Most people in the West, even those who follow international news avidly, have likely not heard of Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, the seven-month-old Palestinian baby Israeli soldiers shot in the face and killed near Hebron in the occupied West Bank earlier this month.
They probably are not aware of the relentless, escalating Israeli violence across the rest of the occupied territories, either. Indeed, Western media rarely talk about West Bank villages like Sinjil, encaged in barbed wire, its residents forbidden to access their own land. News bulletins rarely mention how Israeli settlers continue to set fire to homes and cars, harass, threaten and torture Palestinian villagers while enjoying the Israeli military’s full support and protection. The fact that more than half of Gaza has been de facto annexed by the occupation in the past few months, and that Palestinians in the war-torn enclave are still starving, unable to access life’s most basic necessities, is buried at the bottom of long articles about Israel’s supposed security concerns and struggles.
As a result, much of the Western public, from the United States to Germany, appears to be under the impression that Palestine is now somewhat old news. As the war with Iran took over the headlines, coverage of Gaza fell away while the killing went on. They believe Israel has concluded its assault on Palestine with the so-called “ceasefire” in Gaza and turned its attention solely to its much bigger war of “self-defence” against the “terror state”, Iran, and its ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon.
Now that Iran and the US have announced that they have reached a deal, the headlines talk of the “end of war”. But Israel’s war is nowhere near over, because it was never primarily against Iran. Iran is just another front in the same long war against Palestine.
Since the ceasefire came into effect in October, Israeli fire into Gaza has continued nearly every day, with more than 2,000 documented violations by spring and at least 981 Palestinians killed, many of them children – shot for approaching a yellow line that keeps approaching them. The buildings are still falling. The children are still dying. The snipers are still there. The drones are still there. The bulldozers are still there. And we are expected to call this a “ceasefire”.
The hunger has not ended, either. Aid is treated not as a right, but as a calculation: how little can enter, how slowly it can move, how long people can be kept alive without allowing them to live.
In mid-March, as the world’s attention shifted to Iran, the Israeli army sent aid organisations maps showing it had pushed 11 percent past the yellow line, from the 53 percent of Gaza the ceasefire granted it to 64. By late May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was telling a settler conference that the army already held 60 percent and that he had ordered it to take 70, while the crowd screamed for 100 and he assured them that Israel was going in order, taking 70 first.
Palestinians can no longer reach roughly two-thirds of their own territory, including nearly all of Gaza’s farmland, which lies east of the yellow line. The geography now enforces starvation. Farmers are shot for trying to reach their land. Fishermen are killed for trying to reach the sea. Families are fired on for trying to return to what is left of their homes. Children looking for food are treated as targets for crossing the lines Israel drew through their own neighbourhoods. This is genocide administered as geography.
And it is exactly what the Iran story helps bury. When Gaza’s crossings close, Israel calls it security. When aid is blocked, it says the region is under threat. When Palestinians are killed, it folds them into the war with Iran, branding them terrorists after the bullet has already landed. The dead become operatives, collaborators, threats. The affiliation is conjured after the killing, as if even that would excuse shooting children in the head.
And so Palestine keeps disappearing inside another story. The dead are no longer dead because Israel killed them. They are dead because the region is unstable, because Iran is dangerous, because Israel says it is defending itself. Every Palestinian body is made to carry an explanation larger than the life that was taken.
The same method is visible in southern Lebanon, too, though even there it is narrated not as the forced emptying of land, but as another front against Hezbollah or Iran. Evacuation orders tear people from everything south of the Litani River. Up to roughly a fifth of Lebanon has been ordered emptied. More than 1.2 million people have been forced from their homes. Hospitals and ambulances have been struck. Land has been burned with white phosphorus. When displaced families try to walk home against Israeli instructions, they are treated as threats, because in this system, the punishable offence, in Gaza and in Lebanon alike, is going home.
The devastation in Lebanon does not push Palestine into the past. It merely shows what Israel has learned it can do after Gaza: order people out, destroy what they leave behind, and call the emptied land a security zone. The Iran frame turns all of this into a regional security story. It makes every front look separate, every victim look incidental and every emptied village look like the unfortunate geography of someone else’s war. The same language follows the displaced wherever they go. If they remain, they are human shields. If they flee, they are evidence that the land has been cleared. If they return, they are threats.
No deal with Iran can be mistaken for an “end of war” in the region while Palestinian land is still being taken, Gaza is still being starved, and the West Bank is still being carved apart by soldiers, settlers, checkpoints and barbed wire. The region will not be made stable by treating Palestine as a side effect of someone else’s conflict. Palestine is where this war begins again and again: where ceasefire becomes another name for control, where hunger becomes policy, where a baby shot in the face can be treated as a footnote.
Sam Abu Haikal was buried wrapped in a Palestinian flag, carried in his father’s arms, with all his innocent dreams dying with him. Sam was also the war, the whole of it: the story every headline keeps filing as a footnote to someone else’s missiles. The forgetting, and the forgotten, are Israel’s final weapon.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
