A River of Blood, Not a Riviera
Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
By Lisa Hayes for Confluence Daily
The ceasefire is broken. Again.
As if it ever truly held.
As if the bombs ever really stopped.
As if the war machine that feeds on Palestinian children ever paused long enough to mean it.
The blood never dried.
It just sank deeper into the soil,
while the world looked away
and pretended a lull in slaughter
was the same thing as peace.
But now the quiet has shattered again.
Israel has resumed its campaign of extermination.
And Gaza, already on its knees, is being crushed under the heel of a machine that does not stop,
will not stop,
because no one with power is willing to force it to.
The bombs fall on the starving.
On the displaced.
On the grieving.
On the ones who have already lost everything—
and still manage to lose more.
Hospitals are not spared.
Children’s bodies are not spared.
Babies in incubators are not spared.
They say there are rules of war,
but these rules seem to dissolve when the targets are Arab,
Muslim,
stateless,
voiceless.
This Is Not War. This Is Annihilation.
More than 30,000 Palestinians dead—the vast majority of them women and children.
Entire families gone.
Entire neighborhoods flattened.
Whole generations erased from the civil registry.
Entire bloodlines obliterated.
This is not war.
It is not “self-defense.”
It is not complicated.
It is genocide.
Don’t look away.
You need to see this:
Children’s bodies lined up in makeshift morgues—
limbless, headless, wrapped in torn plastic.
Pregnant women crushed beneath collapsed apartment blocks.
Toddlers pulled from rubble with their skulls caved in.
Mothers screaming into the dirt, clutching their children’s bodies so hard their own fingers break.
This is what your silence protects.
This is what your government funds.
This is what your tax dollars buy.
And as this carnage unfolds in real time,
as Palestinians are butchered in broad daylight,
Donald Trump steps to the microphone
and says he wants to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Let that land on you like a brick.
Let it hit you in the throat.
Because while Gaza is drowning in blood,
Trump dreams of building golf courses on top of the graves.
A Vision of Paradise on a Mass Grave
Trump wants to “redevelop” Gaza.
He wants to erase it, pave it, scrub it clean of Palestinians,
then build playgrounds for the American and Israeli elite on top of the bones.
He calls it vision.
He calls it business.
But we know what it really is:
Colonialism repackaged.
Genocide marketed as real estate development.
Ethnic cleansing dressed up in beachfront brochures.
He is not alone.
Others will invest.
Others will call it “restoration,” “revitalization,” “a new chapter.”
But you don’t build a Riviera on stolen land soaked with children’s blood.
You build it on lies.
You build it on silence.
You build it with the complicity of every nation that let the slaughter happen.
What Kind of Empire Speaks of Luxury While the Smoke Is Still Rising?
Imagine the grotesque audacity it takes to talk about hotels while fathers pull the limbs of their children from collapsed buildings.
Imagine the depravity required to sell beachfront property while thousands of children are buried in shallow graves wrapped in garbage bags.
Imagine how drunk on power,
how rotted with supremacy,
how fully committed to empire you must be
to pitch a resort plan in the middle of a live genocide.
This isn’t just inhumane.
It’s demonic.
It is the logic of empire in its final, most obscene form:
Destroy the people. Steal the land. Monetize the aftermath.
This is blood-to-brick capitalism.
This is what settler colonialism always wanted:
not just silence, not just death—but profit.
And the World Watches. Again.
The United Nations issues its statements.
Leaders express “grave concern.”
Western governments call for “restraint” while continuing to ship weapons and sign deals.
The U.S. Congress applauds.
The President shakes his head and does nothing.
The EU wrings its hands.
No one stops the killing.
No one stops the killing.
No one stops the killing.
No one.
And every minute they delay,
every hour they hedge,
another child bleeds out under rubble,
another family is wiped off the map.
The world is not failing to act.
The world is choosing not to.
We Are Witnesses. We Are Complicit.
History will ask:
How many children had to die before the world said “enough”?
How many times could a ceasefire be broken before we stopped pretending it ever mattered?
How long can we live with the knowledge that we watched this happen and said, “It’s complicated”?
It’s not complicated.
It’s a genocide.
And the United States is bankrolling it.
Trump wants to build a Riviera.
But Gaza is not a blank slate.
It is a land of martyrs.
A land soaked with the blood of poets and farmers and babies and teachers and old men who died holding the keys to homes they were never allowed to return to.
The land does not forget.
The sea does not forget.
Justice has a long memory.
And when this is over—when the fires stop, and the world finally wakes up from this nightmare—
there will be no golf courses.
There will be no casinos.
There will be no Riviera.
There will only be questions.
And ghosts.
And the unbearable shame of having seen it all—
and done nothing.
