It's a tragic humanitarian crisis.

A humanitarian crisis is a result, not a cause. What is happening in Palestine did not fall from the sky, and it is not a natural disaster. It is the direct product of colonisation: a century-long settler-colonial project and a coloniser, the Israeli regime, that has applied every policy and instrument to destroy Palestine and Palestinians, from siege and bombardment to starvation, mass displacement, and the genocide waged on Gaza from 2023 onward. Naming the suffering while hiding what produced it treats the symptom as though it were the disease. There is no "crisis" here in the sense of a sudden, ownerless misfortune. There is a cause, and the cause has a name: Zionist colonisation and the genocide carried out to advance it.

Framing it as a humanitarian crisis shrinks a people's struggle into a supply problem. It reduces colonisation, dispossession, and genocide to a question of food, water, and shelter, as though the answer were more aid trucks rather than the end of the system stealing the water and destroying cultivated lands. This framing erases the political reality and the sacrifice behind it: a people resisting erasure, not a population awaiting relief. It converts a fight for freedom into a logistics operation, and in doing so strips Palestinians of their agency, their cause, and the meaning of what they endure.

The framing is harmful because it redirects thought away from the real issue. Describe Palestine as a humanitarian crisis and the mind turns to donations and relief, not to the fighting and mobilizing against the regime that drives the suffering. That redirection shapes what the world does. It channels the response into charity rather than justice, into managing misery rather than ending it. A world taught to see a crisis will send aid. A world that sees colonisation will act to dismantle it.

A humanitarian disaster is real in Palestine, but treating only the humanitarian symptoms guarantees the disaster never ends. Feed the starving under siege and the siege remains. Shelter the displaced and the force displacing them continues its work. As long as the response addresses consequences and leaves the cause untouched, the misery regenerates, and the world is left managing an endless emergency of its own making. What has to be confronted is the constant reason behind the disaster: the colonisation itself. Relief without justice is not a solution. It is maintenance of the conditions that produced the catastrophe.

Accurate language names the perpetrator. A "crisis" has no author; colonisation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide do. The humanitarian framing is a euphemism, and euphemisms protect those responsible by softening what they have done into something that merely happened. To speak honestly about Palestine is to refuse that softening: to say that this suffering is produced, deliberately and by an identifiable colonial power, and that it will continue until the structure producing it is ended.