The Hierarchy of Grief: Why Palestinian Deaths Receive Less Global Attention

Tendai Makaripe

The morgue at Al-Aqsa Hospital was overflowing again in August.

Among the dead, most were women and children, bloodied and shrouded in white.

Outside, relatives sat in silence, some sobbing into their hands. Since the war escalated in October 2023, at least 62,122 Palestinians have been killed and 156,758 injured in Gaza, according to the U.N. humanitarian office, which cites Gaza’s Health Ministry.

The toll continues to climb amid widespread hunger and disease.

But one wouldn’t know the full scale from much of the global media — or parts of Africa’s diplomacy.

In Zimbabwe, where many still bear the scars of a liberation war, television bulletins often give only brief mentions to the suffering in Gaza. Social media streams teem with football memes and celebrity gossip. Occasionally, a graphic clip from Rafah or Jabalia appears — shared widely, met with shock emojis — then fades.

This uneven gaze raises an old question in conflicts involving people of colour: Why do brown bodies command so little global sympathy?

Media patterns reflect power.

“Media tends to follow geopolitical power,” said Lazarus Sauti, a media trainer and conflict studies researcher. “The closer the victims are to the West in race, culture or politics, the more likely their deaths will be treated as personal tragedies. For black or brown lives, it becomes a statistic.”

 A major U.K. content analysis found far greater per-death attention to Israeli victims in early coverage, while a U.S. watchdog reported networks devoted multiple times more airtime to Israeli deaths than to Palestinian casualties.

At the same time, public-health experts have judged Palestinian casualty tallies broadly reliable even as some outlets repeatedly caveat them as “Hamas-run,” undermining their credibility.

Israel says it targets Hamas militants and infrastructure and that civilian deaths are an unintended consequence of Hamas embedding in civilian areas; that claim does not diminish the scale of Palestinian loss or the disparities in how that loss is mourned and covered.

The comparison with Ukraine has become shorthand: names and backstories, wall-to-wall live updates and features.

Gaza’s dead, by contrast, are often presented as a collective — nameless and faceless. The late Palestinian scholar Edward Said argued that “orientalist” ideas once shaped the portrayal of Arabs as inherently aggressive or backward.

That framing endures in parts of Western media, painting Palestinians either as militants or as helpless victims — rarely as fully human.

“We see it not only in how Palestinians are covered,” said South African journalist Simon Allison, editor of The Continent.

“We also see it in the way conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Sudan barely make global front pages.”

In April, fighting around displacement camps near El Fasher in North Darfur killed more than 300 civilians in two days, the U.N. reported, yet the story struggled to compete with minute-by-minute coverage of a single hostage development in Israel.

The imbalance is not only Western. African newsrooms are often complicit. Producers lean heavily on international wires and pooled video. Without correspondents on the ground, many inherit the framing baked into foreign feeds. “The same filter applies,” said Sauti.

“We inherit the same biases.”

The continent knows what it feels like to be forgotten. During Zimbabwe’s 2008–2009 cholera outbreak, more than 4,000 people died.

Few outside the region paid attention. Mozambique’s northern insurgency in Cabo Delgado has displaced hundreds of thousands since 2017 with limited international spotlight.

“The world rarely sees black grief as urgent,” said Prolific Mataruse, a senior lecturer in the Department of Governance and Public Management at the University of Zimbabwe.

“And when people in Gaza — who look more like us than like Europeans — are bombed or starved, we see the same apathy.”

African diplomacy sends mixed signals.

On August 17, 2024, the Southern African Development Community called for a ceasefire and the release of hostages in its Harare communiqué.

The African Union has repeatedly urged a cessation of hostilities and unimpeded humanitarian access.

Zimbabwe publicly expressed solidarity with Palestinians and announced humanitarian assistance in April 2024.

Across the region, ordinary Africans have been louder: on August 17, 2025, hundreds of journalists and supporters marched along Cape Town’s Sea Point Promenade to protest the killing of media workers in Gaza and to demand greater protection for the press.

“Zimbabweans, shaped by their anti-colonial struggle, have a moral duty to stand firmly with the Palestinian people.

The same imperial forces that once oppressed Zimbabwe now back Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.

Silence in the face of genocide is complicity,” said Mafa Kwanisai Mafa, national chairman of the Zimbabwe Palestine Solidarity Council. “Zimbabwe must transform its institutions from churches to universities into platforms of active solidarity.

This includes protests, boycotts and diplomatic pressure.”

Supporting Palestine, he said, is not charity but a revolutionary obligation in the global fight against imperialism.

So, what can be done?

For African journalists, it starts in the newsroom.

Editors can commission more reporting on Gaza from African vantage points, not just wire rewrites.

Reporters can elevate direct voices from Gaza — nurses, teachers, medics — and draw on Arabic sources with translation support.

Public broadcasters can reflect the opinions of their audiences rather than defaulting to diplomatic talking points.

Internationally, news agencies must confront bias: name victims where possible, humanise all deaths and avoid language that delegitimises Palestinian sources by default.

Platforms should invest in safeguarding local journalists, whose reporting remains the world’s primary window into Gaza.

African diplomacy can align rhetoric and action. That means moving beyond boilerplate statements and using regional leverage to push for compliance with international law — including court orders and humanitarian access — and to support credible war-crimes investigations. It also means matching public sentiment with concrete support for civilian protection and relief.

“What is happening in Gaza is intolerable,” said Palestinian Ambassador to Zimbabwe Dr. Tammer Almassri.

“The international community cannot turn a blind eye to these atrocities. Urgent action is needed to end the suffering of the Palestinian people. The continued silence and inaction have only emboldened Israel to continue its aggression, and this complicity must be brought to an end.”

What is happening in Gaza is more than a war; it is a test of whose grief counts, and whether the world recognises it before more lives are lost.

In Africa, that test should not be failed