Dictionary of Death” A child in Gaza writes her name on her leg. Her leg. So when bombs rip her body apart, someone might know she existed. This is not a metaphor. This is now. This is arithmetic: one child dead every 10 minutes in Gaza. 6 an hour. 144 by midnight. Each one had a name. A beating heart. A future. This is genocide and its script never changes.
The 1948 UN genocide convention provides the only international legal definition. Article 2 defines genocide as any act of killing (committed with the intent to destroy) a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Article 3 then makes punishable not only the act of genocide itself but also conspiracy, direct and public incitement, attempted genocide, and complicity. In other words, international law recognises that any accurate discussion of genocide must use this legal definition.
The United Nations has raised the slogan “Never Again” in multiple UN resolutions, and during this time six genocides have occurred (Bosnia, Darfur, Yazidi, Rohingya, Tigray, and Uyghurs). But the “Never Again” paradox continues. Participating in it or not, allowing it to happen is also a choice the West is actively making, disguised under a different lexicon. “Never again,” and still being complicit in a genocide – between these two phrases lies the corpse of accountability.
Palestinian UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour broke down while addressing the UN on 28 May 2025. He said, “Fire and hunger are devouring our children.” Israel violated the ceasefire on 18 March 2025, resulting in the deaths of 1,309 children and the injuries of 3,738 others.
Dr Najjar, who was honouring her mission as a doctor, trying to save lives, saw her children as they arrived at the hospital, their bodies burnt, already dead. She lost 9 of her 10 kids; a horror and trauma the mind cannot comprehend. Despite this, the Israeli Ambassador boldly asserted that Hamas exploits children as a “human shield”. The medical system in Gaza has failed. It has been systematically dismantled through a sustained military campaign that has wilfully violated international humanitarian law. The horrors happening in Gaza persist beyond human imagination. Hospitals receive six-year-olds who have shrapnel in their hearts and bullets in their brains. Dead bodies floating in air. Bodies shattered by explosives and torn by flying metal. Pregnant women whose pelvises have been obliterated and their foetuses have been cut in two while still in the womb.
The “Ten Stages” of Genocide by Dr Gregory H. Stanton outlines a progression of stages from early prejudice to mass violence. The stages are classification (differentiating us versus them), symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial. The first four processes, taken together, result in what James Waller calls “othering.” Stage 4 involves describing the target group as subhuman, paving the way for violence.
This phenomenon is consistently observed: individuals who practice cannibalism categorise those who do not as non-human. Then they go through these rituals – these words, these labels – to try and expunge themselves of the guilt. They know what they do is wrong, so they redefine the other people as non-human. “Terrorists”, “religious extremists”, “militants”, “animals”, and whatnot. This is the most enduring deception in history.
This situation is similar to what occurred with the Nazis. Hitler could not convince his SS to kill Jews without first destroying the idea that they are living, breathing humans. He called them subhuman creatures. The same happened in Rwanda in 1944, when Hutu extremists called genocide “Umuganda” (community work), and radio hosts named Tutsis as “cockroaches”. Bosnian Muslims were labelled “filth”. The lexicon shifts; the ritual of dehumanising innocent civilians does not. Because the sentiment – you ought not kill innocent humans – is so strong that to break through it, you must first destroy the idea that they are innocent humans. You destroy the idea that they are human at all.
Once the redefinition is complete, the act of violence does not feel like a crime anymore. It feels like duty. Like justice. Once someone is no longer human in the moral imagination of the killer, they become fair game. Not killing, but pest control. Not murder, but necessity. You see it in every genocide, every occupation, every campaign of terror waged from the sky or the checkpoint: that language precedes violence. Before every drone strike that flattens a home, there is speech, the reason, the title, the sanitised lie: “security”, “surgical strike”, “human shields”, “necessary sacrifice”, the same old script, just a different costume for the cannibal.
The Nazis came up with different words to create different sentiments, like ‘Abbeförderung’ (euphemism for killing) and ‘Abgeräumt’ (murdered or cleared away). According to Victor Klemperer’s philological perspective in his book “The Language of the Third Reich”, language serves as the initial barrier in the mass grave. One of the excerpts from his book written on March 10, 1933, reads: “Hitler elected as Chancellor on Saturday. I heard a piece of Hitler’s speech in Königsberg. I understood only a few words but the tone! The unctuous roaring bark, that bark… really of a clergyman” shows that language is not just a curtain drawn over violence; it is the scaffold it climbs, and belief is the scaffold’s architect.
And the most terrifying part isn’t even hatred. It is belief. Belief that what you are doing is moral, justified, and even noble. Because once killing becomes virtue, mercy becomes sin. And then writing your name on your leg becomes the only hope you have of being remembered as a person, not collateral, in their war.