`NEVER again. And yet, here we are.

Again.

Two years into Israel`s war on Gaza, the global debate is still trapped in grotesque semantics: is this genocide, or `merely ethnic cleansing`? Is it famine, or `just food insecurity`? Is it mass slaughter, or `self-defence`? The figures speak for themselves. More than 60,000 Palestinians killed, including over 18,000 children, that is 28 children every single day. Nearly 270 journalists targeted and silenced, leaving Gaza blindfolded before the world. Sixty-nine per cent of Gaza`s structures damaged or destroyed, including 245,000 homes, with the UN estimating 350 years to rebuild under current conditions. Eighty-four per cent of health facilities destroyed. Famine engineered so deliberately that women cannot produce milk for their infants, while children collapse from starvation before aid trucks that never reach them.

Gaza`s environment too has been assaulted: orchards uprooted, farmland razed, olive trees reduced to dust, seas poisoned with sewage, soil contaminated with munitions. The UNEP reports 100,000 cubic metres of sewage pumped daily into the sea after Israel cut off Gaza`s fuel.

Years before Oct 7, Israel`s deputy prime minister spoke words that now echo in the rubbles of Gaza: `We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages, destroying all the infrastructure, including roads and water.` Now Netanyahu proclaims there is `no space` for a Palestinian state, the implication is clear: for there to be no Palestine, Palestinians must either be destroyed or expelled. If this is not genocide, what is? Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term `genocide`, foresaw this very problem. For him, genocide was never limited to mass killings. It was the destruction of a people`s way of life, their families, culture, environment and capacity to exist as a nation. Lemkin`s definition included famine, cultural annihilation and the dismantling of social fabrics. He warned that starvation was one of the most effective genocidal weapons: not only because it kills, but because it fractures communities, forcing individuals to compete for survival.

Under Lemkin`s lens, Israel`s systematic starvation of Gaza, its destruction of its environment, its targeted killing of journalists, professors and poets like Refaat Alareer, its destruction of schools, its poisoning of land and sea, its uprooting of orchards, its bombing of hospitals and homes, all amount unmistakably to genocide. Yet Lemkin`s broad and accurate conception was narrowed by the colonialpowers that shaped the Genocide Convention. Lemkin prepared the first draft of the Genocide Convention, and he explicitly included cultural genocide alongside physical and biological destruction. Later, due to opposition from colonial powers (who feared it could expose their treatment of indigenous and colonised nations), cultural genocide was removed from the final Convention.

This narrowing gave rise to the language games we see today. The international community, from Bosnia to Myanmar, has habitually preferred the term `ethnic cleansing`. In its 2007 judgement on Bosnia, the International Court of Justice affirmed that ethnic cleansing is distinct from genocide, defining it as rendering an area ethnically homogeneous through expulsion or intimidation.

The problem? `Ethnic cleansing` sanitises atrocity. It was coined by perpetrators in the Balkans to downplay genocide, and has since become a tool for denial.

We see it now in Palestine. The 1948 Nakba displaced more than 750,000 Palestinians, and today, UN experts warnof a new instance of mass ethnic cleansing. Yet world powers debate resettlement plans as though mass removal of a people is anything lessthan genocidal. By clinging to `ethnic cleansing`, the world spares itself from acknowledging genocide, and from the obligations to prevent and punish that acknowledgment would demand.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at Nuremberg, saw this coming.

When the Genocide Convention was adopted, he warned: `No one believed that a state committing those crimes would be restrained by the existence of a convention, or would surrender itself for trial to an international tribunal.

The failure to adequately define genocide is why Palestinians must prove their extermination through mountains of corpses and starved children, just as the promise of `never again` rang hollow in Rwanda,inBosnia,inDarfur,inMyanmar, and now in Gaza. If Lemkin`s conception had prevailed, the debate on Gaza today would not be about whether it qualifies as genocide. It would be about the international community`s responsibility to prevent and protect. But because the definition was hollowed out by colonial powers, denial thrives. And denial, as history has shown, perpetuates genocide.

The wúter is a law student.