02.27.26
Gaza, briefly
Maybe you pulled the short straw in the newsroom. Maybe you were roped to a chair by MAGA-affiliated torturers and placed before a TV screen for the entire 108 minutes. If you were, my condolences. Otherwise, I will assume that most readers of Today in Fascism did not watch Trump’s State of the Union Address Tuesday night.
Thankfully, numerous news outlets broke the ordeal down to five or six takeaways and fact-checks. They include Trump’s political theater, goading the Democrats on immigration, misrepresentation of the state of the economy, lies about tariffs, gas and food prices, transgender healthcare, and alleged voter fraud. If Mary McCarthy were still around, she might say that every word of it was a lie, including and and the.
But except for the Jewish and Middle Eastern press and a couple of foreign policy think tanks, there was no mention of the president’s words on Gaza. Even those who mentioned his words on Gaza did so to note the absence of any substance in them, including any vision about the region’s future.
We already know Trump’s vision for Gaza: a “Riviera of the Middle East,” its coastline bristling with skyscrapers and luxury hotels, its development overseen by Trump’s “Board of Peace” and conditioned on the unlikely disarmament of Hamas. Perhaps it’s a blessing that he didn’t add ten minutes to the speech by talking about any of this.
Anyway, here’s most of what he said:
Under the ceasefire I negotiated, every single hostage, both living and dead, has been returned home. Can you believe this? Nobody thought it was possible. Nobody thought that was possible. Both living and dead. And those parents who had a dead son. Their boy. They’d always tell me, their boy. They wanted him as much as though he were living. That was an amazing period of time.
They came back, and when we got all the living hostages back. And many, many before them. But I always said those last 20 are going to be very tough. But we got many, many more. Hundreds. But I said those last 20 are going to be tough. We got them back, but we only got back 14 or 15 of the dead, of the 28, and believe it or not, Hamas worked along with Israel, and they dug and they dug and they dug.
It’s a tough, it’s a tough thing to do, going through bodies all over. Passing up 100 bodies sometimes for each one they found, a tough job. They finally got it back to 27 and then, Steve and Jared, they got it back to 28, they found all 28, nobody thought that was possible but we did it. I remember the family of the 28th, they were so grieved but they were so happy, as happy as it was possible to be. They had their boy back. The mother said, “Sir, we have our boy back.”
As is often true of Trump, the substance was hidden in the unscripted asides.
Of course, he took credit for everything: “We got .. . we got … we got.”
He invented, and wistfully recounted, meaningful human interaction in which he took part: “And those parents who had a dead son. Their boy. They’d always tell me, ‘their boy.’”
He talked about violence as a great adventure: “That was an amazing period of time.”
But the most telling few words were these:
Passing up 100 bodies sometimes for each one they found.
Whose bodies were the searchers “passing up”? Recently, Al Jazeera reported that Gazans are picking through the rubble for almost 10,000 missing people.
This phrase was a succinct distillation of whose lives matter: 100 Palestinian bodies for one Israeli body. Just more stuff to “clean up,” as Jared Kushner put it, before revitalizing the Gaza Strip as a tourist mecca.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, and reported by the UN, Israeli forces have killed 611 Palestinians and injured an additional 1,630 since the “ceasefire” Trump negotiated in October 2025. An analysis by Al-Jazeera, published Monday, found that the Israeli military has carried out attacks on Gaza on 119 of the 137 days of so-called ceasefire.
The casualties are a small portion of the 72,063 Palestinians killed and 171,726 injured in Gaza between the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 and February 16, 2026, according to the MoH. Israel has also targeted and killed hundreds—record numbers—of humanitarian aid workers and journalists, many of them not Palestinian.
The carnage is not limited to Gaza. Raids, destruction of homes and olive groves, assaults and fatal shootings by settlers protected by Israel military and security forces have risen sharply in the West Bank since the beginning of the war. A report released February 19 by the UN’s human rights commission expressed alarm at the “pervasive and growing settler violence committed with impunity,” raising “serious concerns about ethnic cleansing” by Israel.