Most of the western media has played a pivotal role in normalising these obscenities. From October 2023 to January 2025, 1,091 babies were killed in Gaza, more than the total number of Israeli civilians killed on 7 October. A total of 17,400 children have been killed – the equivalent of one every 30 minutes. A recent study in the Lancet reported the total number of deaths in Gaza were probably an underestimate.

The Times newspaper splashed on a story about lurid and unverified allegations of Hamas cutting babies’ throats; two days later, it followed up with another story about the allegedly “mutilated” babies. The unevidenced allegations were later found to be rumours. More than 1,000 Palestinian dead babies aren’t rumours – they really have been killed by Israeli forces. As far as I’m aware, no equivalent Times front page exists.

Unlike Guernica, the crimes committed in Gaza have been documented in real time. Israeli soldiers gleefully posted evidence on social media and survivors took to the internet to share footage of what they were enduring. Many of those survivors were, in the words of the Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, “broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something”.

There must be a reckoning. Those who continued supplying weapons to Israel ought to be put on trial for helping to facilitate it. Those who used their media platforms to justify it should see their reputations in tatters. Without that accountability, even more depraved violence will become normal, even acceptable.