“To my unborn child, with you, I will become a mother for the first time. I can’t believe how quickly this pregnancy has passed and how you have grown quietly within my womb, waiting for my first joy.”
These were what would tragically turn out to be the last words posted online by Sundus Shalabi, who was eight months pregnant. Early on Sunday morning, the 23-year-old Palestinian mother-to-be was killed by the Israeli military in the Nur Shams refugee camp, on the outskirts of Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank, in what the Palestinian Foreign Ministry is calling a “crime of execution” and the targeting of “defenseless civilians.”
Shalabi and her husband Yazan Abu Shola were shot in their car, with her husband critically injured. Their unborn child was also killed in the attack. “Medical teams were unable to save the baby’s life due to the [Israeli] occupation preventing the transfer of the injured to the hospital,” said a statement from the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah.
Got that? The Israelis shot and killed an innocent young woman and then caused the death of her unborn baby, too.
Shocking, right? Depraved? Murderous? And yet, as of Monday morning, there was no mention of Sundus Shalabi on the websites of the New York Times or the BBC, and only passing, brief, buried references to her death on the websites of the Washington Post and CNN.
Also over the weekend, three Israeli hostages were released by Hamas, looking “gaunt and sunken-eyed.” Compare and contrast the coverage they received in the Western media with Shalabi. There were multiple and lengthy stories about their plight in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the BBC. One of the headlines on the BBC website on Sunday night? “What will anger at sight of gaunt hostages mean for a fragile ceasefire?”
Really? Gaunt hostages? How about the anger from Palestinians at the non-stop killing of women and children during this “fragile ceasefire”? Or do Palestinian lives not matter?