told Quamas story this week in an attempt to generate global action to stop the horrors that Israel has been inflicting on Palestinians for a year. As horrific as Quamas story is, Elder said that there are thousands of children in Gaza who have endured similar traumas. The scale of psychological trauma which is impacting virtually every child in Gaza is unprecedented.

The IDFs onslaught in Gaza, which Elder describes as a war on children, is killing an average of 40 children every day. Death and destruction on a catastrophic scale have been normalised.

An entire population of children has been traumatised from continuous bombing, witnessing the dead and the maimed, including loved ones, and the obliteration of their homes, schools, neighbourhoods, communities, and all they have known in their short lives. Everything has been taken from these childrentheir past and their hope of a better future.

Gaza is about half the size of Canberra. Just over two million people are now crammed into the 15% of Gaza that is not under an evacuation order. Israel is inflicting apocalyptic destruction on Gaza and its people. It is deliberately blocking food, water and medical supplies from getting into Gaza, with August being the worst month so far in terms of the volume of humanitarian aid making it in.

The Palestinian people in Gaza are being slowly wiped out with the world watching on.

Gaza is the most precarious place in the world to be a child. Imagine for a moment that Quama was an Australian child. Would Penny Wong be parroting the line that she has concerns about Israels actions in Gaza? Would she be repeating ad nauseam the canard that Israel has the right to defend itself? As the occupying power, Israels principal obligation under international law is to protect Palestinians, not to blow them to smithereens. The legal right to self-defence belongs to the Palestinian people, not to their illegal occupier. Australia has a legal obligation not to provide support to Israels illegal occupation and genocidal actions in Gaza.

Our government has reached a new moral low. Genocidal slaughter has been normalised as a legitimate campaign of self-defence by an occupying power in order to consolidate its control over Gaza and its subjugated population. It is patently obvious that the governments failure to do anything meaningful to stop Israels genocidal actions is because according to its political calculus, there is no moral equivalence between the life of an eight-year-old Palestinian child and the life of an Australian child.

Despite our governments hideous failure, we must not turn away from the atrocities in Gaza. We must continue to pressure our politicians to take immediate meaningful action, such as sanctions and the ending of diplomatic, economic and moral cover for Israel. We must pressure the mainstream media to stop using sanitised language to describe the reality on the ground, and to stop playing the journalistic game of balance. There are no two sides to genocide. The reason that Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza since the very beginning of its military onslaught is clear. It has killed Palestinian journalists who were reporting from Gaza for the same reason.

Along with hundreds of thousands of others in cities around the world, we must continue to rally for the rights and lives of Palestinians. We must not be deterred by the governments rhetoric about community cohesion or be silenced by those who smear us as antisemitic because we are calling for freedom, justice and equality for Palestinians.

Our politicians must demonstrate through meaningful action that every life matters is not merely a hollow mantra.

The barbarism of Netanyahu and his war cabinet seems to know no limits. At the time of writing, Israel has commenced a ground invasion of Lebanon, where up to one million people have been displaced in just two weeks. As the attention of politicians and the media turns to Lebanon, it will be all the more difficult to keep the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza in peoples hearts and minds. It is up to every one of us to do all we can to stop the carnage. We owe it to the Palestinians, to Quama, and to all the children of Gaza.