You want to know what dehumanization looks like? It looks like this: Israel will save your donkey, but not your daughter
reposted from Ha’aretz
My mother, who is in Gaza, cannot walk. Since October 2023, my family has been displaced seven times. Every time the bombs fell too close or the leaflets rained down warning my family to flee, the only way she could be moved was on a donkey. Israel destroyed the roads. It bombed the vehicles. It starved Gaza of fuel. And in that wreckage – in the dust and the terror – donkeys became ambulances, buses, lifelines.
So when I read that Israel was “rescuing” donkeys from Gaza – stealing them from starving families who can’t even save their own children, loading them into trucks and taking them across the border to safety and comfort – I couldn’t breathe.
Donkeys get to leave. My mother doesn’t.
A donkey can cross the fence. But a Palestinian child with no legs cannot.
What is this world we’re living in?
According to a report by Israel’s public broadcaster, Israeli soldiers have seized donkeys from Gaza in recent weeks, flying them out to France and to sanctuaries in Israel, claiming it’s for their safety and welfare. Israeli media have described these animals as “abused” and in need of rescue.
But the irony is glaring: How can one care for a donkey in Gaza when there is no food, no water, no medicine – not even the ability to bathe them? The same conditions afflict the people of Gaza, who are enduring mass starvation, dehydration and relentless bombardment. The sudden compassion for animals – while children rot under rubble and families are denied basic necessities – exposes the grotesque double standards at play.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military has now banned Palestinians in Gaza from entering the sea. On July 12, the IDF’s Arabic-language spokesperson Avichay Adraee announced that the water is forbidden – a threat enforced by naval gunboats and snipers. The sea, once a rare escape from the suffocating blockade, has become another border of fear.
This is not war. This is a slow, humiliating suffocation.
We used to go to the sea to wash. When water stopped flowing from the taps, when the desalination plants were bombed, when the pipes dried up and the wells turned salty – the sea was all we had. We bathed there. We washed our clothes there. Sometimes, we just stood in it, trying to feel clean again. Trying to remember we were human.
But even the sea is off-limits now.
You want to know what dehumanization looks like? It looks like this: Israel will save your donkey, but not your daughter. It will evacuate animals – while making water a crime, movement a crime, breath a crime.
What kind of morality rescues beasts of burden but blocks the disabled, the wounded, the grieving? What kind of state uses animal rights as a PR tool while carrying out what has been widely described by human rights organizations and experts as genocidal attacks on the very people those animals once served?
تكريم الحمير في غـزة نظراً لجهودهم المتواصلة في خدمة الناس في وقت تخلى عن أهل غزة أخوة الدين والقومية وأغمض عيونه العالم وسكتت الجمعيات الإنسانية والحقوقية وأغلقت أبوابها الأمم pic.twitter.com/rj4lX7m3ZO
— Ahed Madi عاهد ماضي (@77ahed) June 17, 2025
Translation: Honoring donkeys in Gaza for their relentless efforts in serving people at a time when the people of Gaza were abandoned by their brothers in faith and nationality, the world turned a blind eye, humanitarian and rights organizations remained silent, and the nations closed their doors.
It’s not compassion. It’s theatre. It’s propaganda. And it is cruelty of the most calculated kind.
Donkeys are not symbols of suffering in Gaza – they are tools of survival. They are how Palestinians carry water jugs when trucks can’t get through. They are how the elderly are evacuated when bombs fall. When people flee with nothing, they flee with donkeys. And when Israel takes them away under the banner of “rescue,” it is not offering mercy. It is tightening the noose.
My family used a donkey to move my mother – because Israel bombed every other option. That donkey was our only way to carry her. And now even that small sliver of dignity is being taken away.
And while they parade these rescued donkeys across their social media timelines, Palestinians stand in endless lines for a cup of water. Children die of dehydration. People with bullet wounds lie untreated. Families are buried together under the same slab of rubble.
But donkeys get blankets. Donkeys get air-conditioned shelters. Donkeys are safe.
This is not about animals. This is about erasure.
To rescue a donkey while denying a human being water is not mercy – it is a message. That your suffering is invisible. That your life is disposable. That even your beasts of burden are worth more than you.
This is the violence of dehumanization. Not just in bombs or starvation – but in symbols. In headlines. In the grotesque moral inversions that treat Palestinian lives as an unfortunate inconvenience, while holding up donkeys as sacred.
This isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s sadism. It’s the slow, public stripping of dignity. It is Israel – backed by Western complicity – telling the world: Look, we care. Just not about them.
If this world still has any conscience left, it must stop pretending this is normal. It must stop rewarding cruelty dressed as compassion. Because when animals are lifted to safety, and mothers like mine are left to rot in tents, the line between justice and barbarism has long been crossed.
Ahmed Najar is a Palestinian writer, economist and commentator originally from Gaza and based in London.
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