Five more Palestinians, including two boys who hadn’t yet mastered the art of dodging high-velocity democracy, have been efficiently dispatched into the void. This is what we call 'tuesday' in the Levant. According to the health authorities, who spend their days counting pieces of people, the fire came from the Israeli side. According to the Israeli military, they 'eliminated' a militant. It’s such a clean, clinical word, isn't it? 'Eliminated.' Like a smudge on a window or a bug in a software update. It sanitizes the messy, iron-scented reality of a human being being turned into a statistic by a state-of-the-art weapon system paid for by people who complain about the price of eggs in Ohio.

While these five souls were being deleted from the census, the 'Gaza truce deal' remains 'stalled.' Stalled. As if it were a mid-range sedan with a faulty alternator rather than a desperate, gasping attempt to stop the industrial-scale slaughter of civilians. The word 'progress' in the context of Middle Eastern diplomacy is a cruel joke, a linguistic carrot dangled in front of a global audience that is increasingly bored by the spectacle of suffering. We are told that negotiators are working around the clock, which is a lovely image—men in expensive suits eating catered pastries in Cairo or Doha while they argue over the semantics of 'permanent' versus 'sustainable.' Meanwhile, on the ground, the only thing that is truly sustainable is the misery.

Let’s look at the players in this theater of the absurd. On one side, you have a government in Israel that views every dead child as a tragic but necessary line item in the budget of 'security.' They operate on the delusion that you can bomb a population into loving you, or at least into a state of catatonic compliance. It’s a strategy that has failed for seventy years, yet they lean into it with the manic energy of a gambler who thinks the next spin of the wheel will finally pay off. They speak of 'eliminating threats' while simultaneously creating a thousand new threats for every one they neutralize. It’s a self-perpetuating business model for the military-industrial complex.

Then there is the other side—the performative outrage of the international community. The Left is currently engaged in its favorite pastime: moral grandstanding. They wear the right scarves, post the right infographics, and feel a deep, soul-cleansing sense of superiority while accomplishing absolutely nothing. They treat the conflict like a Marvel movie where there are clear heroes and villains, ignoring the inconvenient reality that the 'liberators' they champion are often just as happy to use their own people as human shields as the 'oppressors' are to shoot through them. They want a ceasefire so they can go back to worrying about things that don't involve blood on the pavement, like whether their oat milk is ethically sourced.

And what of the Right? The ghoulish architects of 'unwavering support.' They view the region as a giant chessboard where the pawns are made of flesh and bone. To them, every explosion is a signal of strength, and every call for restraint is a sign of weakness. They have traded their humanity for a seat at the table of 'geopolitical strategy,' a table where the main course is always the same: more dead kids. They cheer on the 'eliminations' from the safety of their television studios, convinced that they are defending civilization while they watch it crumble under the weight of its own hypocrisy.

The 'stalled' truce is a feature, not a bug. It allows everyone to stay in character. Hamas gets to remain the defiant martyr-cult; Netanyahu gets to keep his coalition of religious zealots and avoids a jail cell; and the West gets to pretend it cares about human rights while it continues to ship the hardware that makes the 'eliminations' possible. It is a perfectly balanced ecosystem of death. The two boys killed in central and southern Gaza weren't just victims of Israeli fire; they were victims of a global commitment to the status quo. We are all complicit in the stall. We watch, we tweet, we shrug, and we wait for the next update from the health authorities, who are currently sharpening their pencils to record the next five names that will mean nothing to anyone in power. The meat grinder is humming, the diplomats are lunching, and the truth is the only thing more dead than those five Palestinians.