Just imagine if in the space of 12 hours there were 25 bomb attacks in Israel and five people were killed.

In the United States, the cable news networks would devote round-the-clock coverage to the “terrorist bloodbath” (or whatever other sufficiently dramatic branding they chose) and this would go down as an important date in history.

But when the dead are Palestinians, it’s a completely different story.

The New York Times reports that last night was:

… a relatively quiet night, in which the Israeli military bombed 25 sites in Gaza, killing five Palestinians in the southern cities of Rafah and Khan Younis, according to the Gaza Health Ministry; about 1,400 others have been wounded.

Ashraf al-Qedra, the Health Ministry spokesman, and local journalists said that Ismail and Mohammed Najjar, relatives in their 40s who worked as guards on agricultural land in a former Israeli settlement in Khan Younis, were killed early Tuesday. In Rafah, drone strikes killed Atwa al-Amour, a 63-year-old farmer, and Bushra Zourob, 53, a woman who was near the target, a man on a motorbike, who was wounded.

Perhaps reporters Jodi Rudoren and Anne Barnard are employing Benjamin Netanyahu’s novel definition of quietness, that being: the silence that follows explosions.

The Israeli prime minister said:

[I]f Hamas does not accept the cease-fire proposal, as it looks now, Israel will have all the international legitimacy in order to achieve the desired quiet.

So far Israel has launched 1,609 air strikes, detonating hundreds of tons of explosives in order to create quietness.