Establishment Panics Over Israel Critics, Silent on ‘Deliberate’ Gaza Slaughter
Image Description: People protesting for Palestine. A person carries a sign that says, ‘Trump, Netanyahu, Biden Harris: Butchers of Palestine.’ Another sign reads, ‘End All U.S. Aid to Israel.’ Palestinian flags are flown in conjunction with the signs.
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Political pundits and media figures have grown increasingly apoplectic in recent days amid the rise of a Democratic socialist in New York City who is deeply critical of Israel, and a punk band in the UK whose anti-IDF chants aired on BBC’s airwaves, spawning a criminal investigation.
The establishment’s collective meltdown comes as dozens more Palestinians are killed by Israeli forces each day, including at so-called “humanitarian aid sites,” ;where more than 500 have been slaughtered and thousands wounded since the scheme began in late May.
Yet the same people outraged over speech and someone’s political philosophy—which conflicts with their perverted interpretation of “unbiased” journalism—somehow have little to say about the routine killings of Palestinians.
Of course, it’s easier to air clips of a Muslim man eating rice with his hands—apparently to depict him as some sort of primitive being—and scenes from an outdoor music festival featuring Palestinian flags, with the subtext being that these things are scary, than to show all the horrific ways in which Palestinians have been killed: deprived of food and water, crushed by tanks, skulls smashed and brains oozing out, droned to pieces, burned alive, sniped in the chest and head.
The diagnosis is plainly obvious: An increasingly insulated corporate media can’t process political thought outside of the traditional Republican-Democrat binary, and violence against Muslims in the Middle East, however disturbing, has become normalized for so many of a certain generation.
Their deafening silence on Palestinian slaughter came into even sharper focus last week when Haaretz, a leading Israeli news outlet, dropped an explosive story (one that Palestinian journalists have been documenting for weeks) reporting that soldiers were “deliberately” firing on starving Palestinians at four aid sites since late May.
No one paying close attention to the genocide likely had high hopes that the publishing of this story from a flagship outlet would be the “smoking gun,” so to speak, to end the destruction in Gaza.
Why would they? The Western world has effectively declared quite definitively that Palestinian lives don’t matter, which is consistent with its anti-Muslim worldview—a deep-seated racism we’re seeing play out yet again in response to NYC Democratic mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory last Tuesday over political scion Andrew Cuomo, whose campaign failed miserably at depicting Mamdani as an antisemite.
‘Red Light, Green Light’
With so much unfolding politically in the U.S. and around the world, it’s possible that even some of you missed the story. Well, the article could be summed up by this quote: “The loss of human life means nothing.”
Here’s more:
“It’s a killing field,” one soldier said. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”
The soldier added, “We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces.” According to him, “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.” He also said the activity in his area of service is referred to as Operation Salted Fish – the name of the Israeli version of the children’s game “Red light, green light.”
When Israel decided in May to allow a disproportionately small amount of humanitarian aid back into Gaza, its political leaders admitted it was not aimed at ending the mass starvation of Palestinians, but to appease its Western backers, who had become increasingly uncomfortable with images of starving children.
“We need to do it in a way that they won’t stop us,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said about continuing the bludgeoning.
So they executed a previously proposed plan to sideline international humanitarian aid groups in favor of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which the New York Times reported was an “Israeli brainchild.” At the time, aid groups with a history of working in war-torn regions condemned the move. More than a month later, their outrage has boiled over, with 170-plus organizations, including Oxfam International, calling for an end to the aid scheme and a return to the previous model, which had support from the United Nations.
Even for a genocide in which depraved attacks on Palestinians are broadcast on our social media feeds daily—including recent footage of a lone man lugging flour killed in an Israeli drone strike—the waves of slaughter at the GHF sites have been particularly abominable.
With 90 percent of the population displaced, exhausted by nearly 21 months of abject annihilation, and intentionally starved, Palestinians have been forcibly cast into a real-life version of “Hunger Games,” in which malnourished, injured and sick people risk life and limb to grab a small offering of sustenance.
“This thing called killing innocent people—it’s been normalized,” a soldier told Haaretz. “We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza, and apparently that message sank in among the troops.”
Gaza’s Real Death Toll
The report, which generated coverage but not to the extent you would think from a paper with standing among elite media institutions in the U.S., came on the heels of yet another critical story from Haaretz a day earlier that said the true death toll in Gaza could be closely approaching 100,000 (the official count is now over 52,000).
Based on a recent study that has yet to be peer-reviewed but was conducted by “a world-class expert on mortality in violent conflicts,” according to Haaretz, the findings suggest the death toll as of January 2025 stood at 75,200 people, Haaretz reported.
“According to the survey’s data, which is consistent with those of the Palestinian Health Ministry, 56 percent of those killed have been either children up to the age of 18, or women,” the article noted.
It’s one thing to study these slayings and another thing entirely to experience them in full view. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma and critical care surgeon based in California, has twice volunteered in Gaza, most recently this spring, during the period of the fragile ceasefire and when Israel violently broke it on March 18 with the launch of a vicious bombing campaign. Several days later, Israel struck Nasser Hospital, where Sidhwa was stationed, killing a patient of his, 16-year-old Ibrahim Barhoum.
“I don’t think there has ever been a larger mass casualty event in history, like literally in world history,” Sidhwa told News Beat in a podcast that was released yesterday. “If anybody can name it, I’d love to know what it is...It’s insane. The level of killing is not well understood.”
Sidhwa is correct about the scale of the slaughter. But when it comes to the intentionality of it all? There should be no doubt about that.
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Rashed Mian
Rashed Mian is the managing editor of News Beat. Mian previously covered civil liberties and the Muslim American community for Long Island Press. Mian graduated with a degree in journalism from Hofstra University. Mian is interested in under-reported stories that impact disenfranchised communities as well as issues related to civil liberties.
