BLOCK THE DATE: GENOCIDE & GAZA'S DISABLED
National Platform For The Rights of the Disabled
September 4, 2025
Invitation
Genocide & Gaza’s Disabled
"Give me a voice of thunder... that I may hurl imprecation upon this cannibal, whose gruesome hunger spares neither woman nor child.”
Rabindranath Tagore wrote this in another time. But today... his words echo in Gaza.
Here, genocide disables by design. Children undergo amputations without anesthesia. The disabled crawl across rubble... denied wheelchairs and other assistive devices, denied caregivers... fleeing bombardments on bloodied limbs.
Hospitals, rehabilitation centres, even homes—are reduced to dust.
This is not collateral damage. It is the systematic creation of disability.
The Women Enabled’s submission to the United Nations calls it: the “mass production of disability”.
Since October 2023, thousands have lost limbs— at least a thousand of them children. The bombs maim. The siege denies treatment. Trauma corrodes the spirit. Disability here is not an accident— it is a weapon of war.
History tells us this logic well. In Rwanda disabled people were burned alive in churches. In Srebrenica the elderly and disabled were abandoned to die.
And in Nazi Germany Aktion T4 marked the disabled as the first to be exterminated—called “unworthy of life.” More than two lakh disabled were sent to the gas chambers.
Gaza stands in that dark lineage.
Starvation itself has become a weapon. Mothers give birth without anesthesia. Babies die in incubators without fuel, without milk and food.
Women with disabilities, unable to flee, face sexual violence and despair.
This is what Palestinian feminists rightly call— “reproductive genocide”.
The mental wounds run just as deep. Children wake screaming from nightmares that never end. Anxiety, depression, grief—blanket Gaza like dust. But there are no hospitals. No counsellors. No safe space to heal. While survivor’s guilt blankets those Palestinians and their supporters living in lands beyond watching helplessly in horror and despair.
Here, trauma is not a moment... it is daily life.
And the numbers the world refuses to see: Over 63,000 dead. 1,43,000 wounded. Nearly 4,00,000 missing beneath rubble.
Among them, the disabled—erased twice... in life and in death.
All this, while Gaza becomes a testing ground for AI-guided bombs and surveillance tools, exported worldwide for profit. From Nazi doctors... to modern arms makers... genocide and capitalism have always walked hand in hand.
Many Indian companies are collaborating, have joint ventures with Israeli companies and manufacture products that directly help the Israeli Defence Forces in its genocide of the Palestinian people.
History asks us again: How many more limbs... wombs... and futures must be shattered before we say—Enough?
And yet... in India, the disability movement has remained largely silent.
While global disability organizations have condemned Israel’s deliberate targeting of disabled Palestinians... many here look away. This silence echoes the silence of the State. It betrays the very principles of disability justice.
The cries from Gaza demand not silence—but thunder. For the disabled of Palestine... for every life deemed disposable... we must say—Never again. Not in our name.
Please join us:
On: September 28, 2025
At: Lecture Hall, Harkishan Singh Surjeet Bhawan,
Indrajit Gupta Marg, Near Mata Sundari College, New Delhi
From 3.00 to 5.00 p.m.
During these two hours speakers will try to draw attention to the plight of the disabled in Gaza, impact of the destruction of health and rehabilitation facilities in Gaza, the mental health trauma in situations of conflict, how India’s business houses contribute to the genocide etc.
We will be joined in person by the Palestinian Ambassador to India, H/E. Abdullah Abu Shawesh; author and Executive Director of Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, Vijay Prashad will join online from Paris, while disability rights activist Haitham Al Saqqa and a Counsellor at the Palestinian Counselling Centre, Razan Nahed Al Saqqa will join us online from Gaza. Other speakers include disability rights activist Radhika Alkazi. Also joining us will be activists who will draw attention to the perilous condition of healthcare in Gaza following the destruction of health and rehabilitation centres.
Please do come and join us in expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle against the Zionist occupier and its genocidal machine.
PLEASE BLOCK THE DATE
Muralidharan
General Secretary
National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled (NPRD)
Jan Swasthiya Abhiyan (JSA)