On September 2 the Irish News, like much of the UK media on that day, carried a report on the recovery of the bodies of six of the Israeli hostages in Gaza including the names, ages and pictures of each of the murdered individuals
No-one would dispute the inclusion of these details as anything other than sound journalistic practice. Putting a name to the victim, and then a face and age to the name collectively showing us that these victims were real people, living everyday lives as deeply loved family members before being cut down so cruelly.
On seeing the coverage of this atrocity one cannot help but question the approach taken by the same media to the reporting of the now 40,000-plus Palestinians slaughtered by Israeli state forces during the current incursion into Gaza and ongoing campaign of violence and forced displacement in the West Bank.
In the cases where reports of atrocities inflicted on Palestinians do make it through, there are no names, ages, personal photos to humanise the victims – just anonymous statistics, often reported in such a way as to cast doubt or discredit their validity.
It’s almost as if the Palestinian’s aren’t people at all as declared by Arieh King, Jerusalem’s Israeli deputy mayor: “They aren’t human beings and are not human animals. They’re subhuman and that’s how they should be treated” (December 2023).
The issue here is that this framing of reports – reducing the victim to an abstract, actively promotes the Israeli strategy of dehumanising a people in order to help justify their appalling treatment up to and including mass murder.
And yet, the Israelis would have us believe all their actions are legitimate acts of war, not being waged against a ‘real people’ – only against those anonymous ‘sub-humans’.
Despite the efforts by Israel to nullify the humanity of Palestinians and portray them as ‘less than’ people, devoid of dignity and therefore not deserving of our care and concern, we must see through the reports and remember that these are people just like any others – people with hopes, aspirations, loves and anxieties just like the rest of us.
We must not allow ourselves to be numbed into indifference by this ongoing campaign of misinformation and selective reporting. Now, more than ever, they need our support.
Réamann Ó hÓgáin, Newry, Co Down
