What 3 years of destruction in Gaza actually looks like

Today marks three years since the start of Israel’s devastating war on Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks , and one year since a ceasefire agreement that did nothing to halt Israel’s military . I want to tell you what three years looks like, because the number itself has stopped meaning anything to most people.

To understand what three years of this reality means, you have to look past the numbness of the passage of time and into the systematic dismantling of human life. When the United Nations reports that 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been forcibly displaced , it means nearly 2 million Palestinians have been uprooted, many of them violently displaced again and again. Most are now crammed into overcrowded, suffocating, unsanitary tent cities where the air smells of smoke and raw sewage, and where desperation is the only constant.

They aren’t just “displaced,” either — there is quite literally nothing left to go home to. With more than 80 percent of all buildings in Gaza systematically razed to the ground , entire family lineages, neighborhoods and childhood memories have been ground into gray concrete dust.

It looks like a child who has spent years flinching at incoming missiles and watching parents and siblings killed in front of them. The U.N. estimates that 17,000 children in Gaza have been orphaned or separated from their caregivers . Thousands more are living with amputations, burns and shrapnel wounds, and cannot get the surgeries or prosthetics they need. Even since the ceasefire, Israeli strikes and gunfire have continued to kill them, more than 300 children since it began.

It looks like a child who has never turned on a faucet and had water come out. Water, for that child, comes from a jerrycan, carried, rationed, fought for in a line. It looks like a child who doesn’t know that a roof is supposed to keep the rain out, not shake, leak and let the water in with the noise. It looks like a child who has never sat in an actual classroom, and who goes to bed hungry because there still isn’t enough food to fill him.

And it looks like an elderly man, like my father, diagnosed with cancer this fall and unable to get the treatment that could save his life, because Israel has destroyed the hospitals that could treat him and won’t let him leave Gaza for care that might.

This systematic tearing down of every wall, every hospital and every tree is not a byproduct of war. It is a deliberate effort by Israel to erase the very possibility of life for Palestinians in Gaza, leaving families with a cruel choice: abandon the soil of your ancestors, or die beneath its ruins.

In comfortable, air-conditioned halls of power, senior Israeli officials speak openly of “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza, saying that they’re waiting for President Trump to approve their plans. It is a sterile, dishonest term meant to mask a systematic uprooting — in other words, an ethnic cleansing — of an entire people from the only home they have ever known.

More than 71,000 children under five are currently at risk of acute malnutrition . Aid flows into Gaza have dropped by roughly one-third since the first months after the ceasefire, according to the U.N.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military is actively hauling away the rubble, trucking off concrete that has become one with the crushed bodies of Palestinians killed beneath it. International experts and U.N. officials say Israel isn’t just clearing away debris — they are clearing away a mass grave and evidence of Israel’s crimes.

We are told there is a ceasefire, but nothing has stopped in the underlying machinery of what human rights groups and other experts have concluded is a genocide carried out by Israel.

After watching the horrors Israel has inflicted on Gaza for three years, it is finally time for the world to put a stop to it. The U.S. and other signatories to the Genocide Convention are legally obligated to act. States must impose sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel, including ending unconditional U.S. military funding.

Israel must allow the unconditional entry of humanitarian aid — water, food, fuel, medicine and shelter materials. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s funding must be restored , and it must be allowed to work without interference; a patchwork of soup kitchens and charities cannot substitute for the civil infrastructure of an entire population.

And Palestinians must be centered in planning Gaza’s future — not a technocratic committee reporting to a board of foreign financiers who don’t have their best interests at heart.

My father did not survive a genocide only to die of untreated cancer in a shelter he has to flee every time it rains. To ask for more than that is not a radical demand — it is the floor of human decency. It is time our government started treating it like one.

Hani Almadhoun is vice president of philanthropy at UNRWA USA and co-founder of the Gaza Soup Kitchen. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “A Ladle against the Drones: One Family’s Fight to Feed Gaza.”