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Live blog update| Israel's war on Gaza

Opinion: You can’t arm a genocidal state into moderation. So why does the West keep trying?

There are many reasons Gaza has been mostly off the radar of the western establishment media for months now, even as the enclave turns into an ever-bigger killing zone.

One is that, nearly a year into what the World Court has termed a “plausible genocide”, where Israel has kept out western journalists and killed off most Palestinian journalists, as well as driving out international aid organisations and the United Nations, there is almost no one left to tell us what is happening.

We have only snapshots of individual suffering, but not the big picture. How many Palestinians are dead? We know there are at least 40,000 killed by Israel - the deaths recorded by Palestinian officials before the health system collapsed. But how many more? Double that figure? Quadruple it? Times it by 10? The truth is, no one knows.

What about the famine in Gaza that has been raging for many, many months as Israel has systematically blocked aid into the enclave, in line with its promise last October to deny the Palestinians there food, water and power?

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, because the pair’s starvation of Gaza is a crime against humanity.

But the prolonged famine is presented as a near-victimless crime. Where are the dead from this famine? They are certainly not on our TV screens or on our front pages.

The true death toll will probably never be reported, just as it wasn’t after the West’s Middle East bloodbaths in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Western politicians have no interest in knowing the truth, and the western establishment media has no interest in discovering it.

Read more: You can’t arm a genocidal state into moderation. So why does the West keep trying? By Jonathan Cook