Meet the change leaders: Steven Olikara, storyteller

Since October 10, 2025, the day when the US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was announced, Israel has killed at least 401 civilians, including at least 148 children. This has led Palestinian scholar Saree Makdisi to decry a “continuing genocide, albeit one that has shifted gears and has—for now—moved into the slow lane. Rather than hundreds at a time, it is killing by twos and threes” or by twenties and thirties as on November 19 and November 23 – “an obscenity that has coalesced into a new normal.” The Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik describes the post-ceasefire period as nothing more than a “reducefire,” quoting the warning issued by Amnesty International’s secretary general Agnès Callamard that the ”world must not be fooled” into believing that Israel’s genocide is over.

A visual analysis of satellite images conducted by the BBC has established that since the declared ceasefire, “the destruction of buildings in Gaza by the Israeli military has been continuing on a huge scale,” entire neighborhoods “levelled” through “demolitions,” including large swaths of farmland and orchards. The Guardian reported already in March of 2024, that satellite imagery proved the “destruction of about 38-48% of tree cover and farmland” and 23% of Gaza’s greenhouses “completely destroyed.” Writing about the “colossal violence” Israel has wrought on Gaza, Palestinian legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah lists “several variations” on the term “genocide” which researchers found the need to introduce, such as “urbicide” (the systematic destruction of cities), “domicide” (systematic destruction of housing), “sociocide,” “politicide,” and “memoricide.” Others have added the concepts “ecocide,” “scholasticide” (the systematic destruction of Gaza’s schools, universities, libraries), and “medicide” (the deliberate attacks on all aspects of Gaza’s healthcare with the intent to “wipe out” all medical care). It is only the combination of all these “-cides,” all amounting to massive war crimes, that adequately manages to describe the Palestinian condition. Constantine Zurayk introduced the term “Nakba” (“catastrophe” in Arabic) in 1948 to name the unparalleled “magnitude and ramifications of the Zionist conquest of Palestine” and its historical “rupture.” When Eghbariah argues for “Nakba” as a “new legal concept,” he underlines, however, that to understand its magnitude, one needs to go back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British colonial power promised “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, even though just 6 % of its population were Jewish. From Nakba as the “constitutive violence of 1948,” we need today to conceptualize “Nakba as a structure,” an “overarching frame.”