On November 7, 2023, children stood before cameras at al-Shifa Hospital and spoke in English, not their mother tongue, but in the language of those they thought might save them. “We want to live, we want peace, we want to judge the killers of children,” one boy said. “We want medicine, food and education. We want to live as other children live.” Even then, barely a month into the genocide, they had no clean drinking water, no food and no medicine. They begged in the colonisers’ language because they thought it might make their humanity legible.I wonder how many of those children are dead now, how many never made it to this moment of “peace”, and whether they died still believing the world might answer their call.Now, almost two years later, US President Donald Trump posts that he is “very proud” of the signing of the first phase of his “peace plan”. French President Emmanuel Macron praises and commends Trump’s initiative, while Israeli leader Yair Lapid calls on the Nobel Committee to award Trump a peace prize. Leaders have lined up to claim credit for ending a genocide they spent two years, and the previous 77, funding, arming and enabling.But Gaza never needed saving. Gaza needed the world to stop killing it. Gaza needed t …
