The Israeli military today killed a group of journalists reporting from Gaza. The Israeli government claims they were Hamas agents. Earlier, they had published a set of documents that purported to show their names on a list of members of several armed jihadi organizations.
The reporters—and NGOs that monitor the rights of journalists—say this was a smear campaign meant to justify the IDF's attempt to silence critical voices. Netanyahu's government—this theory goes—simply does not want any international coverage of what they are about to do in Gaza.
People will believe whichever set of claims seems more credible to them. But regardless, the assassination closes another pair of eyes that would have recorded the starvation that is happening in Gaza right now. Even fewer photos of dying, emaciated children will reach the world.
And one knows very well why Netanyahu would not want any more of those images leaking out of Gaza. They are literally intolerable to behold. Whatever intellectualized perspective one held on the conflict, it collapses and dissolves before the picture of a mother holding a skeletal toddler.
Children, their bellies swollen like blown-up paper bags, the poet Theodore Roethke once wrote,
Their eyes, rich as plums, staring from newsprint,—
These images haunted me noon and midnight.
I imagined the unborn, starving in wombs, curling;
I asked: May the blessings of life, O Lord, descend on the living.
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