by ASFA SULTAN
This past year has been fraught with tension, anger and an overwhelming sense of helplessness, all of which has extended past politics and into every day lives.
Today marks a year to October 7, the day Palestinian resistance group Hamas fired rockets into Israel in a surprise retaliatory attack killing at least 1,163 people and taking over 240 Israeli civilians hostage. It also marks a year since Israel launched air strikes in a military offensive in Gaza, killing scores of civilians.
Today also marks a year to Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza, which has since killed 41,870 Palestinians — roughly 114 Palestinians killed in a day.
A year to the day the world changed, forever divided into two fragments — pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. It’s been a year of learning, and unlearning everything we’ve been told about war, apartheid, settler colonialism and ‘self-defence’ — a year since we’ve been speaking, or not speaking, about Gaza, as Macklemore puts it, “complicit in our platforms of silence.” A year of raising awareness, only to be interrupted by the inevitable, “But do you condemn Hamas?”
And most importantly, it’s been 52 weeks, 365 days, 8,760 hours, and 525,600 minutes of Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza, its war on a people that have been resisting occupation since 1948. A year later, Israel’s war now extends to Lebanon and has managed to loop in the US, Iran and Syria.
The past year has been fraught with tension, anger and an overwhelming sense of helplessness, all of which has extended past politics and into people’s every day lives. We’ve created a timeline of the major cultural events that have occurred since October 7 around the ‘conflict’.
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