Joyce Fegan: Looking away from Gaza will not end our powerlessness over Palestine

A harrowing UN report prompts reflection on Gaza, collective responsibility, and whether ordinary people wield more influence than they realise

The UN report contains dozens of incidences of obscene violence against children, babies, and even embryos carried out by Israeli forces. File Picture: Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty

"Looking away will not ease our repulsion, distress, or despair at what continues to happen to our fellow humans in Palestine.”

Insofar as possible, most of us strive to be good — to be sure to salute our postman on a daily basis, to keep a calendar of birthdays so our friends feel thought of, and to pay our respects at a funeral, even if nobody ever knows you were there.

Most of us do not strive to operate drones by the names of “Birds of Prey” or “Predator”.

Most of us do not strive to shoot at different parts of boys’ bodies in a “game of target practice”.

And most of us do not aim to insert a bullet in the head of a 10-day-old baby being breastfed in the privacy of their tent in a refugee camp.

So what’s a person to do about the heavy weight of powerlessness when it comes to genocide in Palestine? Look away now? Scroll quickly on? Stop reading? Just stop thinking about it?

A loss of hope is a goal of war.

This week, the UN published a 94-page report detailing war crime after war crime in occupied Palestinian territory since October 7, 2023.

It’s everything we have deigned to wish away, ignore, turn a blind eye to these last 32 months, even though, in the further recesses of our minds, and bodies, we always knew they were continuing on.

Officially, the report finds that “Israeli security forces have continued to commit the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in the Gaza Strip”.

The use of the word genocide to accurately state what is occurring is an essential naming in a world where the obfuscation of truth, and the pillorying of those who simply care, collide to make Palestine an almost out-of-bounds, livelihood-ending topic of discussion. All by design again.

The report contains dozens and dozens of incidences of obscene violence against children, babies, and even embryos. Some of the incidents from the last two years and eight months we may have come across, or heard about at the time, or saw on our phones late at night.

As we bore witness to these mounting crimes, we have internally borne witness to our own growing sense of powerlessness.

Peaceless resignation

Maybe some of us have arrived at a place of peaceless resignation, finding imagined comfort in things like scrolling, online window shopping, or other digital rabbit holes.

Looking away will not ease our repulsion, distress, or despair at what continues to happen to our fellow humans in Palestine. Looking away will not decrease our sense of powerlessness.

Of all the incidents reported, the one of the 10-day-old baby stands out for its abject inhumanity.

“On April 12, 2024, at 13:00, a 10 day-old-baby boy was shot by a quadcopter while being breastfed by his mother inside their tent in Nuseirat camp. The mother was alone in the tent, breastfeeding her baby, when a single bullet from a quadcopter hit the baby in the head and exited through the back of his head, hitting the pillow behind her. The baby survived but sustained brain injuries and now suffers from seizures,” reads the report.

The incident itself would ordinarily be beyond belief were we now not so inured to the barbarity of the last 32 months, but the report found something additional afoot.

A Palestinian man sits on the rubble at the site of a residential building targeted overnight by an Israeli strike, following a warning from the Israeli military to evacuate, in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, on May 24, 2026.  Picture: Eyad Baba / AFP via Getty Images

“The commission concluded on reasonable grounds that the bullet was fired from a sniper rifle mounted on a quadcopter. Considering that the shooting occurred in broad daylight, the commission concludes that the quadcopter controller would have been able to see inside the tent and assesses that the target was a mother and a baby,” finds the report.

Children, and babies, have been a target in Gaza, with more than 20,000 killed, amounting to 30% of all people killed.

The report includes the words of far-right politician, Moshe Feiglin, as quoted in an interview with Israel’s Channel 14 on May 20, 2025.

“Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy. The enemy is not Hamas, and it is not Hamas’ military wing, like our chief military prosecutor tells us, that we are not allowed to harm a Hamas member unless they are part of the military wing," he said.

Every child in Gaza is the enemy ... We need to conquer Gaza and colonise it and not leave a single Gazan child there. There is no other victory

This sentiment perhaps explains the mentality behind the next finding in the report — Israeli soldiers using children as target practice in the Gaza Strip.

“Based on the clustering of injuries and the targeted body parts, I assess that the Israeli soldiers have been deliberately shooting teenage boys in a game of target practice — a different body part being targeted on different days ... There is a very clear pattern that suggest this is a deliberate aiming of different body parts [of children],” reads the testimony of a doctor who visited Gaza on medical mission.

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Other abominable crimes include the destruction of the Al-Basma IVF Centre, Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, in December 2023, and an attack on an orphanage, including one that damaged the nearby home of orphaned children with special needs.

The report also details how mothers, so deprived of options to feed their babies, have resorted to “giving a mixture of star anise with water”.

Powerlessness is an understandable feeling place to arrive at, but it is nowhere near true.

Since October 7, 2023, alone, the US has provided at least $21.7bn in military aid to Israel, according to an October 2025 report by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Some of that amount has already been sent in bombs, weapons, and funding, while other parts will be delivered in the future.

US financing, weapons, and political support

“It is clear the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) could not have done the damage they have done in Gaza or escalated their military activities throughout the region without US financing, weapons, and political support,” reads the report.

There are many high-profile business leaders who have shown exceeding warmth to the current US administration.

Those businesses need the favour of the American administration to grow as unimpeded as they do.

The administration needs those businesses to grow as unimpeded as it does.

But those businesses also really need us — their loyal, obedient, unthinking users. They also really need businesses’ billions in advertising dollars, but for this they need us again — a loyal, obedient and unthinking audience with phones in our hands and time on our hands.

While we may feel powerless as individuals, we are powerful as a collective.

If an administration relies on the influencing power of businesses, but those businesses are wholly reliant on its user and audience numbers, it’s not hard to see where we could collectively leverage the digital power that only we hold in our hands.