We live in an age where death is televised and suffering is streamed. Coffins in Gaza, bombed streets of Kharkiv, the emaciated faces of children in Sudan – they flash across our screens with numbing regularity. The world watches, mourns briefly, then scrolls on. Humanity has learned to witness tragedy without feeling it.
Coffins as Currency: In Gaza, the exchange of coffins and hostages between Israel and Hamas was more than a grim ceremony – it was a metaphor for our moral decay. Over 68,000 Palestinians have died in two years of relentless bombardment. Israel, too, buries its dead. Yet both sides have turned the dead and detained into bargaining chips. Every coffin traded for a prisoner measures the distance between human life and human conscience.
Half a continent away, Ukraine bleeds the same color. Since Russia’s invasion, more one million people have been killed or wounded. Ten million have fled their homes. Cities like Mariupol and Kharkiv echo Gaza’s grief – mothers clutching remains, fathers digging graves.
The Numbness of the Spectator: Wars today are not fought in trenches but on screens. Every viewer becomes a witness, yet few become actors for peace. We mistake awareness for empathy. Philosopher Hannah Arendt called it “the banality of evil” – atrocities committed by ordinary people who stop questioning. In our time, evil is banal because indifference has become normal.
Africa’s Silent Suffering: While global powers trade condemnations over Gaza and Ukraine, Africa’s tragedies unfold off-camera. In Sudan, rival generals have killed over 15,000 and displaced millions. In Ethiopia’s Tigray, more than 600,000 have died since 2020. Somalia and Rwanda remind us that when the world looks away, humanity dies twice – first in flesh, then in memory.
The Vanishing Sanctity of Life: The Qur’an declares, “Whoever kills an innocent person, it is as if he has killed all of humanity.” (5:32) The Talmud repeats, “Whoever destroys one life, it is as though he destroyed an entire world.” The Dhammapada warns, “All tremble at violence; all fear death.”
Every faith, every philosophy, every civilization has upheld life as sacred. Yet the same civilizations now rationalize the destruction of the innocent as “collateral damage.” The twentieth century’s vow of “Never Again” after 60 million deaths in World War II has become an empty ritual.
The world has mastered precision warfare but lost moral direction
The Death of Empathy: We live in a time when compassion is a fleeting emotion, not a moral habit. Susan Sontag warned that compassion “needs to be translated into action or it withers.” Today, it has withered. Images from Gaza, Ukraine, or Sudan evoke outrage, not reform.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant urged that humans must “always be treated as ends in themselves, never as means.” Yet in war, both the dead and the living are means – to gain leverage, to appease politics, to satisfy vengeance. Camus wrote that “the only way to fight the plague is with decency.” Our plague is indifference, and decency has become rare.
Saving the Dignity of Life: Restoring humanity requires not sentiment, but structure – moral, legal, and educational.
1. Rehumanize the Adversary – As Martin Buber taught, real living is meeting. Peace begins when we see the enemy as human, not as a label.
2. End Impunity – The Geneva Conventions must mean something. War crimes – whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or Africa – demand universal prosecution, not selective outrage.
3. Regulate the Trade of Death – The global arms market, worth $2 trillion, fuels wars it later pretends to solve. Disarmament must precede development.
4. Humanize Technology – Drones and AI weapons must answer to law and ethics. Machines may calculate efficiency, but not mercy.
5. Educate for Peace – Schools must teach empathy as literacy. A child who learns compassion is harder to recruit for hate.
Faith and the Future: The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said, “The merciful are shown mercy by the Most Merciful.”
Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus.
The Buddha taught that hatred never ends by hatred.
Civilizations fall not when they are defeated, but when they lose the capacity for mercy.
A Covenant with the Dead: Every coffin from Gaza to Kyiv, from Darfur to Mogadishu, carries a silent question: What have we become? The living owe the dead a covenant – to end the cycle of vengeance, to rebuild a world where life is sacred again.
If the twentieth century conquered matter, the twenty-first must conquer morality. Humanity’s true progress will not be measured in technology, but in tenderness – in the ability to see every life as a divine trust.
Only then will the coffins stop coming, and the handcuffs fall away.
