A Mayo View: An acutely dark, depressing era for the world and human kind

In the years and decades to come, the human race is going to look back on the unfolding genocide in Palestine and wonder why our world leaders failed miserably to address one of the greatest humanitarian injustices the globe has ever witnessed.

It gets worse and worse and worse - and the Israeli prime minister and his extremist government is not called to account despite growing levels of outrage by its own people.

And if matters were not already bad enough, we have learned in recent days that 'the unthinkable' in Gaza City has already begun.

This is the description used by Tess Ingram, UNICEF Communication Manager for the Middle East and North Africa Regional Office, following a recent visit there.

When she spoke on RTÉ Radio One about her experience, you could sense the deep level of despair and desperation in her voice.

She told how Gaza City, the last refuge for families in the northern Gaza Strip, is fast becoming a place where childhood cannot survive.

It is now a city of fear, flight and funerals. She observed: “The world is sounding the alarm about what an intensified military offensive in Gaza City could bring - a catastrophe for the almost one million people who remain there.

“It would be an unthinkable tragedy, and we must do everything in our power to prevent it. But we cannot wait until the unthinkable has happened to act.

“In Gaza City, over nine days, I met families who fled their homes in fear - already displaced, now displaced again - arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs. I met children who were separated from their parents in that chaos.

"Mothers whose children have died of starvation. Mothers who fear their children will be next. I’ve spoken to kids in hospital beds, their small bodies shredded by shrapnel.

“This unthinkable is not looming - it is already here. The escalation is underway.

“The collapse of essential services is leaving the youngest and most vulnerable fighting for survival.

“Malnutrition and famine are weakening children’s bodies as displacement strips them of shelter and care, and bombardments threaten their every move. This is what famine in a war zone looks like and it was everywhere I looked.

“An hour in a nutrition clinic is enough to erase any questions of whether there is a famine – crowded waiting rooms, parents in tears, children fighting the double-punch of disease and malnutrition, mothers who cannot breastfeed, babies losing their vision, their hair and their strength to walk."

And this is after all that has happened there over the past two years, in particular, when more than 64,000 Palestinians have been killed while the numbers injured is more than double that figure.

When accepting an award from the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland last Friday, former Ireland President and UN Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson said it is “shocking that the world hasn’t stopped to reflect on the genocide and deal with it immediately."

She said she would particularly like to see the European Union stepping up.

"The European Union can do far more than any other grouping by suspending the pillar of preferential trade for Israel under the EU-Israel Association Agreement. And that alone would be a cost to the government and people of Israel," she argued.

Ms. Robinson had no hesitation in pointing the finger of blame at 'an extremist government, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and a bad President of the United States who is supporting him and who is complicit in this unfolding genocide'.

The sad reality is that much of the world has switched off because the television images, night after night, upset them so much.

Yet it is reassuring to know that people like Mary Robinson and Tess Ingram will continue to fight for justice and, when it comes, those responsible will not be remembered kindly in the history books, like all the other notorious perpetrators of genocide before them.