We are at the end of 2025 and people are thinking about the year ahead and all that they would like to achieve. Goals and resolutions are being set, and improved lives are being envisioned. There is significant focus on the self and the family at this time. In a few weeks, there will be increased attention on the country and its fate as related to the next general election. Zooming out from our immediate lives and geographic location, the global swing to the political right comes into view. The consequences have been and continue to be far-reaching. While it does not receive the necessary attention, the uninterrupted genocide in Palestine is one of the most horrific failings of our time, certain to reverberate all over the world and for many years to come. The refusal to see the connection between our struggles and the interdependence of our liberation is certain to determine our future. 

Even after more than two years of feigning or enjoying ignorance, today is a good day to start paying attention. It is a good day to commit to the development of a political ideology that does not discount the lives or the land of people we see as different or distance from ourselves, but demands solidarity with all people in situations of vulnerability. Our survival depends on it, especially as capitalism becomes more acceptable to the masses for whom it is devastating.  

At the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 Francesca Albanese said, “As I argued in my last report to the Human Rights Council, this genocide has become profitable, unfortunately, not just for some corrupt private entities. And this is not only Israel’s crimes. This is the world’s crime sustained by silence, complicity, and the supply of funds, weapons, and political cover. History, we’ll remember, because it’s not that this is the first genocide that is been known. No, the Holocaust, the genocide in Bosnia, the genocide in Rwanda were also known to the people of the time. But this genocide happened because the world didn’t care enough to stop them, like today, or not. But today’s genocide is something different. It’s openly incited, cynically denied, and relentlessly supported, armed, and weaponized, while those who oppose it are silenced, beaten, criminalized, and smeared. This is why I say this is the shame of our time and the collapse of the international legal order in this moment, not only for the Palestinians, but for all of us.”

In an October 2025 address to the General Assembly from Cape Town, due to U.S. sanctions preventing her participation in New York, Albanese said, “International law is clear: States must neither aid nor assist in the internationally wrongful acts of others, and must prevent and punish international crimes. This requires immediately suspending all military, economic, and diplomatic ties with Israel until its crimes cease, and pursuing justice for the survivors by holding perpetrators and accomplices accountable.” 

To close the perceived distance between us the Palestinian people who are experiencing the genocide perpetrated by “Israel” and the Palestinian people in the diaspora, fiercely advocating to the lives and the land of their people, it is important to listen to their voices. Their stories are the truth we need to hear and feel. 

Nour ElAssy

“Since becoming a journalist, my life has unravelled in real time. Every time I have found a new place to stay, the bombs have found me again. The signal bars on my phone flicker like a dying heartbeat, and when the battery dies, which is often, I scramble – desperately searching for even a whisper of electricity just to send a photo, a sentence, a single update. Sometimes, I have to walk for kilometres through shattered neighborhoods to find a generator or a hotspot. All while airstrikes roar above me.

“But I keep going. I take testimonies from mothers standing beside the corpses of their children. From fathers who haven’t eaten in three days and have nothing to give their starving kids. From children who draw tanks instead of flowers. And I send them out to the world, praying someone, somewhere, will read them and feel what I feel[…] Every time I zip up my vest, I remember the face of the photographer who was burned alive. The videographer who lost his family while filming the ruins of another. This vest is not armour. It is a shroud. But I wear it anyway. Because my people need someone to tell the world what’s happening. Because silence is complicity. Because if we stop speaking, no one else will.” 

Omar Suleiman

“Thousands of children are dead. Thousands of children are under the rubble. Thousands of children are missing limbs. Thousands of children are missing parents. Thousands of children are fighting disease. Thousands of children are having surgeries performed on them without anesthesia. Thousands of children have been starved. Thousands of children have been bombed out of their homes. Every single child in Gaza has been forever traumatized. All of the above are war crimes. We can keep letting human rights organizations count them. Or we can finally hold them accountable.”

Sumayah Abu Qas

“Ousamah begged me to let him go there to get food, but I refused. I was afraid of losing him. In the end, I gave in to my daughters’ hunger. On the morning of 19 June 2025, Ousamah went to the aid distribution center by al-Bureij R.C. in the Netzarim compound with my brother Ahmad and some other friends.  That whole day, I was scared and anxious. Then, at 11:00 P.M., my brother came back with Ousamah’s body. He was covered in blood and dirt. Ahmad told us an Israeli tank had fired a shell at them and hit Ousamah in the back, killing him and five others while they were opening boxes of aid. They all died on the spot.” 

Ahmad al-Ghalban 

“We started packing up our things with my uncle Iyad Salem, 33, and his daughter Hibah, 6. Around 2:30 P.M., as we stepped into the street with our things, the army fired shells, and one hit us. I was seriously wounded. Muhammad was dying next to me, and my uncle Iyad was torn to pieces. Hibah, my mother, my sister Alaa, and my brother Qusai were about ten meters away. I lay on the ground, bleeding. I looked at my legs and couldn’t believe what I saw. I told myself, “This is a dream.” My mother screamed and called for help. Five minutes later, a man arrived, and when he saw we were still alive, he put Muhammad and me in a tuk-tuk and took us to the Indonesian Hospital, along with my uncle, my mother, and the others.

“On the way, Muhammad recited verses from the Quran and the Shahadatain prayers [recited before death], but I didn’t realize he was taking his last breaths. At the hospital, I was taken into surgery right away. It lasted four or five hours. When I woke up from the anesthesia, I found out they had amputated both my legs and four fingers on my left hand. My right hand was also broken, and they put a metal implant in it. I had shrapnel all over my body. I stayed in the ICU for five days.

“I didn’t know Muhammad had died. I kept asking about him, but my mother said he was hospitalized in critical condition at a-Shifaa Hospital. She was afraid to tell me because I was in a very fragile physical and mental state. I kept telling her, “I want to see Muhammad.” And every time I asked, “Why don’t you go visit him?” she said the doctors wouldn’t let her. After two weeks, when I was doing better emotionally, she told me Muhammad had died. I cried a lot because Muhammad was a friend, too. He was my twin brother. I couldn’t believe he was gone. I cried nonstop for five days. I never imagined I would lose him, or that I would lose both my legs.”

Abir Hamza El-Khawaja

“We used to have lives and dreams. Despite the fact the Gaza Strip has long been besieged, right now, it’s completely desolate. All that exists is destruction. It’s become apparent that our dreams may not come true, such as the ultimate dream of visiting Jerusalem, or Akka, for example. But beforehand, we were able to enjoy simple pleasures: We could go to work in the morning; we could eat our favorite food; and we could quietly read a book. We could enjoy watching the sunset over the vast sea, and people could play with their children. We could then return to our families at the end of each night and to a warm bed, where we could enjoy a favorite drink, in peace. This security disappeared from that moment, and it seems it’ll never return.

“In previous Israeli military assaults on the Gaza Strip, most people would stay in their homes. We were inevitably suffering from all the death, destruction and incessant bombing, but this time, it’s not like that. It’s annihilation, displacement and starvation. This time, they’re really taking our lives.” 

Noura Erakat

“As a Palestinian, my heart is very broken that a genocide can continue, that Palestinian babies can be slaughtered and there is a debate over whether or not that’s OK or how it should be done better. As a Palestinian, I’m so frustrated that rather than take aim at the oppressive systems that placed us in these conditions, like prolonged military occupation, apartheid and genocide, that we are made into a problem to be resolved. We are not the problem. These conditions that oppress us are the problem and should be what the international community targets to destroy, rather than allowing us to be the target of destruction.”

Diana Safieh

“How do we handle this [survivor’s] guilt? Some struggle and do nothing, while others, occupied with their own struggles, cannot engage. However, many of us feel compelled to do what we can for those who cannot. Our activism is driven by the belief that our survival obliges us to fight for justice and the rights of those in Palestine. This constructive action is crucial for our own survival. And many of us, at home and abroad, seek comfort in those non-Palestinians offering their solidarity, through kind words, marches and other forms of activism. 

“I do not want to end on a pious note, and yet I will. It is one’s duty to take advantage of all the opportunities life presents to you to make the world a more hospitable place for all of us[…] We must use our privilege to work toward a day when life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be afforded to us all.”

Act to End the Genocide

Boycott, divest, and sanction. This is what we, who support human rights, abhor violence, and work for liberation, are called to do. It is as wrong as it is easy and lazy to assume a position of powerlessness. We can choose to seek information and use it to make decisions that, at the very least, minimize harm. The BDS movement is growing, and the organizers are providing easily accessible information to help participants to avoid giving money to “Israel” and entities that support it. Google, Amazon, AirBnB, and Disney+ are among the companies targeted by the economic boycott. More information is available at bdsmovement.net/campaigns#2. Make 2026 the year that you spend as if the lives of others depend on it. They do.