“With what can all this be paid for? The monsters are said to go to hell; but what can hell undo of the mischief, what can it restore of the ruined lives? Would you consent to be the architect of this building with its foundations laid on human tears, tell me straight without a lie!”
— Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
In Gaza, over the last three years, at least 73,000 Palestinians have been killed, including at least 25,000 children. According to UNICEF, more than 64,000 children have been killed or injured in Gaza since October 2023.
Although some label this a ‘war’ or a ‘conflict,’ what we have witnessed for three years is the deliberate trapping of people within a tiny enclave—their homes, apartments, and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble, their living spaces bombed, and their lives extinguished by denying them medicine, food, and water.
These children did not perish in a clash between two armies; they lost their lives as a result of systematic attacks by Israeli forces—where the daily average toll of child deaths is entirely predictable. For three years, images of children with severed limbs and partially or completely charred bodies have flashed before our eyes every single day, marked with ‘sensitive content’ warnings.
They are still flashing.
The crux of the matter is not Hamas. Because while these horrors were unfolding in Gaza, 1,186 unarmed and defenseless Palestinians were killed in the West Bank—where Hamas or any armed resistance has no presence—by Israeli forces and ‘settlers’ carrying out pogroms under their supervision. There, too, a systematic ethnic cleansing continues to escalate through occupations, home demolitions, and the confiscation of vacated lands.
What is happening there?
Why is all of this happening? What is going on? How do we explain this event that we are forced to watch online, which some describe as ‘the largest mass killing of children in history’?
When we set aside religion, ancestry, and nationality, what do we actually see?
A group of people with the means and power is displacing and killing another group of people who are entirely defenseless, seizing their homes and lands. To achieve this, they annihilate cities, rain bombs down upon others, slaughter tens of thousands of children, clear an entire region of its inhabitants, and hand over what they have taken to someone else.
Look down upon what is happening below, bypassing Palestine, Israel, Jew, and Arab. If your vision has not been distorted by nationalism, false beliefs, and unjust ideologies, this is exactly what you will see.
An Analysis of a Choice...
Can a person build a blissful, happy life there without erasing the people whose lives they took and whose property and land they seized from their conscience? Can they live a peaceful life at the expense of another’s catastrophe? Can a house built on tears ever bring joy to the one who smiles?
Or does the phantom of the people whose rights were violated perpetually haunt them, no matter how much they rationalize their wickedness, and regardless of the religious, national, or ideological justifications they manufacture?
What lies in the deepest recesses of the human soul, and which of these narratives is true? Revealing those depths is no easy feat. However, we can clearly see and expose what is currently happening in the world and what human beings are doing to one another.
“The Spoils of a Sinking Ship”
Believing that a happy life can be built upon the catastrophe, death, and destruction of other families must be a grave delusion.
Yet, humans can choose this path too.
The issue is not a lack of awareness. We cannot claim that a person is unaware of the injustice when they displace someone, kill them, and confiscate their home. Nor can we claim that those to whom these homes and lands are ‘gifted’ do not know where they came from. Just as we cannot say that those who established a ‘New World’ by committing the greatest genocide in history following the ‘discovery’ of America did not know where the indigenous populations—tens of millions of Native Americans, including their women and children—had gone.
The entire issue crystallizes in Dostoevsky’s question: Would you reside in a building whose foundation is built upon the bodies of children?
Would you kill someone and seize their home and land? Or would you become a part of the authority that kills them and confiscates their property? Would you approve of them killing on your behalf? Would you accept what is given to you, or would you say no because of the bloodstains on it?
The answer ‘yes’ given to this question explains Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide, as well as the historical narrative built upon that political choice. Naturally, it also explains the ‘Nakba’—the great catastrophe that Palestinians have been enduring for a century, which is the name of the Holocaust in Palestinian history.
“The Fruit Will Be Bitter”
“This is your paradise. But its soil is soaked with the blood of the innocent. And what about its fruit? Is it not black and bitter?”
Agatha Christie’s detective, Hercule Poirot, spoke these words to a woman who had strangled a child to death for the sake of land.
There is an unaccountable, irreplaceable agony of 25,000 children standing before us. A monumental sorrow that no land returned and no victory achieved can ever compensate.
Those who rejoice today, thinking, ‘the global conjecture is favorable, we did it and it’s done. After a while, no one will remember Gaza,’ are mistaken. Because the fruit harvested from the stolen lives of those children will also be bitter. It will bring a state of perpetual vigilance, an enduring anxiety that accountability will be demanded every single day, anywhere in the world. It will mean always feeling forced to be strong, constantly keeping one’s guard up, and living in perpetual fear of exposure. It means being acutely aware that even if ‘that topic’ is never brought up, and even if no one asks, everyone knows what is left unsaid.
And feeling that, sooner or later, these files will be opened.
Antisemitism has always existed; but times are coming when we will be most helpless in combating it. What kind of consequences this will yield can be debated, but what is certain is that everyone, including Israel, will now live with this reality.
We are at the beginning of a long, exhausting, and painful history for everyone.
Can the World Stomach It?
It is evident that the people who encroach upon the homes of others—or, to use a polite expression, the ‘settlers’—feel no shame or discomfort about sitting in houses and gardens built upon the bodies of children; in fact, they view it as their right.
To avoid working a lifetime and saving money for years to own a home and land, it is enough to simply choose one of the narratives spun for justification.
“Our ancestors were here three thousand years ago,” or “God promised these lands to us,” or as an Israeli man responded to his Arab neighbor who accused him of stealing his home in a widely viewed video: “If I don’t steal your home, someone else will.”
Now, while Israel continues to take lives in Gaza despite the ceasefire, there is talk—in the words of Trump—of beachfront real estate development projects on the rubble of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank.
But today, the situation is different.
Because ethnic cleansing in Palestine was historically stretched out over time, the world did not fully see what was happening. Israel’s response to Hamas’s October 7 attack with a genocide, and the atrocities witnessed in Gaza over the last three years, have laid bare the core of the Palestinian issue to even the most reluctant observers.
We did not personally witness the suffering of the past. It is no longer possible to turn back time and save those innocents today. But how the story concludes in the face of today’s suffering depends entirely on us.
Now, the world knows; it sees the essence of the problem in all its stark nakedness. Now, the question is what eight billion people will do—whether their stomachs can turn it away or endure it.
Seeing creates accountability. As the world is being rebuilt once again, granting or denying a permit to this construction built upon the bodies of children imposes, above all else, a moral responsibility on every human being living on Earth.
What was asked in The Brothers Karamazov? “Would you consent to be the architect of a building to be settled on the tears and life of a child?”
This question is being asked to us today, and it addresses all eight billion people on Earth equally—whether Arab, Jew, Mexican, Chinese, Kenyan, Buddhist, Christian, liberal, conservative, or socialist. And it forces everyone to make a choice: Will we consent to be the architects of a world whose foundations are washed with the tears of innocents, or will we not?
The kind of place our world will become in the near future—not just Palestine—will depend heavily on the answer we, as humanity, give to this question.
About the Author:
Bekir Berat Özipek
Prof. Dr., Istanbul Medipol University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Political Science
* In a statement on June 19, 2026, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder also described the current ceasefire as a “cruel and deadly illusion,” expressing his profound sorrow over the loss of hundreds of more children’s lives. “Let us be clear about what this means,” Elder said. “These children were not killed in a war zone. They were killed in their homes. In their schools. Playing football. Fishing.”