A note on the dead baby thing: A family local to me is currently grieving the death of a relative as well as his baby. The man, a fitness coach named Ohad Cohen, was shot in the kibbutz massacre along with his wife Susan, and then forced to watch as their 11 month old daughter had her throat cut. Ohad and the baby died from their injuries, but his wife is alive in critical condition at the hospital.
I’ve seen the news of their deaths confirmed by multiple relatives both in Israel and the US, and by Ohad’s place of work and several of his friends. Yet when I search their names online there’s no result. Not one article or news piece names them and identifies their daughter as one of the murdered babies. So knowing of at least one murdered infant that’s gone completely unreported on, it does make me think there likely really are a lot more that just haven’t been identified yet.
I think that Americans like myself find the lack of specifics weird just because we are so used to the 24/7 extremely invasive and detailed news cycle that happens after mass casualty events here. But that stuff happens because the main causes (mass shootings, isolated bombings, earthquakes, house fires, car/plane/helicopter wrecks, even the recent submarine saga, etc) generally happen in a matter of minutes and then it’s just over. The threat is neutralized, the danger is gone, and all we really have left to do is hyper-analyze every last detail on the news for days on end. This isn’t like that. It’s the start of an extremely intense war. The threat is still active, the region is in chaos, and everyone’s focus is on the ensuing war. It just isn’t top priority to compile lists of the names of every dead baby for the sake of strangers’ morbid curiosity.
Also, from what I’ve heard, in almost every case of murdered babies or young children, the parents were killed (or at least wounded) at the same time. Most of these massacres were of entire families. And the few surviving parents are mostly in hospitals recovering right now. So we don’t have a huge line of parents to be satellite interviewed on CNN or photographed for newspaper covers the way school shooting parents immediately are here.
It just seems like a very different dynamic than what most of us are used to. So it’s going to look a little different. I don’t know that it was 40, for all we know that could be greatly embellished. But it’s definitely happened to some level, and just doesn’t seem to be being reported on to the same specific, detailed extent that these things are reported on when they happen in the US.