The world watched in horror last month as Israeli forces bombed and shelled the Gaza Strip, hitting schools and even a hospital and killing hundreds of civilians. But relatively few outsiders seem to care or even notice that a similar tragedy is happening right now on the island republic of Sri Lanka. Why is so much attention, compassion and aid money spent on one conflict, and so little on the other? That is one of the harsh realities of the media world we live in.

We all know what happened in Gaza, even if there are differences over who should be blamed for the conflict. Despite the efforts of the Israeli armed forces to limit foreign media coverage of their invasion of Gaza, they were unable to stop shocking pictures and harrowing accounts from Gaza reaching the outside world. Palestinians were penned into their narrow strip of territory, unable to escape the Israeli onslaught, and they suffered terribly. It was the latest round in a long conflict between two peoples, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, who are fighting over disputed territory.

Substitute Buddhist Sinhalese majority and Tamil Hindu minority for Israelis and Palestinians and you get the picture of what is happening in Sri Lanka. The problem, however, is that most of the world is not seeing the pictures, or hearing much about this other tragic conflict. The Sri Lankan government has been more successful in keeping the media out of the conflict area. Indeed, much of what is broadcast by the few foreign media organizations that even bother to mention Sri Lanka seems to be fuzzy cell phone videos. You see a bit of the conflict on television here in Britain, but almost none in the U.S., where most of the major broadcasters have paid no attention to Sri Lanka since it was devastated by the tsunami in 2004 that killed about 30,000 inhabitants of the island.

And yet it is a civil war that has lasted for decades, and killed more than 70,000 people. It now appears to be in its final stages, as the armed forces of the Sri Lankan (largely Sinhalese) government forces have pushed the Tamil rebels into a shrinking corner of the island. As of this writing, 250,000 Tamils are penned into what's left of the rebel-held territory, and are trying to escape the constant pounding of the government artillery. There are few independent witnesses to what is happening there, but the Red Cross said yesterday that a packed hospital in the war zone was hit by artillery shells for the fourth time in two days.

It is hard to tell who are the good guys and the bad guys in this nasty little war. The government accuses the rebel fighters, known as the Tamil Tigers, of holding the Tamil population as hostages by refusing to allow them to escape to a government declared sanctuary. The Tigers, who want autonomy for the Tamil minority, are notorious for their cruel tactics. Their speciality is wiring up men and women as human bombs and using them for suicide attacks against Sinhalese targets. Both sides systematically violate humanitarian law and human rights, and the victims as always are the men, women and children who are caught in the ethnic crossfire. Humanitarian assistance is described by aid agencies as “sporadic at best” because of severe government limits on their activities.

The realities of the media world, or at least the Western world, are such that a recall of tainted peanut butter is worth more coverage than thousands of civilians slaughtered in Sri Lanka. Israelis and the Palestinians fall somewhere between these two extremes. And that means that relatively little aid and international attention has been directed to the Sri Lankan conflict. If it's not on TV, it doesn't exist. That's the flip side of the so-called “CNN effect.”

So people will keep dying in that teardrop-shaped island in the Indian Ocean. And don't expect foreign governments to come to the aid of the Tamils. In fact, most governments (including the United States) naturally support the Sri Lankan government, since the island sits right in the middle of the international shipping route that carries 40 percent of the world's oil supply. Oil, as we all know, is thicker than blood.