Through Lens, 4 Boys Dead by Gaza Shore

LP NOTE: In some ways these four boys were lucky — a cynical thought certainly, but hear me out: They won't have to be facing the horrors of Israeli attacks every day. They won't have to be exposed to their friends and family members being killed or maimed in the inevitable and incessant carnage that will go on an on and on through their young and maybe adult lives. They won't have to worry about struggling to find food and water and education and daily peace. They won't have to worry about finding productive work as they reach adulthood....

My question is this: Why do the citizens of the U.S. tolerate their government sending billions of dollars each year to the Israeli government when outright murder is the result?

Would they tolerate such a travesty in their own country? In 1970 it was "Four Dead in Ohio". Today it's "Four Dead on Gaza Beach". Then we acted. But today? No.

All Americans should hang their heads in shame for being accomplices to the brutality of the current Israeli regime.

The aftermath of an airstrike on a beach in Gaza City on Wednesday. Four young Palestinian boys, all cousins, were killed. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

By TYLER HICKS, NYT
JULY 16, 2014

GAZA CITY — My day here began at 6 a.m. Photographing something as unpredictable as war still has a routine.

It is important to be out the door at first light to document the destruction of the last night’s bombings. By midmorning, I check in at the hospital’s morgue to see if families have come to pick up the dead for burial.

When the routine is broken, it is because things can go horribly wrong in an instant. That is how it happened in Libya in 2011, when three colleagues and I were taken captive by government soldiers and our driver was killed.

On Wednesday, that sudden change of fortune came to four young Palestinian boys playing on a beach in Gaza City.

(More here.)