Yesterday, the UK’s Guardian newspaper reported that Israel used a 500 lb (230 kg) bomb in its attack on the al-Baqa cafe on Gaza’s beachfront on Monday, which killed at least 24 people. It reports that,

“Experts in international law said the use of such a munition… was almost certainly unlawful and may constitute a war crime.”

Journalists and legal experts, we know, must measure their words cautiously, couching judgments with calculated restraint. Yet the result is a dissonance that turns the stomach: horrors so plain they cry out for unambiguous naming are veiled instead in a gauze of speculation, at the very moment when the urgency of the situation demands clarity, directness, and an unobstructed voice of conscience.

“Almost.”

“May.”

These nearly-words sum up all too well the half-measures and diluted condemnations that, even after 20 months, have failed to galvanize widespread collective action across Europe or spur popular resistance to the genocide being committed in our names. This action is urgently needed to demand an end to the weapons sales, the reconnaissance flights and refueling stops , the gross abuses of power deployed by politicians and law enforcement across the continent against the few who truly resist the barbarity of Israel’s occupying force and European complicity with it, having weighed the personal cost it might carry and decided to act anyway.

Image: Screenshot from the Instagram account of *Ismail Abu Hatab*.

Ismail Abu Hatab was a journalist and photo-videographer, who wrote that the places he preserved on film told him and his fellow Gazans,

“Do not abandon us, for we carry your memories and dreams.”

He was the 228th journalist to be killed in Gaza since October 2023.

Amna “Frans” al-Salmi, a visual artist who also had her life stolen at the cafe,filled her Instagram page full of portraits; digital and sketched. Her portrait of Ismail is also his Instagram profile picture.

On 20th June, Frans shared a different piece of art. Three faces, appearing as if shrouded, depicted in vivid, urgent slashes of red and white.

Ten days later, images of her final moments would be juxtaposed with this picture, and shared worldwide.

Ismail and Frans were two of the 22 whose richly illustrated and intertwined lives were taken at al-Baqa on Monday. Tens of others were killed that day. Hundreds more in June. And more than 55,000 in the last 635 relentless days. This paragraph cannot even begin to detail those injured, orphaned, displaced and dispossessed in this timeframe.

Amidst the ‘almosts’, the ‘mays’ and the ‘nearlies’, one thing is certain: Each one of us must judge ourselves against the actions and decisions we are prepared to take at this moment, and in these times, to resist.

For we are what we tolerate.

End the genocide.

End the occupation.

End European complicity with the apartheid state of Israel.

Images shared from the Instagram accounts of Amna “Frans” al-Salmi and Ismail Abu Hatab.

May they rest in peace.

Words by Poppy G.

In the Time of Almosts and Maybes