Young relatives of newborn Amira Khaled Abu Asir, slain in an Israeli air raid, mourn over her body in Gaza City. (Wissam Nassar, Maan Images)

We celebrated my son Yousuf's fourth birthday two weeks last Saturday. We sang happy birthday. And we counted the bodies as the death toll in Gaza steadily rose. We ate cake. And my mother, stuck here with us in North Carolina and prevented by Israel from returning to Gaza, sobbed. We watched the fighter-jets roar over Gaza on our television screen, pounding its narrow streets; and we shuddered. Yousuf tore open his presents, then asked my mother if the plane he saw overhead was a drone, an awful memory from his days spent living in Gaza. And we were torn open from the inside, engulfed by feelings of helplessness and anger and fear.

Respected Israeli professor Ilan Pappe has said that genocide "is the only appropriate way to describe what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip". Genocide is not a word most people use lightly. But words laden with meaning have been used often, where Gaza is concerned, of late. Israel's deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai warned that a "shoah," the Hebrew word most commonly used for the Holocaust, will come to Gaza if the rocket fire does not stop.

Many complained that Vilnai's use of the term cheapened the concept and the memory of the Nazi Holocaust. During its five-day onslaught, Israel killed 123 Palestinians including 55 unarmed civilians.

Related stories Photos of the sea Israeli estimates for undermining peace An uneasy calm descends

There were 27 children among them, nearly a quarter of the total killed. Five Israelis were killed in the same period, four of them soldiers and one a civilian killed by a rocket landing in Israel.

And just last week, Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak sought legal opinions on the possibility of expelling Palestinian civilians from northern Gaza. Such attempts to drive Palestinians out of their homes and homeland began in earnest 60 years ago this year, and continue today.

These numbers, of course, do not approach the magnitude of the Nazis' crimes. But should this make the deliberate and sustained siege of Gaza, and the mounting civilian death toll, acceptable?

The real genocide in Gaza will not be assessed through sheer numbers. It is not a massacre involving gas chambers. Rather, it is a gradual, modern-day genocide - a genocide through more calibrated, long-term means. It is cloaked in state-sanctioned legitimacy and "security concerns", and as a result, tends to be overlooked. All is OK in Gaza, the wasteland, the "hostile territory" that is accustomed to slaughter and survival. Gaza, whose people are somehow less human, need not cause the world alarm, at least not until a mass killing or starvation is carried out. So the donors keep the trickle of humanitarian supplies coming, just enough to stave off disaster.

To read the full article please visit The Guardian.