Throughout the current hostilities in Israel and Gaza — which has gone from a horrendous attack that killed hundreds of innocent Israelis on October 7 to what is now a mass slaughter of many more innocent Palestinians — US politicians have regularly pointed to the Americans killed by Hamas to tacitly justify the blank check given to Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government.

The rising number of dead Americans has, quite appropriately, been a staple of coverage of this latest violence, with the stories, lives, and dreams of the victims given prominent space in news reports. From the start, reporters pressed the Joe Biden’s administration about whether any of those killed were US citizens. Five days in, Secretary of State Antony Blinken cited the “immeasurable loss” of the murdered Americans as he stood shoulder to shoulder with Netanyahu, pledging to give the Israeli prime minister more ammunition to prosecute his war. President Joe Biden brought up the Americans held captive by Hamas in his recent primetime address, telling the country that, “as president, there is no higher priority for me than the safety of Americans held hostage.” After a week of Netanyahu’s war, which had already seen some two thousand Palestinians killed, Senator Ted Cruz called it “right for America,” since the (at that point) twenty-seven US dead meant it was “one of the worst terrorist attacks on America,” too.

There’s little wonder US officials are incensed. If there’s one thing that should outrage a government, it’s the killing of that nation’s citizens by another government. And yet, the attention currently being paid to the fate of US citizens killed or threatened by Hamas feels like a major sea change. Because the fact is that US citizens have regularly been, to use a foul euphemism, “collateral damage” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, often at the hands of the Israeli military, and much of the press, as well as Washington officials, have never seemed to care all that much.