To truly understand the significance of the contemporary debate around Gaza, it is perhaps necessary to perform an exercise that the Western media system rarely encourages: to remove one’s gaze for a moment from the bright spot on which it is almost obsessively focused, and re-accustom it to perceiving the entire human horizon. Only then does it become possible to grasp a fact that is as evident as it is little discussed: in recent decades, the planet has been criss-crossed by an immense amount of child suffering – hunger, thirst, epidemics, civil wars, child soldiers, religious persecution – that has received incomparably less media attention than that reserved for Gaza today.

There is no question of minimising the Palestinian tragedy. Nor is it a matter of establishing moral graduations of grief. Every child who dies under the rubble of Gaza is a real wound in the human conscience. But precisely because of this, the question becomes inescapable: why did millions of other children who died slowly of hunger, dysentery, malaria, cholera, civil war or armed recruitment remain almost invisible to Western sensibilities for years?

The numbers, in this respect, are staggering. According to theWorld Health Organisation and UNICEF, some 4.8 to 5 million children under the age of five still die each year. Almost half of these deaths are directly or indirectly related to malnutrition. For decades, therefore, the world has experienced a silent child slaughter on the order of millions of victims per year. In the 1990s, the number of children who died annually under the age of five was as high as 12 million. In the past half-century we are therefore talking about hundreds of millions of avoidable child deaths.

Many of these children did not die in spectacular and continuously filmed wars, but in the slow collapse of societies lacking clean water, sanitation, infrastructure and political stability. Diarrhoea caused by contaminated water still kills hundreds of thousands of children every year. UNICEF recalls that over a thousand children a day still die from diseases related to unsafe water, poor sanitation and lack of health services.

When hunger is intertwined with war, the picture becomes even more devastating

From 2005 to 2020, the UN has verified more than 104,000 cases of children killed or maimed in armed conflicts. But the UN itself points out that the actual figures are certainly much higher, because many war zones do not allow direct verification. Save the Children has estimated that between 2013 and 2017 alone, at least 550,000 children under the age of five died in the worst theatres of war from indirect causes related to conflict: hunger, epidemics, health collapse.

And it is here that another fact emerges that is difficult to ignore. A very large proportion of the worst humanitarian child crises of recent decades are concentrated in areas with a Muslim majority: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Sahel, northern Nigeria, Gaza. Jihadist movements that have recruited child soldiers, used minors in suicide attacks or violently persecuted religious minorities also operate in many of these areas.

Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, northern Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan: in almost all of these areas, UN reports document severe persecution against Christians, Yazidis, Baha’i, Hindus, Shia dissidents or religious converts. In Iraq,ISIS has almost wiped out entire historic Christian communities and perpetrated massacres against Yazidis. In Nigeria, Boko Haram systematically targeted Christian schools and moderate Muslims. In Somalia, conversion to Christianity can mean death.

All this, however, does not authorise crude simplifications. Even Christian or Buddhist countries have experienced immense atrocities against children: the Christian Congo, the Rwanda of genocide, Buddhist Myanmar, communist Cambodia, Latin American guerrillas. No serious historian could reduce violence to a single religious faith, although Islam is by far the greatest source of crimes against humanity and widespread abuse. But the causes are almost always multiple: state collapse, tribalism, proxy wars, extreme poverty, ideological radicalisation, colonial legacies, uncontrolled population growth, climate crises.

The perceptual distortion of humanitarian disasters

But it is precisely here that the most disturbing knot emerges: the disproportion between the real quantitative dimension of these tragedies and their weight in the Western media imagination. For example, Sudan is today one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes on the planet, with millions of displaced persons and vast areas threatened by starvation. Yet many European citizens would know very little about what is happening there. The Democratic Republic of Congo has experienced millions of deaths and appalling levels of violence against women and children, yet it remains almost absent from western public debate.

A comparative study on international media coverage showed that Gaza received about 58 articles per day, while Congo received about one and a half. Some African crises with enormously larger affected populations therefore received tens of times less coverage.

The disproportion also emerges in public perception. A survey from 2026 showed that virtually all respondents knew about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while only a minority had minimal knowledge about the Congolese wars or the Sudanese catastrophe.

How is this possible? And more importantly, why?

The explanations are many. Gaza has a unique geopolitical and symbolic centrality: Israel, the United States, Iran, terrorism, the memory of the Shoah, Jerusalem, the three Abrahamic religions, the relationship between the West and Islam. It is a highly filmable war, urban, continuous, immersed in social networks, emotionally polarising. It produces immediate, dramatic, symbolically powerful images.

Many African wars, on the other hand, are rural, dispersed, slow, and difficult to tell on television. But above all, they are far less relevant in symbolic, ideological and political terms. Chronic hunger does not produce the immediate emotional impact of an urban bombardment. A child slowly dying of dysentery in a Sahel village does not generate the same viral cycle of images, hashtags, university marches and political polarisation as a child pulled from the rubble in Gaza.

But it is precisely here that the decisive moral and political question emerges. Why does the West seem to react with immensely greater emotional intensity to certain sufferings than to others? Why do some children become universal symbols while others remain simply statistical numbers? Why have entire generations of children who died in Congo, Sudan, Yemen or Somalia remained at the margins of the European collective consciousness?

Perhaps this is because the contemporary media system does not measure suffering according to its actual amount, but according to its ability to enter into the great symbolic conflicts of the West: colonialism, the Palestinian question, Islam, identity, human rights, historical memory, global geopolitics. The visibility of pain then depends not only on its magnitude, but on its narrative utility, and in particular on how much it lends itself to reinforcing a particularly partisan narrative: the one that tends to portray the democratic West and evil capitalism as the primary cause of the world’s ills.

And this is the most disturbing point of all: it is not that Gaza receives too much attention, but that millions of other children, who have died in the silence of forgotten wars or chronic famine, have received scandalously little just so as not to obfuscate the propagandistic use of a humanitarian tragedy by those motivated by an ancient and livid resentment towards Israel, the Jews, the West and liberal democracy.