On March 25, I reported that the ongoing Gaza blackout had killed an infant after his respirator failed. Though the infant did die in the manner reported, later information has showed that he actually died earlier in the month.
This isn’t the major shift in story that it sounds like, however. The Gaza Strip has been under rolling blackouts for over a month now, and the same exact issues surrounding the infant’s death would’ve been true in early March as were on the 25th. The Hamas government’s state media simply didn’t catch wind of the story and report it to the world until weeks after it happened, and therefore no one else knew about it either. Instead of some plot by Hamas to garner world sympathy, it strikes me more as an attempt to cover up that they have such a poor handle on things that they didn’t even notice an infant dying in the blackouts.
Some other outlets are scrambling to correct the story because they initially blamed the Israeli blockade for the death. Interestingly, however, this wouldn’t have been true at either date, and this is one of those rare occasions when suffering in Gaza isn’t a direct result of Israeli policy.
As I pointed out in the initial article, the Egyptian junta is the one that stopped the fuel shipments to Gaza’s power plant, though no one seems to have a solid answer as to why. Israel even went to the surprising length of supplying Gaza some emergency diesel fuel last week, though it was quickly burned through.
