Four Coffins

(Thanks to Rachel O'Donoghue, Jerusalem Post)

 It was not just the presence of the four coffins that made the spectacle an echo of the savagery of October 7. It was the festive atmosphere—the casual, almost celebratory way a community gathered to watch a terrorist group display the bodies of murdered Jews. A society so desensitized to terroristic violence that even the sight of coffins holding two dead babies did not shock. Did not horrify. 

Quite the opposite. It was a cause for celebration.

The mothers and fathers of Gaza brought their children to watch. To gawk. To clap. At the sight of dead Jews.

Mainstream media outlets barely acknowledged the sheer depravity of Thursday morning’s spectacle, offering only the most muted references to the macabre show in Khan Yunis.

Sky News, for instance, summarized the scene with an almost clinical detachment: “Four black coffins were displayed on a stage” before being “put into vehicles and driven away as masked members of Hamas and other factions looked on.” A bizarrely sanitized description for what was, in reality, a horrifying public exhibition of murdered civilians.

CNN at least had the journalistic integrity to acknowledge the “propaganda backdrop with slogans in Arabic, Hebrew, and English”—but conspicuously failed to mention the crude mural of Netanyahu as a blood-sucking vampire looming over the coffins. ABC News cropped its accompanying photo so that only one Hamas terrorist remained in the frame, reducing the entire event to just two paragraphs—one of which described a Red Cross official “signing documents” as part of the so-called handover.

References to the crowd were fleeting. If mentioned at all, it was merely as “crowds gathered,” with no photographs to accompany the words. One of the most honest assessments came from an AFP report, but even then, it was buried in the final paragraph:

“Large speakers blasted chants, as children and youth pressed themselves around a table where fighters displayed a large automatic rifle and its long ammunition belt, as well as anti-tank mines.”

Yet not a single major news outlet thought it relevant to report that Hamas had invited families to watch—and that they eagerly did, gathering with music and celebration. Not a single journalist spoke of the carnivalesque atmosphere. Not a single reporter noted the chilling detail that all four coffins were the same size, as though a child-sized casket would have made the heartbreak too explicit.

Israel has been repeatedly criticized for its supposed lack of a “day-after” plan for Gaza, for failing to put forward a roadmap that would lead to Palestinian statehood.

But Thursday morning’s gruesome display provides the most unflinching answer to that demand:

Israel cannot be expected to solve what is clearly a deep-rooted, generational problem in a society that treats the murder of its civilians as family entertainment.

Related Tags #Israel; #Gaza; #media; #hostagel #Hostage Deal