Where do you turn on the humanity switch?

We live in a time where horror has lost its weight. Where everything is noise. We watch a video of a massacre, then a cake recipe. Someone is beaten to death in the street, and some continue filming as if they were at a concert. Violence doesn't shock, it merely entertains. The pain of others is no longer a topic, it's become content. Empathy has vanished. Social media mixes corpses with makeup tutorials. A bombardment erupts between a cell phone unboxing and a viral dance. The sequence is absurd and yet familiar. A cry of despair, followed by an "outfit of the day." Shattered lives side by side with "what I bought on sale." And no one is shocked. Worse: we've become accustomed to it.

When did we start to normalize the reprehensible?

We watch, undeterred, the genocide in Gaza. Children, entire families, lives ripped away by a logic of war that cannot be justified, yet continues to be financed, legitimized, and, above all, ignored. There are videos. There are testimonies. There is real blood. And yet, we react as if it were fiction. Or worse: as if it had nothing to do with us, as if it were too distant to matter. As if we weren't, in the 21st century, watching history replay live on our television screens, on our cell phone feeds, between one commercial and the next.

While Israel turns hunger into a weapon of war—systematically preventing the entry of humanitarian aid and sometimes using what it does authorize as bait for bombings— Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu records videos with YouTubers , discussing their favorite fast food chains. The contrast is grotesque. But it doesn't shock. We swipe the screen and move on to the next video. To the next distraction. Away.

In Gaza, the civilian population is trapped between two forms of violence: the relentless occupation and an extremist group that often hides behind innocent people, using them as human shields. Hamas, in addition to perpetuating the conflict, compromises the security of its own people, and this cannot be ignored. But none of this justifies the indiscriminate massacre of civilians. Nothing justifies starvation as a weapon. Nothing justifies collective punishment.

In Portugal, the Israeli ambassador declared on national television that there is no famine in Gaza. According to him, this is a "media fabrication" and "Hamas propaganda." The visibly emaciated and malnourished children seen in videos and reports "were already sick before," he says. A denial of the obvious, broadcast live and without consequences.

There is no longer even a consensus within Israel. Israeli humanitarian organizations, such as B'Tselem, have openly denounced the war crimes committed by the government itself , calling them what they are: acts of collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Shamefully, much of the world does not.

Even with all this data, all these voices, all these images, the world remains apathetic. It's estimated that over 60,000 people have died . I repeat: over 60,000 dead, the majority of whom are women and children. Bodies torn apart. Entire families wiped out. The pain is documented, reported, transmitted minute by minute, but it has become a background landscape. A persistent noise we've learned to ignore.

Empathy no longer dies from excessive pain. It dies from excessive distraction. From excessive neutrality. Because we've become experts at looking the other way, at relativizing, at saying "let them sort it out," as if one side weren't being systematically exterminated.

And, faced with this, the international community remains paralyzed—or worse, complicit. The UN issues resolutions that are not enforced. The European Union releases timid statements while continuing to maintain diplomatic and commercial relations with the aggressor. Governments merely "express concern." Israel, even under accusations of genocide, war crimes, and forced starvation, suffers no real consequences. It receives lectures. Pats on the back. Votes of "restraint." Meanwhile, the victims are brutally killed by a war they did not ask for, in a territory they cannot leave, under the detached gaze of those who could, and should, have acted.

Impunity is total. International justice fails, diplomacy shrugs its shoulders, and the world continues to watch. No rush. No shame. No urgency.

I wonder: where is the empathy? When did we stop being moved by the pain of others? When did we trivialize violence so much that it no longer hurts us? When did we start watching horror and calling it "context"?

What's failing isn't just the systems that represent and should protect us. It's all of us. Humanity has disconnected. Not completely, because there are still those who resist. But those who truly feel, today, feel alone. Out of place. Strange. As if empathy were an excess. A pathology.

We don't need heroes. We need humans. Whole humans. Capable of feeling, of not turning a blind eye, of not accepting the unacceptable. It's not about ideologies, nor about flags. It's about people. For lives that are worth the same, everywhere.

Where do you turn on the humanity switch?