Gaza now is the most lethal assignment in modern journalism. At least 197 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 2023, often while reporting on the aftermath of strikes, or while seeking shelter with family. The Committee to Protect Journalists or CPJ says this the most deliberately coordinated attempt to silence journalists it has ever recorded. On Aug. 10 and again on Aug. 25, 2025, Palestinian journalists were targeted and killed in clusters of attacks that illustrate how murderous and lawless this war has grown for the press. The right to report is being buried with the people we report on.

Here is the question their deaths express: Does it require a genocide for a nation to be acknowledged by the world?

Rwanda: recognition through remorse

A president of the United States knelt before the survivors of the Tutsi genocide in Kigali in 1998 and lamented the slow-motion failure of the “international community.” “We did not act quickly enough after the killing began… We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide,” Bill Clinton said. The purpose of that contrition wasn’t just to come to terms with a calamity. It was to chart a new reflex: When mass horror occurs, acknowledgment and protection cannot grow tardy while the paperwork of history is filled in.

Rwanda’s flag wasn’t in need of new signatures in 1994. But the world’s gaze did, belatedly and painfully, come only after the crime achieved dimensions that no one could plausibly deny. Many of the post-genocide policy mechanisms, from tribunals to doctrine, flowed from that realized shame. I once read a book called Shake Hands with the Devil by former Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, who was the Force Commander for UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda) during the Rwanda Genocide, in which he stated that humanity lost its soul when it turned its back on Rwanda. I had the pleasure meeting him in Rwanda in 2016. This was the book that brought tears to my heart more than any other book before and spoke to me about the plight of the Rwandese Tutsis. Yet today, I’m forced to question whether they’ve forgotten what happened, or is their leadership blinded by something else. This is no way a criticism, but a question.

Israel: recognition after annihilation

The powers that could not avert their gaze from what had been executed on the Jews of Europe had come to recognize the Israeli state. Even Israel’s forever-Young founding document, though, bears the weight of that catastrophe, naming “the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe” as a constitutive fact of the new country (Israel’s Declaration of Independence). The world did not give recognition to Israel to avoid a genocide; it gave recognition to Israel after having watched one.

And Palestine?

For Palestinians, the recognition has come in two waves. Over 70, mainly Global South, countries recognised the State of Palestine following the 1988 declaration of independence. A second wave got underway in the Gaza war’s tenth month and beyond, in 2024.

Norway, Ireland and Spain were in sync by May 2024. “Recognition of Palestine is a means of supporting the moderate forces,” said Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, casting statehood as an investment in politics over nihilism. Ireland’s Taoiseach at the time, Simon Harris, was straightforward about the bet: “This decision of Ireland is about keeping hope alive. It is about believing that a two-state solution is the only way for Israel and Palestine to live side by side in peace and security,” Mr. Harris said. Spain’s Pedro Sánchez depicted it as both a moral and strategic necessity, acknowledging Palestine “por justicia, por coherencia y por la paz” — “for justice, for consistency and for peace” (Moncloa statement).

By mid-2025, several others had followed, or indicated that they would, including Australia, which said it would move recognition at the U.N. General Assembly in September 2025 (Prime Minister’s Office, Foreign Minister). The logic was clear and consistent — a two-state solution is dying, recognition is an effort to keep politics alive.

For its part, Palestinian leadership has described the current campaign as “a full-scale war of genocide,” language that is no longer the exclusive province of activists (Mahmoud Abbas at UNGA). In December 2024, Human Rights Watch determined that the deliberate withholding of water in Gaza rendered Israeli authorities “responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination” and “for acts of genocide.” (HRW report). Those legal characterizations will be hashed out for years. But the bodies do not need a court to be real.

What recognition meant, for Rwanda as for Israel, is that the world chose to see a people in their fullness after it had seen the worst that could be done to them. The test for Palestine is whether the world can before it’s devastated.

Africa and Palestine: an ancient conversation

Mandela Arafat The Exchange Africa (https://theexchange.africa)
A Feb 27, 1990, file photo shows Nelson Mandela being embraced by PLO leader Yasser Arafat at Lusaka airport.—Reuters (Source DAWN)

If there is a memory to the Global South, it is Yasser Arafat. From Dar es Salaam to Algiers, Accra to Lusaka, the PLO built relationships that were unambiguously not just diplomatic but personal. Liberation movements basically exchanged notes and safe houses. Palestinian offices operated in African cities; Palestinian cadres exchanged notes with African revolutionaries on subjects like underground logistics and the morality of armed struggle. These were friendships of people who knew each other’s hurts.

No pair represented that better than Arafat and Nelson Mandela. In 1997 in Pretoria, Mandela spoke the unspeakable: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” linking South Africa’s moral imagination to Palestine’s incomplete liberation (Mandela, 4 Dec 1997). He wasn’t speaking as a commander. He did so as someone who had seen prisons from the inside.

That inheritance is visible today. There’s a case before the International Court of Justice, brought by South Africa, against Israel under the Genocide Convention (ICJ case docket), and President Cyril Ramaphosa has told the UN that there is a “plausible case of genocide” and that states have a duty to act to prevent it. The war is “immoral” and “unacceptable,” said the African Union Commission (AU remarks). Leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement and the G77 meeting in Kampala in January 2024 criticized the war and called for a ceasefire (Kampala Declaration; NAM Final Outcome). Most of Africa and the Africans have already recognized the State of Palestine; the governments, the publics and the courts have all insisted that recognition carries consequences.

Is Africa doing enough?

There is distance between words and leverage. African governments can close it.

First, align diplomacy with law. If the genocide case in the I.C.J and the starvation-as-a-weapon findings of rights groups are to have any substance, they have to be turned into routine voting, amicus briefs and coalition-building to make the cost of noncompliance high for any state, friend or foe. Recognition is the floor, the not ceiling.

Second, pair rhetoric with procurement. Arms embargos, dual-use export controls, and open audits of defense and surveillance contracts are blunt, but they’re real. They are also in line with the obligation that many coutnries already assumed under the Genocide Convention to stop genocide, not just to deplore it.

Third, use Africa’s convening power. The AU, regional economic communities and major capitals can host track-two and track-one-and-a-half dialogues that go beyond symbolic communiqués. Those forums should amplify Palestinian civil society and journalists who are undertaking the day-to-day work of documenting life and death under bombardment and blockade.

Fourth, defend the press. While they file, our colleagues in Gaza are starving and hunted. African nations can lead an emergency journalist-rescue mechanism that does not require the permission of warring parties: airlifts of equipment, medical support, rescue corridors when needed and legal representation. If your foreign minister is quoting Mandela on Palestine, your government should be wiring money to support the people who testify there.

Lastly, speak to your own publics. African diasporas are already protesting, raising money and building alliances with Palestinian groups. Governments can reach them where they are with civic education and policy transparency. A continent that taught the world so much about anti-colonial solidarity should hardly subcontract its conscience to the chancelleries of the former colonial powers.

Where is Africa’s Voice?

There is a bright line that many will have a hard time acknowledging. What of Kagame in all this? The microphones in Kigali are low. Rwanda’s leadership has long valued security partnerships and deals, and Israel is part of that calculus.

After October 7, Kigali condemned Hamas and extended condolences to Israel, eventually backed several UN ceasefire votes and sent aid, but it hasn’t reached anything like Pretoria’s volume or vocabulary. Many presidents are making the same choice all over the continent. They fear jeopardizing intelligence sharing, cyber tools and defense know-how. They are worried of alienating Washington, Brussels and important creditors. They are fearful that loud moralizing abroad will rebound and come back to haunt their own human rights records at home.

The result is a careful language that treats Gaza’s dead as a diplomatic liability rather than a red line. Critics call it moral outsourcing. “How is that possible?” they ask: How can a continent shaped in anti-colonial struggle stare and watch besieged people starve and still speak in euphemism? If anything, the African Union says means anything today, Rwanda and its peers should do so in clear language and bear the costs of opting for law over leverage.

The politics of “never again”

Politicians love the term; reporters rush like a siren to react to it. “We did not act quickly enough… We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide,” Clinton said in Kigali. It has now turned into a script for anniversaries and apologies.

But ‘never again’ only has meaning if it prompts action when the evidence is immediate rather than curated. In 2024 and 2025, some leaders have attempted to do just that. “Recognition of Palestine is a means of supporting the moderate forces,” Store said. “This decision of Ireland is about keeping hope alive… [so] Israel and Palestine [can] live side by side in peace and security,” Harris said. Sánchez described the Spanish government’s recognition as a commitment “por justicia, por coherencia y por la paz.” (Moncloa) And those are not just press-conference bromides. They are bets that perhaps politics can still outrun catastrophe.

For many of those in the media, they are not the arbiters of borders. They are the witnesses to its aftermath. This year in Gaza has meant writing the names of children down the backs of many notebooks, to remember them when the signal goes out. It has meant either selecting a charging station or getting a meal, and in one case, selecting a very last upload over a safer shelter. It has meant funerals with cameras laid lightly on coffins, there is no other place to put them. While I’m not in Gaza, I see the horrifying images displayed on the tele, via Al Jazeera and say to myself, what can I do, while in Africa and what is Africa really doing? Not much to both, but perhaps just being able to say something is more than enough.

In the end, what can one say to declare a war a genocide, in order to recognize a nation? The lesson of Rwanda is that repentance is too late. What Israel teaches, for anyone who wishes to learn, is that recognition after annihilation doesn’t inoculate anyone from further repetition. If the world learns in time, the lesson of Palestine is that recognizing a people’s political existence is not a reward for its suffering. It’s the precondition for bringing that to an end.

If one can’t safeguard the living, they might at least quit pretending that the dead are an alibi for inaction and instead try to recognize a nation, a people and its civilians. And for those in the media, continue carrying the microphones to amplify your voices in the news, let those in the media be allowed to do their work and come home alive.

Author name is kept private due to potential repercussions from this article.