We swipe our phones and casually ignore 80 dead children in under an hour

On Tuesday, 18 March 2025 Israel launched a massive assault on Khan Younis and Rafah in southern Gaza, as well as Gaza City in the north. This marked the end of a fragile ceasefire with Hamas.

In what may turn out to have been the deadliest day since 7 October 2023, initial casualty figures were of 404 Palestinians killed and 562 wounded. At least 183 of the dead were children.

One estimate was that in the initial assault 80 children were killed in 51 minutes. But it hardly warranted a blip in the Western media. If people did look up from their phones, it was only for a second.

The moral philosopher Peter Singer once posed the “drowning child thought experiment”. It is a lovely summer’s day and you are walking to work. As you walk past a shallow pond where you have often seen young children paddling, you notice that there is a small child in the pond. The child appears to be struggling.

Initially, you think little of this as you know it is shallow, shallow enough even for a small child to stand if they wished. You continue walking but then stop again. Now it appears that the young child is getting weaker, and they are lying face down in the water.

What do you do? You realise that saving the child will mean wading into the water. But there is no time for you to take off your shoes. Shoes you bought only yesterday and which cost you R5,000. Do you wade in and save the child and ruin your shoes?

Making it an even more difficult decision is that by the time you have done this and saved the child, waited for the ambulance and the child’s parents, you will be late for a really important meeting at work.

The answer of what to do is, for most people, that of course you wade in, save the child, irrespective of the damage to your shoes. The idea of someone walking away from a drowning child in such a situation feels nothing short of monstrous.

But for Singer, when we decide to do nothing for the thousands of children dying every year in wars or from perfectly preventable diseases (because they are not in front of us), we are in fact doing the analogous thing of walking away from a drowning child to save our expensive shoes.

Singer’s thought experiment has been used to encourage donations to organisations working with vulnerable children around the world, and underpins the effective altruism movement.

Are there lessons from this thought experiment for Gaza? I cannot see the bodies of Palestinian children amid the debris of Gaza as I walk to work. I cannot make the decision not to spoil my expensive new shoes to save the lives of a Palestinian infant. There are no meetings I will miss. So, I resume my daily life, oblivious for the most part to the slaughter in Gaza.

The problem though is that this feels like something more than simply forgetting, that something more active is happening. Is our ignorance and perhaps wilful blindness about what is happening in Gaza just about the politics of the region, the duration of the genocide. Is it all just too much to integrate in my daily life? Or does it suggest something else?

In her book, Freedom to Think: Protecting a Fundamental Human Right in the Digital Age, the human rights lawyer Susie Alegre describes how our modern digital age and online environment have been ruined by fake news and disinformation. This is, of course, not new.

But she goes on to make the case that, in such an environment, it is not only that we are being fed lies, but that ultimately our freedom to form reliable thoughts is being routinely violated. We are all sleepwalking into a future where the algorithms of a small group of tech oligarchs and their political handmaidens will determine the nature of our distractions, will fuel our power to ignore (what Tim Wu describes as our “incredible, magnificent power to ignore”), and fill us so completely with lies and inane distractions that we will forget what we have lost.

Read more: Middle East crisis

I believe that in this context it is relatively easy to casually ignore the deaths of 80 children in less than an hour, and simply swipe our phone to explore the new shoe sale that has just dropped.

As the politics of the world has shifted inexorably to the right in the past 10 years, George Orwell’s 1984 is routinely cited to explain our descent into a variety of forms of authoritarianism.

But perhaps it is to a lesser-known classic of “authoritarianism fiction” that we should turn? Aldous Huxley in Brave New World portrays a futuristic technological world where people are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anaesthetised to follow an authoritarian ruler.

But as far back as 1985, the media scholar Neil Postman, in his magisterial analysis of the impact of television on our culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death, nailed the difference between Orwell and Huxley:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions’.”

I do feel helpless about Gaza. About Sudan. About Yemen. About every child needlessly suffering.

But what I can and will do is to commit to trying to think, to read books, to help where I can, to wrest my attention back from my phone, and to actively attempt to subvert the algorithm and seek out the truth.

Not doing so would be tantamount to surrender. DM