Left I on the News

One by one, the killer claims victims. The latest, a 12-month-old infant named Muhammad Rami Ibrahim Nofal. Just last week, another 1-year-old named Odai Samir Abu Azzoum and 10-year-old Ribhi Jindiyeh. The majority of victims of this serial killer have been children. Remarkably, though, virtually none of these murders have even been reported in the Western media. Much less has there been an outcry to do something about the killer, even though the identity and location of the killer is well-known.

Of course this killer is Israel, but, sad to say, there plenty of accomplices. Active accomplices like the U.S., E.U., and Egypt, who actively help to promote and enforce the blockade which claimed these victims - the 337 Palestinians who have died because they were refused or delayed entry into Israel where they could have obtained medicine or medical care unavailable in Gaza - and many more - the unknown number who have died in Gaza, the victim of "natural" causes which were anything but natural.

Why do I call this murder? I don't know what the law states, but if someone is poisoned and you hold the antidote in your hand and refuse to give it to them, surely you're as much of a murderer as the person who administered the poison. It's not a perfect analogy, since the "poisoner" in at least some of these examples is actually genetics, although in others, it's even worse, since it may well be that the one with the antidote is also the "poisoner," that is, that Palestinians in Gaza are developing deadly medical conditions which never would have occurred in the first place had they been living under less squalid conditions.

And it's actually even worse. Because the person with the antidote isn't just simply withholding it, but using it as an opportunity for blackmail:

According to an August-released report by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, titled Holding Health to Ransom, Tel Aviv employs fatal illnesses as one of its "methods of coercion" to pressure Gazans and to spy on the strip.

Israel, according to the report, prevents patients from leaving Gaza to receive medical treatment unless the government in Tel Aviv is provided with desired information about their relatives.

Medical treatment for "the most helpless members of society", reads the report, "is explicitly or implicitly made contingent upon collaboration" with Israel on a "regular" basis.

"I decide and set the rules, and you'll see that if you do as I say, I'll let you go to Ichilov Hospital," the report quotes an interrogator as telling a patient. "It depends if you accept my demands."

Could there be any more repugnant behavior?

Some pedants will no doubt observe that there is no guarantee that all 337 would have been saved by the medical care they could have received, and that's certainly true. Maybe only 300 would have died. Maybe only 100. There's just no way to know, obviously. But if even a single person died, that's a murder in which the identity of the killer is well-known, but who is still walking the streets, free to kill again. And, until international and particularly U.S. policy changes, more deaths are guaranteed.

A serial killer is on the loose, and the world watches as the victims are stalked, and picked off, one by one. When will the world cry out? When will they act?