This week, Israel killed my cousin Mohammed, a young and cheerful lawyer, along with his wife Myriam and their only seven-day-old baby, Jaber.

Words fail me as I try to pick up the phone to mourn my caring and patient auntie, who is now displaced, starved, and left alone, having to find medical care for two of her grandchildren who have sustained burns due to Israeli missiles. How do we mourn unceasing wounds and waves of loss, even when mourning has become a privilege?

I feel the ultimate powerlessness and helplessness. In the past 22 months of Israel’s genocide of Gaza, it has killed at least 40 from my immediate and extended family and wounded so many and destroyed and bombed so many of their homes.

On my way back from London, I received a phone call from my brother Anas in Gaza. He reported with immense fear, and in a shaking voice, that Israeli occupation forces had rung a number of our extended family in the oldest neighbourhood, forcing them to evacuate or prepare to be ethnically cleansed. I continued my painful journey, trying to find ways to calm them and exploring possibilities of survival, finding areas in Gaza City where they could shelter, as the devastating bombing of residential buildings has not stopped. Israel was determined to level the entire city and empty it of its people, either displacing them to the south of Gaza or exterminating them and then invading and colonising it.

My family is trying to escape death in Gaza City and then death elsewhere.

In Gaza, a million human beings are trapped, unheard and left alone to face this relentless cruelty and dehumanisation. Displaced families are barely able to wake up, let alone face displacement. Their bodies are weak, dehydrated, and sick. There are elderly displaced, blind, and suffering.

The media must know that there is no “humanitarian zone” in Gaza; only outright extermination, genocidal abuse, and violence against a people. The so-called “humanitarian area” shown on the map, which Israel warplanes threw over Gaza this week, is deliberately made to appear larger than Gaza, three times its size, to create the illusion of spaciousness. In reality, there isn’t even enough room to stand, let alone set up tents. They’re caging a million people into a geographic area that doesn’t even fit 2000, so that they die en masse instead of one by one. Families have no means of survival. Displacement is super expensive. Tents are not available. Even if they were, they’d cost over US$1000. There is no space to erect tents in so-called humanitarian zones.

There is no end in sight for the deep wound of continued displacement, forced starvation, and death sentences awaiting the Palestinians.

Relentless bombardments and the erasure of lives, and everything associated with them, continue unabated.

Left with impossible decisions for their survival, the Palestinians are left with no words that can console their deep shock, trauma, fear, loss, mourning, separation and displacement.

They bid farewell to their loved ones, families, memories, schools, universities, neighbourhoods, sea, mosques, churches, cultural sites and their city, Palestine.

I am mourning the concert “humanity”. An inhumane system has failed to stop the destruction of a people.

Rallies, protests, shouting, destructions, calls for sanctions, an arms embargo, and cutting ties with apartheid have not saved a single one of the 66,000 murdered in 22 months.

State politicians must be exposed, called out and held accountable, but who will hold them accountable and responsible?

The Palestinians need immediate protection. Please form an immediate peace-enforcing and protection force now. Global South states, including the Hague Group, must lead and mobilise these protection forces now, moving away from the US’ domination and disgusting complicity.

Form an immediate protective peace-enforcing mission, deploy troops to uphold the obligation to stop the annihilation and destruction of a people, and provide humanitarian aid, health education, and shelter.

Every single minute, every day, we mourn more and more. The Israeli depravity has to be confronted and ended.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.