It was supposed to be a moment of collective grief, a funeral in Sudan where mourners gathered to pay their respects. Instead, a drone strike turned the ceremony into another scene of carnage. The UK’s condemnation of the attack, delivered with the gravity reserved for breaches of international law, feels both necessary and hollow.
Necessary because the killing of civilians at a funeral violates the most basic of human taboos. Hollow because the steady drumbeat of such attacks has numbed us to the horror. A drone does not weep.
It does not distinguish between a soldier and a mother laying flowers. And as British diplomats urge an immediate ceasefire, one wonders if the message will reach the commanders who operate these machines from distant screens. The human cost is stark: families burying loved ones only to die themselves.
The cultural shift is a slow eroding of the sacred. When funerals become targets, what is left to hold sacred? The UK’s moral outrage is clear, but in the field, the dead do not hear the press releases.
They only hear the next drone overhead.
