Palestinians trapped in Egypt heading home

The Palestinians trapped in Egypt will be heading home via Israel and then into Gaza. The AP piece looks almost balanced.

Israel has agreed to allow Palestinians stranded in Egypt for weeks to pass into Israel and then into the Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials said Saturday.

Palestinian Information Minister Riad Maliki said that some of the 6,000 Palestinians who have been waiting in the Egyptian border town of Rafah would be allowed to pass at the beginning of next week.

Hamas, which wrested control of the Gaza Strip last month, denounced the deal since it allowed Israel to decide who could enter Gaza. Hamas officials and supporters would presumably not be allowed to enter through Israel.

Israel has agreed in principle to the passage of the Palestinians, and must approve of the names of potential passengers on lists the Palestinians must compile, Maliki said.

The Palestinians would pass from Egypt into Israel through the rarely-used Al-Oja crossing, then into the northern Gaza Strip through the Erez crossing, he said.

Israel did not immediately comment on the deal. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev would only say that Israel was searching for “creative solutions” to return the Palestinians to Gaza.

“No one wants to see those people trapped indefinitely,” Regev said.

Here’s the part that I think includes a very subtle bias:

Hamas, which wrested control of the Gaza Strip last month, denounced the deal since it allowed Israel to decide who could enter Gaza. Hamas officials and supporters would presumably not be allowed to enter through Israel.

When the AP quotes Israel’s reasons, they nearly always include something like, “Israel says,” as in “Israel says the militants were planting explosives near the fence.” It takes away the certainty of the facts and makes it look like the AP isn’t really sure that Israeli sources were telling the truth. Yet when quoting the anti-Israel forces, the AP allows the facts to be represented as truth and does not include any watering down of those facts. What that paragraph should have said, however, is something like this:

Hamas, which wrested control of the Gaza Strip last month, denounced the deal because Hamas says that it allowed Israel to decide who could enter Gaza. Hamas officials and supporters would presumably not be allowed to enter through Israel.

I know some of you think my radar is set far too sensitively when it comes to anti-Israel media bias. But these are the things I see repeated in stories about Israel, and these are the patterns that I think aid in the delegitimization of Israel, bit by bit.