Perhaps the worst indictment of the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians since the terrible Hamas attack of October 7th, 2023, is the fact that we have become immune to the horror, whether it’s the more than 100,000 dead, the deliberate targeting of journalists or the systematic destruction of what was already a creaking health system.
This level of compassion fatigue is only possible when the amount of atrocities committed is too much for our brains to compute and the numbers start to lose all sense of meaning.
Former RTÉ journalist Fintan Drury digs beneath the thousands of bodies, the millions of tonnes of rubble and the devastated wasteland that is the Gaza Strip to lay bare the reasoning behind the carnage and point the finger at those responsible.
This was never just about revenge for the brutal events of October 7th, he argues, but part of Israel’s wider plan to seize more territory in Gaza and the West Bank, happily annihilating the Palestinians who call that land home to do so.
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Drury’s 2025 book, Catastrophe: Nakba II, focused on how we got to the events of October 7th and Israel’s disproportionate and genocidal response. This time around, he focuses on October 13th, 2025, when Donald Trump unveiled his 462-word Middle East peace plan in a showy PR exercise, which Drury dubs “Genocide Celebration Day”.
While searing in his appraisal of Binyamin Netanyahu and his government, Drury argues that the slaughter is not the fault of “sovereign adolescent” Israel alone, calling out those nations who have either turned a blind eye or directly supplied arms to the Israel Defense Forces, especially the “worst offenders … the US and the UK”.
Drury delves into the region’s past to explain some of the “diplomatic thrombosis” that allows Israel to act without fear of consequence. He lambasts the UN for sanctioning Trump’s “deeply flawed, inequitable” plan and his “Board of Peace”, effectively washing its hands of the situation.
Admitting that genocide is not yet officially proven, Drury argues reasonably that if the events in Gaza do not constitute grounds for the charge, it’s hard to see the value of the Genocide Convention. He is not without hope, however, that one day those responsible will face international justice, and not just the state whose army carried out the killings but also those complicit and who failed to prevent the butchery.
John Walshe is a Dublin-based book reviewer
