Séamas O'Reilly: The constant atrocity in Gaza beamed into our pockets risks leaving us numb

By mid-December, 352 schools and educational facilities had been bombed, and at least 200 teachers killed. Over a hundred places of worship have been attacked. 23 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals have been rendered “completely inoperable” and at least 300 healthcare workers have been killed; more in these three months than in all global conflict combined, in any year since 2016.

The World Health Organisation reports that Israel has made over 300 attacks on healthcare providers in Gaza, including 26 hospitals and 79 ambulances, and a further 24 health facilities and 212 ambulances in the West Bank. Those facilities which remain now operate with skeleton staff, with just five doctors remaining in Al-Aqsa Hospital to treat thousands of injuries. Over a thousand children have undergone amputations without anaesthesia. With food, medical aid and clean water blocked, disease is rampant and starvation is at critical levels. The WHO now says that diarrhoea has increased 2500% from pre-war levels, with half of all cases being among under-fives, and that more people are likely to “die from disease than from bombings if the health system is not repaired”.

At least 136 UN staff have been killed, many with their entire families. Issam Al Mughrabi, who had worked for the United Nations Development Programme for thirty years, was killed with his wife, children and seventy members of his family on December 22. The situation for journalism is even more stark. At least 79 journalists and media workers have been confirmed dead, again, many with their entire families. By some estimates, these deaths amount to nearly 10% of journalists active in the region before this current escalation.

Perhaps no individual personifies the horror more than Al Jazeera bureau chief Wael Al-Doudah, who has become a harrowing exemplar of the onslaught on Palestinian journalists. In October, he learned live on air that his wife, daughter, son and grandchild were killed, along with 21 other people, while sheltering in a refugee camp. Six weeks later, his cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa bled to death when Israeli forces attacked their car, and prevented ambulances from reaching him afterward. On Sunday, Al-Doudah’s eldest son Hamza, also a journalist, was killed along with another colleague. Two of his nephews were killed the following day.

It sometimes seems like retreating behind these numbers is about all we can do. The sheer saturation of horror being inflicted on innocent people, the constant roll call of atrocity and outrage, beamed into our pockets every hour of every day, burns through every critical faculty I have, and risks leaving me all but numb. 

This feeling is only intensified by the jarring sense that so much coverage of the conflict continues to be filtered through a knowingly distorted lens. The Intercept analysed more than a thousand articles from the first six weeks of the conflict, from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. They found that “highly emotive terms like “slaughter”, “massacre” and “horrific” were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians”.

UK group OpenDemocracy found similar results when they examined BBC coverage and found variations of “murder” were used “a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths”. Versions of “massacre” were used “35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths”, with similar findings for the words “atrocity” and “slaughter”.

Speaking from London, these reports shock but don’t surprise. While sympathy for the Palestinian people in the UK remains high — 71% of Brits surveyed last month stated there should either definitely or probably be an immediate ceasefire — the coverage of the conflict itself is still too often coy and abstract, as if the poor people of Palestine have been beset by a series of terrible natural disasters, an unfortunate sequence of events without cause, agency or aim.

This, despite entire swathes of the Israeli cabinet and government benches repeatedly going on record advocating genocide, ethnic cleansing, and — on at least one occasion — the use of nuclear arms.

One of the most striking, and heartening, aspects of being back in Ireland for Christmas was to witness news reports from Gaza which appeared to have been beamed in from the same moral universe as reports from Ukraine or Sudan. Reports which showed the wreckage of Gaza alongside Israeli cabinet ministers clearly advocating for such wreckage to continue. Footage in which Palestinians spoke for themselves, and where context of Israeli occupation was acknowledged, rather than wholly ignored. Scenes of peaceful protest in support of the Palestinian people, absent bad faith claims of controversy, from people wishing to tarnish all such people as terrorist sympathisers.

The horror continues, and the fact that it crowds out our timelines is deplorable. But we cannot and should not look away. The news that South Africa is taking a case against Israel’s war conduct to the International Court of Justice should be welcomed. That Irish lawyer, and veteran of the Bloody Sunday campaign, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, will advise them should make us proud.

The numbers can only tell us so much, and words are increasingly meaningless. What’s needed now is action.