“Nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children,” said United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. At first Israel denied targeting the Abu Hussein girls’ school in Jabaliya refugee camp, north of Gaza City.

More than 20 were killed, all of them civilians, all of them in a United Nations designated safe zone.

“In the name of humanity, the violence must stop,” said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

United Nations Humanitarian Operations director, John Ging said that “nowhere is safe.”

This was the sixth attack on a United Nations Relief and Works Agency school in Gaza since the Israeli bombardments commenced on July 8.

There are few places to shelter in safety in the Gaza or wherever in what is left of Palestine, which is very little – 95 per cent of what was Palestine has been subsumed or is occupied by Israel. The Gaza strip is a now but an enclave region on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, some 50 kilometres long by 10 kilometres wide. It is not Israel that appears threatened with extinction but Palestine. When 95 per cent of a nation disappears there does not appear to be an agenda of either any peace nor the disingenuous propaganda of a two-State solution. The Palestinians had lived on their lands for thousands of years, now they fight for survival in what are effectively walled camps and squatter living, in grinding abject poverty.

More Israeli citizenry and Jews around the world are speaking out against the inhumanity of the Israeli Government and of the unjustifiable slaughter they are wreaking on the Palestinian people. Mainstream media has had no choice but to publish and broadcast the horrific slaughter streaming through social media live out of the Gaza. These competing images are being broadcast by Western mainstream media whereas once this would not have been the case – but because the world is being availed to them, the mainstream has no choice but to tell some of the truth, lest the mainstream media become irrelevant.

Hamas is not at fault for what is happening in Palestine and Israel. Palestinians are not responsible for what is happening to them. Israelis have to sit down at the table of peace and open their hearts and minds that far too many of them have long closed to the Palestinians they pushed off their lands and into this enduring misery. There are no other solutions, just bloodshed.

We can discuss what was before Al-Nakba and since to the end of days, we can discuss what it means to be a Semite and who are the Semites, about Jewry and the Holocaust, about the manifest of Israel and the destruction of most of what was Palestine, but where will this get us?

We were not put on this Earth to bury our children. We were not put on this Earth to betray one another, but for far too long innocent Palestinians have been betrayed. They are not the aggressors – certainly not. They have had their homes and lands taken from them in order to afford the nation of Israel. Subsequently, Israel has failed to cut any slack to the Palestinian people whom far too many of them were made refugees by the nationhood of Israel and its bent for more ‘lebensraum’. There has never been any sincerity on the part of Israel in moving towards any honourable lands deal with Palestine. Jewish peoples had lived side by side with Palestinians till the impost of the State of Israel; one of modernity’s worst implemented plans.

Holocaust survivor, Dr Reuvin Moskovitz said, “It is a sacred duty for me as a survivor, to protest against the persecution, the oppression and the imprisonment of so many people in Gaza, including more than 800,000 children.”

“I, as a Holocaust survivor, cannot live with the fact that the State of Israel is imprisoning an entire people behind fences.”

“It is just immoral.”

“What happened to me in the Holocaust wakes me up every night and I hope we don’t do the same thing to our neighbours.”

So far more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed in the onslaught, more than three-quarters were civilians. When all the rubble cleared the missing will be found. Their time on this earth done – premature and unnatural deaths. The scale of the killing is horrendous. What is left for Palestine to do? Should they die out by a thousand cuts or should the 1.7 million Palestinians who languish gather at the walls and borders of the squats they have been corralled in, and bring down those walls, and silently, peacefully, holding hands, walk across into what not long ago was Palestine or is now occupied and keep on walking. Maybe many Israelis who do not believe in what is being done in their name will join the Palestinians in their walk; and maybe they can march out of the Apartheid they endure, out of the oppression that for far too long no light on any horizon has loomed. Maybe they will be met by right-minded thinking Israelis. Or maybe they will be met by an instant genocide, an abysmal bombardment by Israeli firepower and that instead of what is being done to Palestinian men, women and children by a thousand cuts shall instead be done to them in the instant – time sped up. Such a genocide would be unimaginable and would more than likely not occur if a million people walk together but genocide is indeed what is happening day in, day out, over weeks and years, decade after decade.

Humanity can step up. Or the majority of humanity can do as it has been doing for far too long, it can sit idly by while blame is cast mercilessly upon the victims. Israel cannot continue to build its nation on the blood of the children of Palestine – they should instead sit at the table of peace. We were not put on this Earth to betray one another.

The whole world can take a step in the right direction if Israel ensures peace for Palestine and its children.