Many, many thanks for running the tragic story (“Journalist killing sends a chilling message,” Gazette, Aug. 16), of the premeditated wholesale slaughter of six Arab-Palestinian journalists in Gaza City on Aug. 10, bombed in their tent by the Israeli Defense Force, bringing the total number of slain reporters to 180, more than all wars of the entire 20th century combined.
Since Oct. 7, 2022, the IDF has forbidden reporters into Gaza, unless to sites permitted, making it increasingly difficult, if not deadly, to provide accurate first-hand information. The result is that we in the West are intentionally kept in the dark of this virtual, vast concentration camp. Virtually every Gazan has been forbidden to leave.
My prayer is that the Gazette will continue to keep us up to date on the plight of hundreds of thousands of our fellow human beings: starving, continuously displaced, (and as we speak, being expelled from their homes, beginning in Gaza City) without medicine, clean water, or nourishment to heal wounds. The extremist government of Israel, together with U.S. millions and an array of American made bombs, weapons, tanks, trucks, drones, and surveillance materiel, mercilessly proceeds unabated, especially afflicting the most vulnerable: children, mothers, and the elderly, not to mention Palestinian or Arabic reporters.
Otherwise, Americans will have become like the aloof citizens of Dachau, who, in 1945, were compelled to stand over seemingly endless trenches of nude Jewish bodies heaped upon one another, pleading they had no idea that hell was just over the tidy high walls they passed by every day to shop and work, occasionally questioning one another about the particularly dark, rancid stench from smoke periodically billowing out of brick smokestacks.
Who can put a stop to these orchestrated steps toward genocide? (note: the Israeli Cabinet just approved an IDF plan to sweep away all of the nearly million residents of Gaza City, by displacement or death, militarily slated to begin Oct. 7)
The answer? America and America alone can pull the plug on this mad machinery grinding on to produce their version of an Hitlerian “final solution.” The question: Can we as an avowedly moral nation, today withdraw all support to Israel, before the ongoing cover-up resumes full force?
Dear Gazette: We look to you to help us to no longer do the easy thing, i.e., to stay away. To express our rage, to demand resumption of aid, ceasefire, and prisoner-freedom for all.
Rev. Peter Kakos, member of River Valley For Palestine
Northampton