The first thing I learned about the world on Sunday morning was that Israeli airstrikes had killed dozens of Palestinians on yet another bloody day in Gaza. I heard this in an early morning report on the BBC and made a note to look for more details after I started my day. Once up, I listened to NPR, as I usually do, before reading several major U.S. newspapers and some offerings from the British press.
None of these carried details of the Palestinian death toll—at least not in any way comparable to that BBC radio report, which led its broadcast by noting that the new Israeli strikes added to a death toll that has risen to more than 57,000 since Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
That day, nearly all of the U.S. news reports on Gaza that I encountered focused instead on the prospects of a new round of indirect diplomacy between Israel and Hamas, scheduled to take place early this week in Qatar.
For some time now, as both a journalist and professor of journalism, I have been troubled by the Western press’s inconsistent and often paltry focus on the astounding devastation that Israel has wrought in Gaza. This is foremost a matter of lives lost but includes the physical destruction of Palestinian communities and widespread hunger and disease.
In today’s endlessly busy and chaotic world, the demands on the attention of individuals who wish to stay informed surpass almost anyone’s ability to keep up. What has unfolded in Gaza, though, amounts to a human and moral catastrophe of not only great gravity but rare clarity, and this calls for much steadier and more forthright scrutiny.
The severity of this crisis has been clear from the start of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. In its early phases, Israel’s military attacked hospitals in what many analysts regarded as a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. One after another, strikes devastated Gaza’s hospitals—which Israel claims were used to harbor Hamas militants—leaving a territory of 2.1 million with little ability to treat proliferating numbers of ill and wounded people.
Then came Israeli drives to forcibly relocate Palestinians, clearing cities and pushing desperate inhabitants from one part of Gaza to another and back again.
Meanwhile, international relief groups and human rights organizations criticized Israel for hindering the supply of food and other humanitarian supplies to Gaza. As Israeli authorities held up aid trucks at access points to the territory, leading to long lines, they again justified their actions by invoking Hamas, claiming that onerous inspections were necessary to prevent weapons from being smuggled into the territory.
As humanitarian agencies warned of a crisis of starvation, Israel denied any shortfall in food supplies to Gaza and insinuated that United Nations groups and other relief organizations were to blame and were perhaps even colluding with Hamas.
In a more recent phase of the crisis, Israel cut off virtually all humanitarian supplies to Gaza this year, subjecting the territory to a near-total blockade. After more than two months, Israel allowed the resumption of aid—but only via the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a new Israeli- and U.S.-approved organization working with private security contractors, which stands outside the world’s traditional and well-developed infrastructure for relief.
The U.N. and many experienced relief organizations and human rights groups criticized this decision and with good reason. What has followed has only been more horror. With alarming frequency in recent weeks, famished Palestinians in desperate need of food have repeatedly been shot and killed while approaching or lining up at these aid distribution centers. As of last week, the death toll from this relief site violence stood at more than 500 people, with thousands more wounded.
Israeli forces have killed Palestinians in senseless attacks on other nonmilitary targets in Gaza as well, including a strike on a coffee shop last week that left at least 30 people dead.
There is nothing ordinary about this situation. In late June, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, denounced the atrocities in Gaza in unusually harsh terms, speaking of an “economy of genocide.” Whether one agrees with this phrasing, it is time to recognize civilian deaths in Gaza for what they are: an abomination brought about by sheer cruelty and callousness.
Yes, the immorality behind the origins of this catastrophe is just as clear. Hamas provoked this crisis by launching a murderous raid into Israel that killed roughly 1,200 people, more than 800 of whom were civilians, including dozens of children. Another 251 people were taken as hostages, many of whom have since died. What ensued after this horror, however, has come to resemble ever more clearly a de facto campaign by Israel that treats the entire population of Gaza as collectively guilty for Hamas’s crimes.
The 20th century saw enormous horror, with two world wars and countless other examples of large-scale bloodletting. In that time, though, human civilization also seemed to advance, as an international consensus grew around the idea that it was unacceptable to target and punish an entire population for any reason, including crimes committed by a small minority of that population.
In this regard, the crisis in Gaza represents a clear step backward. Israel is not alone here, of course. Russia’s war on Ukraine, and its repeated targeting of cities and civilian populations, stands as another instance of the world’s failure to hold nations to account for minimal standards in warfare. Other examples of everyday barbarity abound, such as the civil war raging in Sudan, where rival sides have afflicted numerous atrocities on civilians.
The world’s knowledge of these horrors is limited by the skewed focus of international media. For instance, Sudan—and many smaller conflicts throughout what is fancied as the global south—draws little international attention.
In terms of press interest, Israel is a different matter. The country’s drive to achieve security in the Middle East, including its recent war with Iran, has been a staple of Western news coverage for decades. So is its relationship with the United States, as widespread coverage of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visits to the White House attests. Even Israel’s domestic politics receives coverage in the U.S. media.
Gaza, though, has come to feel to me like a place where the press too often averts its eyes or downplays the scale of the human disaster underway. Israel has been careful to deny access to Gaza to international journalists throughout the 21-month crisis, so as to both limit coverage of its ravages there and prevent independent accounts of events. This is no excuse, though, for the way the Western media has underplayed this human catastrophe.
Meanwhile, Israel’s government continues its campaign largely unchecked. Earlier in the Gaza crisis, U.S. officials and policymakers—including supporters of Israel—suggested that Netanyahu was continuing to pursue the conflict in Gaza in part to bolster his political career and criticized him for having no “day after” plan for the war’s conclusion.
Under the Trump administration, though, objections such as these have faded. In their place, voices invoking a Gaza without Palestinians have come to the fore. President Donald Trump himself has spoken dreamily about turning the territory into a lucrative oceanfront real estate development. Last week, the Financial Times reported that a major consulting group had studied the possibility of paying Palestinians $9,000 per person to relocate from Gaza.
In the West Bank, meanwhile, attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinian villages have multiplied in recent weeks. After French President Emmanuel Macron said in May that recognizing a Palestinian state was a “moral duty,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz retorted, “They will recognize a Palestinian state on paper—and we will build the Jewish Israeli state on the ground. … That paper will be thrown into the trash bin of history, and the state of Israel will prosper and flourish.”
Behind such words lie both crime and delusion. Violently clearing Palestinians from land in Gaza and the West Bank is simply illegal. And thinking that Israel can build a future that is safe and sound on this basis is a horribly conceived fantasy. The best way to help Israel is also the best way to help Palestinians—and that is to hold it to standards that promote human rights and denounce the desecration of human life and dignity.
The post The News Cycle Is No Excuse for Ignoring Gaza appeared first on Foreign Policy.
