At Gate 8 of Ercan Airport — the main hub of Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus, a territory recognized by no government except Ankara — a 24-year-old Israeli citizen is stopped moments before boarding a flight to Mexico via Istanbul. Inside his luggage: a specialized cryogenic transport container. Inside the container: four human embryos, preserved in four separate test tubes, sealed under nitrogen. The label on the container reads: “Life Parcel.”

Israel is killing Palestinian babies before they are born. Not as a figure of speech. In the literal, biological, measurable sense: in the wombs of their mothers, in the nitrogen tanks of the fertility clinic a single Israeli shell obliterated in December 2023, on operating tables where cesarean sections are performed without anesthesia because the blockade has eliminated the anesthesia, in the incubators Israeli forces smashed when they raided the Kamal Adwan Hospital neonatal unit.The United Nations Commission of Inquiry reviewed the evidence. The Rome Statute does not hesitate to define it. The Genocide Convention of 1948 does not hesitate to classify it. The only entities that hesitate are the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France — who have decided, with full information, that Palestinian children, even unborn Palestinian children, do not rise to the level of a crisis requiring a change of policy. This text will name what they will not name.