Covering Israel
ByCurrently running on BBC News:
Israeli dies in Gaza rocket raid
An Israeli woman has died of her wounds shortly after a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip hit her car in the border town of Sderot, medics say.
The woman was the first Israeli killed in a rocket attack since November.
The attack came after Israel carried out an air strike on a refugee camp in northern Gaza. The Islamic Jihad militant group said four members died.
Israeli air strikes have killed more than 30 people in the past week, several of them civilians.
Although the BBC report does not say it explicitly, you could be forgiven for thinking that the two acts were related. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that the killing of the Israeli woman was in retaliation for Israel’s earlier attacks.
You could be forgiven for thinking that if you only read this story, and you didn’t know that militants had fired over 200 rockets at Sderot since November, that a home and a school were hit in the past week, and that the situation had become so bad that the Israeli government had already started evacuating people from the town.
in other words, one incident has very little to do with the other. At least not in the way that this story portrays it. If the rocket attacks were retaliation, they could not have started last year.
Meanwhile, it’s interesting to see Fatah now accused of being in the pocket of the Zionists. This from the New York Times article covering the Israeli air strike and the rocket attack on Sderot:
Asma al-Hayya, 24, said her father, Nimir, worked in Israel until the beginning of the second intifada, or uprising, in 2000 and was killed “because his brother is Hamas,†she said.
“This isn’t war between Hamas and Fatah,†she said. “This is a war against Islam. Those pretending to be Fatah are collaborators, and they coordinate with Israel against Hamas.â€Â
A Hamas legislator, Huda Naaem, said, “Inside Fatah there is the program that is American-Zionist, and which fights resistance.†Another Hamas legislator, Jamilah Shanty, asserted that Hamas “will remain in government to protect resistance, so we will continue fighting and will insist on government, too.â€Â
A very sad situation indeed.
4 Comments
May 21st, 2007 at 10:30 pm
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May 22nd, 2007 at 1:15 am
very, very, sad. Everytime I read anything by the BBC about Israel it makes incredibly sad and angry.
May 22nd, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Here’s a great article about how Europe’s struggle to outperform the United States is resulting in embarrassing disasters. The cost of all this buerocratic nonsense is thrown into the lap of the European tax payer: http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/europes-galileo-satellite-positioning-project-spins/story.aspx?guid=%7BDB2C7553%2DB734%2D453D%2D9FFD%2DBF5F4EFC4E7A%7D&dist=RNPullDown
May 27th, 2007 at 12:51 am
It’s only been from the Internet that I learned about Sderot being under frequent fire from Gaza.
OK, I haven’t been reading the New York Times every day, but when I have read it during the past week or so, I saw coverage whose main thrust was that Israel was attacking Gaza.
I saw a big, colorful front-page photo of Palestinians running from an Israeli missile clearly visible in the sky. A day or two later, I saw another big front-page photo, this one of a Hamas building reportedly blown to bits by the Israelis. The second photo’s caption referred to the reader to an article, not about Sderot, but about an Israeli crackdown in the West Bank in which 33 Palestinians were seized.
You’d think that the Palestinians were doing very little against the Israelis, whereas the Israelis were running hog-wild.
Although The NY Times does refer to attacks on Israel by Hamas, it does so only in passing, and you never get a sense of the rain of missiles on Sderot and the damage it has caused. You never get the sense that it’s the Israelis responding to Hamas aggression, rather than the other way around.
My impression is that the reporting is mainly done from Gaza, with little or nothing from Sderot. Why not have big photos from both places? I think one problem is that, with no Western reporters daring to go into Gaza these days, the major news organizations rely on local Palestinian reporters. But that shouldn’t stop the Times from also hiring stringers on the Israeli side.
Actually, many Western news organizations rely on Palestinian reporters even in the best of times, a practice I cannot fathom. But now the dependence on Arab reporters in Gaze is probably total.
It’s very strange to first look at videos of the damage in Sderot and then see the New York Times. It’s like looking at two alternative universes.