‘How many martyrs left until liberation?’ Mass atrocity as international law’s price for emancipation by Shahd Hammouri

One clear element facilitating the inevitability of this price is the distance of the western spectator. On the 23^rd of October, I was tasked with presenting the case for sounding the red alert of unfolding genocide to high-ranking UN officials in Geneva. We were greeted with smiles and welcomed to a room with a long table overlooking the scenic mountains of Geneva. Their tone, smiles, and diplomatic aura conveyed a mixture of atrocity denial and acceptance – which seemed tailored for the Palestinian cause, and sister causes like Sudan. After my elaborate and strongly worded presentation, I see the value stripped from my words in the eyes of the officials. In a calm tone, the top official asked: ‘what are your plans for the day after?’ I was struck by the level of normalisation – two weeks into a genocidal war where officials of a government administering a settler colonial project were calling for the annihilation of a city under siege on TV, and UN officials were coldly querying the plans for political and administrative post-genocide reconstruction. I responded, ‘so you accept the risk [of genocide] and plan to do nothing about it?’