Ceasefire is a collaboration between Young Fathers, Massive Attack and Fontaines DC. All profits from the record will be donated to Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). The project was announced at the end of last year, when the current Israel-Hamas war was ten weeks old. Eight months later over 40, 000 Palestinians are dead, 86% of the survivors are under evacuation order, while the Israeli-designated humanitarian zone totals only 11% of the Gaza Strip. There, water is scarce, sanitation close to non-existent. Infectious diseases are rife and there are fears of a polio outbreak. It has also been the target of airstrikes. No place is safe.

Conor Curley and Orbital honourably supply remixes, but the two original tracks are appropriately startling pieces of work. Fontaines DC’s In Ar Gcroithe Go Deo (In Our Hearts Forever), versioned by 3D, is jet black and gothic, built from pitched-down beats and bass strings. Beneath the choir-boy vocals are symphonic drones, suppressed strains of distortion and searing metal shredding. The song’s “hook” of “Gone is the day, gone is the night” is a powerful, increasingly impassioned, anguished mantra that incredibly effectively summons not just the current suffering, but also the lasting generational trauma. The sense of seemingly endless horror. Young Fathers’ Give is a bare, raw blues, generated from low end frequencies, hum, and tiny loops of crackle and static. Big piano chords play in slow motion. Percussion comes from lonely isolated gospel hand claps. The “solo” consists of stretched sirens. Creating a dark, introspective score for staring out at the horizon contemplating the state, and fate, of humanity.

I know nothing of Middle Eastern politics. Very little about the history of Israel and Palestine. I write this not as a disclaimer but an explanation. I do know that the world is plagued by not one but many conflicts. When presented with images of bombed out cities, reduced to rubble, and children, wounded, starving and orphaned, taken from anywhere around our warring globe, if I look at these images for what they are, removed of context, based on simply what I see, I ask myself under what circumstances would this be acceptable? The only answer is none.

Ceasefire is out now on Battle Box.