Most people in the West, even those who follow international news avidly, have likely not heard of Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, the seven-month-old Palestinian baby Israeli soldiers shot in the face and killed near Hebron in the occupied West Bank earlier this month.

They probably are not aware of the relentless, escalating Israeli violence across the rest of the occupied territories, either. Indeed, Western media rarely talk about West Bank villages like Sinjil, encaged in barbed wire, its residents forbidden to access their own land. News bulletins rarely mention how Israeli settlers continue to set fire to homes and cars, harass, threaten and torture Palestinian villagers while enjoying the Israeli military’s full support and protection. The fact that more than half of Gaza has been de facto annexed by the occupation in the past few months, and that Palestinians in the war-torn enclave are still starving, unable to access life’s most basic necessities, is buried at the bottom of long articles about Israel’s supposed security concerns and struggles.

As a result, much of the Western public, from the United States to Germany, appears to be under the impression that Palestine is now somewhat old news. As the war with Iran took over the headlines, coverage of Gaza fell away while the killing went on. They believe Israel has concluded its assault on Palestine with the so-called “ceasefire” in Gaza and turned its attention solely to its much bigger war of “self-defence” against the “terror state”, Iran, and its ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon.

Now that Iran and the US have announced that they have reached a deal, the........

© Al Jazeera