The psychology of the Gaza genocide

The Gaza genocide takes us to the outer limits of human cruelty and destruction. How do we, as onlookers to this darkness, retain our faith in humanity, asks Liam Quaide

Six-year-old Yusuf Abdurrahman Matar and his four-year-old brother Emir Abdurrahman Matar face life-threatening malnutrition amid the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza City, Gaza on July 25, 2025. With no access to milk, food, or basic supplies due to ongoing Israeli attacks, the two brothers struggle to survive. Picture: Getty Images

An Israeli current affairs programme this week hosted commentators mocking a Palestinian woman whose daughter had died of starvation due to the merciless siege imposed by their army. The focus of their humour was the apparent contrast between the mother’s relatively healthy appearance and her daughter’s frailty. “This is a woman who may have eaten all her child’s food. A woman who ate a whole goat, who ate the girl herself,” one scoffed, after asking for a photo of the grieving mother to be adjusted so the viewers could take a good look at her. This exchange shows how deeply dehumanised Palestinians have become in Israeli society — a necessary condition for the normalisation of genocide.

The genocide we have been witnessing for the past 21 months can overwhelm us with rage, paralyse us with despair or prompt us towards activism. Many of us are alternating regularly between these states. Almost as disturbing as the genocide itself have been the silence and complicity of our closest international allies — the EU, Britain, and the US — in the face of endless crimes against humanity. These pillars of Western democracy have lost their moral legitimacy, and with that comes apart some of our own sense of security.

We now live in a world where any form of violence or injustice can be inflicted openly and repeatedly on innocent people, without consequence, and where those who protest such crimes can be brutally beaten by police, as we have seen in Germany, or threatened with lengthy prison sentences, as in Britain. 

The helplessness we feel bearing witness to Gaza's destruction can isolate and paralyse us, particularly when we no longer have any semblance of international justice or a ‘rules-based order’ to fall back on for comfort

In The Drowned and the Saved, Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi detailed in a chapter titled ‘Useless Violence’ some of the cruelties and deprivations the Nazis subjected their victims to prior to their murder in concentration camps. The term ‘useless violence’ reflected the lack of any rationale to this treatment. The point was to inflict suffering for its own sake.

People gather around an impact crater by a destroyed building in the aftermath of overnight Israeli bombardment in northwest of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip.

There was no toileting facility on box-cars packed with people destined for concentration camps. The severely ill, the elderly, the pregnant were forced to urinate and defecate in view of others on torturous journeys lasting days. Levi described this as “a trauma to which our civilization does not prepare us, a deep wound inflicted on human dignity”.

The genocide in Gaza has been distinguished by repeated and varied patterns of useless violence — seen in the thousands of aid trucks lined up at border crossings as the population starves and what is left of society in Gaza descends into anarchy. 

Not satisfied with murdering as many Palestinians as possible, the Israeli government is determined to inflict on them suffering beyond anything we can imagine prior to death

 This comes in many forms — the withholding of pain medication and anaesthetics from people who are in agony due to burns or wounds, and to women giving birth and undergoing Caesarian sections; amputees denied crutches and wheelchairs; infants and disabled adults left without nappies; the targeted bombing of sanitation and sewage facilities to ensure maximum misery for survivors.

The genocide is as much about destroying the dignity of Palestinians as it is about annihilating their lives and their culture and land.

What does it do to us to bear witness to these scenes and accounts of endless cruelty on our phones and television screens, day in day out —to a point where evil has, to paraphrase a famous book by Hannah Arendt, become banal?

In Regarding the Pain of Others, American writer Susan Sontag warned that repeated exposure to images of atrocity risks producing not greater empathy, but indifference. “Compassion is an unstable emotion,” she wrote. “It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” When horrific images circulate endlessly without political consequence or accountability, there is a danger we become passive consumers of suffering rather than witnesses in the moral sense.

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One antidote to disconnection or despair at this grave time is uniting with others who are also profoundly impacted by what is happening to the Palestinian people. Vigils and demonstrations can feel like pointless symbolism but they help us remain connected with our common humanity, and they demonstrate to Palestinians living in Ireland that care about what their families and friends are enduring. There is a particular anguish and desolation in suffering trauma alone, and if we can alleviate a fraction of those feelings by our continued presence at solidarity events, we are doing good.

Liam Quaide is a clinical psychologist and a Social Democrats TD for East Cork