There was an item on the World at One on 5th June that talked about the two Israeli hostages whose dead bodies were recovered by an IDF operation in Gaza the previous night.

They were named and some of their story, and that of another hostage from the same Kibbutz were told.

This introduced and framed a following item on the chaotic and lethal Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid distribution sites, in the same way that Israel’s attack on Gaza is invariably framed with October 7th, as an innoculation against the full horror of it; in an illustration of the way that Stalin’s remark that ” a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic” is routinely applied by the news media.

Altogether, the item lasted about 3 minutes.

So, one minute for each hostage.

Were the World at One to give the same respect and time to each of the 62, 614 Palestinian dead in Gaza – name them, tell a little of their story, round them out as human beings in the way they do for the Israelis – that would be 62,614 minutes.

Thats 1,043 hours.

Or 43 and a half days.

If they were to clear the airwaves of Radio 4 to run this continuously, 24 hours a day, starting with their broadcast at lunchtime in June 5th, it would take them until July 18th to get to the end of it.