CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

How Gaza Was Disappeared from the News

Children walking by a destroyed mosque in the Gaza Strip. © 2009 UNRWA Photo by Shareef Sarhan. CC BY-SA 3.0 igo

Another month passes, and Gaza is barely in the news: the inert, so-called Board of Peace is doing its job. You might have thought that job involved reconstruction so Gazans could use the water, roads, food markets, hospitals and schools that make life livable, but if so, you would have been mistaken. The Orwellian-named Board of Peace (or Board of Empire or Board of Genocide, whichever is most apt) was intended to blunt public opinion by disappearing Gaza, while the very long-term plan remains as garishly awful as ever: Donald Trump’s dreadful Gaza Riviera, which counts on the departure of the culturally conservative Palestinians and replacing them with strip clubs, gambling casinos, bars, resorts, high-rises and western tourists – a new playground for the rich and for the Israelis, towering over a silent necropolis below of dead Gazans.

Another reason that Israeli murders in Gaza have disappeared from the news is simple. The IDF murdered almost all the Palestinian journalists covering IDF atrocities in the enclave. Lastly, there was the Trump regime’s violent crackdown on free speech about Palestine on U.S. college campuses, beginning in the spring of 2024. That didn’t help either.

Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinians languish in Israeli prisons, hostages who include, very notably, Dr. Abu Safiya, a pediatrician of tested integrity, tortured so maliciously by Israel that he now lies at death’s door. On June 5, the Council on American Islamic relations urged congress to demand the doctor’s immediate release – he is currently in “solitary confinement,” per CAIR, “despite being held without charges…UN experts say Dr. Abu Safiya has been subjected to torture in Israeli custody,” and quotes Physicians for Human Rights Israel: “He is held in Negev Prison in harsh conditions, without access to medication or medical care as his health continues to deteriorate.” According to lurid details reported by AI, the doctor has been hideously tortured, with the clear and, who knows – successful? – aim of making him a broken man. But Dr. Safiya’s suffering, like his country’s, Gaza’s, has mostly vanished from the headlines.

By moderating the Gaza genocide, Trump........

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