“If you still do not understand that this is ethnic cleansing and genocide,” Ensler said, “if you still believe that Israel ... is ‘defending’ itself, you have had to deaden some profound aspect of your compassion in defence of a delusion.”

I spent nights thinking about those people with deadened hearts and the governments – our own included – who had failed to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and then suspended payments to UNRWA, the main provider of aid to the stricken region, after Israel had accused a dozen of its staff members of involvement in the October 7 slaughter.

And this at a time of war, mass dislodgement and impending famine, and when the allegations – still unsubstantiated – were directed at roughly 0.1 per cent of the UN agency’s estimated 13,000 Gaza staff members.

I thought about this abject failure of the international community and the failure of so many Jewish people to condemn an Israeli government so utterly hijacked by right-wing extremists, messianic radicals, hooligan settlers and a morally bankrupt prime minister.

The Israeli government had for months been preventing sufficient aid from entering Gaza, and Palestinians were now eating grass and drinking putrid water. Hundreds were being forced to share one latrine. Children were beginning to die of famine, and even aid workers were starving to death. Virtually every hospital had been damaged or destroyed. Doctors, nurses, artists, students, teachers, journalists, entire families and children, thousands upon thousands of children, all dead.

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“I have never in my many, many years as an aid worker seen a place that has been so bombarded for such a long time, with such a trapped population, without any escape,” said Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

And, still, I swallowed my tongue, even after I heard American anti-Zionist Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, denounce Israel. “We cannot be silent,” he said. “Because we’re Jews, we have to stand up and say ... ‘not in our name, we totally object to this. We cry and hurt with the people of Palestine’.”

On February 10, they discovered the body of Hind Hamada, the little Gazan girl who, in a recorded phone call with the Palestinian Red Crescent, had pleaded to be saved. Her family had been complying with Israel’s “humanitarian” call to evacuate Gaza City when they were fired upon by Israeli tanks.

The six-year-old’s fate had remained unknown until she was found in her aunt’s burnt-out car, having bled to death under the bodies of her family.

From that, I turned to an image of another Palestinian girl wailing, shaking and pounding the dirt over the loss of her family, and then I listened to Bisan Owda, the young Palestinian filmmaker who, since the war began, had built an Instagram following of 4.4 million while trying to describe the indescribable:

“Hey everyone! This is Bisan from Gaza, the land of love, life and death. So the groom and bride, Maryam and Abdullah, who got married just three days ago in tents, were killed today. They were living in the ‘safe’ area of Rafah. There are no safe places and no safe people in Gaza and all our attempts to live, to love, to complete our lives while waiting for this war to stop, will fail. There are no other solutions than to stop this war and [begin a] ceasefire.”

Then I read about the “stampede of the starving” and the assessment of Volker Turk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: “There appear to be no bounds, no words to capture the horrors that are unfolding before our eyes in Gaza. This is carnage ... All people in Gaza are at imminent risk of famine.”

That was it. I texted my editor and asked if I could attempt another story. Yes, I could. And so now, in trying to find the words, I reach for those of Elie Wiesel, the Jewish Holocaust survivor and author who, in 1986, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize by swearing never to be silent about the suffering of others.

“Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views,” he said, “that place must – at that moment – become the centre of the universe.”

At this moment, Gaza is the centre of the universe and remaining silent is no longer an option. If, indeed, it ever was.

David Leser is an author and journalist. He is a regular contributor to and former staff writer with Good Weekend.