It is often said that Israel’s war on Gaza is the first live-streamed genocide. Hind Rajab’s tragic final pleas and breaths were broadcast across the internet for all to hear. Israeli soldiers proudly post videos of their atrocities and destruction on TikTok. Brave Palestinians have built massive social media followings, as viewers log on every day to witness their hunger, displacement, and terror. More people around the world have been exposed to near real-time, graphic images of killings and starvation than ever in history. 

What is not unique about the genocide in Gaza is that world leaders — the only people with the means to stop it — have known about Israel’s actions, and its intentions, since day one. And they have done close to nothing to stop it.

The pleas of starving people, images of emaciated bodies, the dehumanization on which such cruelty and suffering is built remind me of the writings, images, and experiences of Jews whom the Nazis imprisoned and starved in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. My mother was one of those people, a small child at the time, thrown into ever-increasingly crowded spaces with less and less food by the week.

Starving at Bergen-Belsen alongside my mother, perhaps in the same barracks, was Hanna Levy-Hass, mother of Haaretz journalist Amira Hass. Hanna was one of the few people to keep a diary throughout her time at Bergen-Belsen, which survived and was later published.

In February 1945, she wrote: “Hunger crushes the spirit. I feel my physical and intellectual strength diminishing. Things escape me, I can’t think properly, can’t grasp events, can’t realize the full horror of the situation. 

“Our hunger has only become fiercer,” the diary entry went on. “Our bodies have been demolished by it, we all drag ourselves around like rags; men literally drop to the ground from exhaustion and end up dying of hunger, simple as that.”

Eighty years later, in a dispatch this week from Khan Younis in southern Gaza, +972 Magazine journalist Ruwaida Amer wrote, “For about a month now, though, I’ve lost the ability to follow the news. My focus is slipping. My body is breaking down.”

“We rarely leave the house anymore, afraid our legs might give out,” Amer continued. “It already happened to my sister: while searching on the streets for something, anything, to feed her children, she suddenly collapsed to the ground. Her body didn’t even have the strength to stay upright.”

One of the questions that has always haunted me about the Holocaust is what ordinary people could have done to stop the mass murder and deportations from taking place. There were, of course, plenty of individuals who saved countless Jews by hiding or smuggling them at great risk to themselves and their families. Less known are the very small number of general strikes and mass protests. In early 1941, for instance, an estimated 300,000 people shut down the city of Amsterdam in an attempt to stop the Nazi deportation and killing machine.

According to the U.S. National WWII Museum, “Tram drivers and sanitation crews started it. Dockworkers quickly joined in. Workers on bicycles rang the doorbells at homes and halted traffic in the streets, imploring drivers to join them. Factories closed. Offices, shops, and restaurants stood empty.”The Nazi response was fierce, deadly, and effective: German forces killed nine strike participants in street clashes, injuring dozens more, and later executed 18 protesters that tried to organize another action.

No similar mass mobilization ever took place again, and the Nazis killed more than three-quarters of Dutch Jewry in the years that followed. If mass popular action was insufficient, however, foreign military intervention could have saved countless lives, if not stopped the genocide altogether. Indeed, by 1944, Jewish leaders were lobbying officials in the U.S. government to bomb Auschwitz and the railways transporting Jews to it.

In 2013, in a speech intended to rally international support for military action against Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued, “The Allied leaders knew about the Holocaust as it was happening. They understood perfectly what was taking place in the death camps. They were asked to act, they could have acted, and they did not.”

At another Holocaust ceremony four years later, Netanyahu was evenmore specific: “If the world powers had acted in 1942 against the death camps — and all it would have required was repeated bombing of the camps — they could have saved four million Jews and the lives of many millions more. The Allies knew — and did not act.”

Last September, at a conference held by the New York-based magazine Jewish Currents, the question of how to stop this genocide was inescapable. In one session, an audience member challenged a senior South African diplomat, Zane Dangor, asking why, “instead of sending our best lawyers to the Hague, why don’t we send our best generals to Gaza?”

Dangor’s answer, that military support would only likely make things far worse, was soberly rooted in the vast power imbalance between Israel, which has the seemingly unconditional backing of the world’s greatest superpower, and those few nations with the courage to confront it.

A few weeks ago, I ran into Dangor at an emergency meeting of The Hague Group in Bogotá, where representatives of 30 countries had gathered to discuss what concrete steps they could take to end the genocide in Gaza. In his opening remarks, Dangor reminded the participating states that they “have the ultimate responsibility to ensure and protect the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.”

The United States threatened all of the participants, saying it would “aggressively defend our interests, our military, and our allies, including Israel, from such coordinated legal and diplomatic warfare.” But 12 of the 30, none with the influence or strength to challenge a superpower, stood up to U.S. pressure and announced an arms embargo against Israel along with other trade measures and steps to prosecute Israeli war criminals.

There is, of course, an entire spectrum of potential interventions that lie between “bombing the tracks,” an arms embargo, and complete inaction. Hundreds of global and Palestinian human rights and civil society organizations recently called on countries around the world to join a humanitarian convoy, “dispatching official diplomatic missions — at the highest possible level — to accompany the aid trucks already waiting at the Rafah Crossing, and to enter Gaza alongside them.”

The time for concrete action is now, and all options should be on the table.