The AP has edited its reprehensible headline, but the story remains an example of the anti-Israel bias typical of the world media.
Gaza truce recedes as rockets hit Israel
Now, the headline mentions the rocketing that caused the IDF to fire missiles at the terrorists. But the lead still sucks.
Barrages of rockets fired from Gaza hit Israeli towns Sunday and the Israeli air force responded with a missile strike as violence surged following the official expiration of a shaky truce with Hamas.
Only one Israeli was lightly wounded in the barrage. But after a weekend of heavy rocket attacks, Israel’s government threatened to strike back hard to the continued assaults.
The “shaky truce” produced nonstop rocket and mortar barrages. Not every day, no, but they never stopped. There was no truce—only a “calm.”
And then there’s the modifier of “only” one Israeli being wounded. When a Palestinian is wounded, have you ever seen the AP describe it as “only one Palestinian was wounded in the Israeli strike”? No, you have not.
Buried near the end of the AP story is the information that should have been in the lead: It’s only by chance that no Israelis were killed in the rocket barrage.
On Sunday, one rocket scored a direct hit on a house in the town of Sderot, the blast scattering rubble and furniture inside. “Everyone is traumatized,” the house’s owner, Maya Aviar, told AP Television News.
No one was injured in that attack, but the Israeli military said a worker at a farming community near Gaza was lightly wounded by shrapnel in a separate rocket hit. Another rocket landed in an industrial zone in Ashkelon, a city of about 120,000 people 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of Gaza.
If you’d like to know the total number of rockets and mortars sent into Israel, refer to Elder of Ziyon’s Rocket calendar. Because the AP won’t tell you until the very last paragraph of its stories. That would be the one that always gets lopped off by your local paper. Here’s the last paragraph of this story:
On Saturday, militants fired more than 30 rockets and mortar shells into Israel, and the Israeli air force killed one militant who was launching rockets.
You see Meryl, just as WE should have responded to 9/11 with only intelligences and police actions, Israel should only respond to rocket attacks with “overtures” and “negotiation”. The reason is that neither of our countries were “existentially” threatened by these actions. The only time you can use military force is if you’re worried that your entire COUNTRY will be wiped out (for the US, that pretty much means an asteroid strike. Goodbye, Army and Navy. Hello Asteroid Deflection Corps).
The death of a few hundred or thousand individual citizens is of no importance. They should accept their deaths as part of the give and take of the peace process. To actually take offense at these attacks would me “we have become our enemies”
So how many psychiatiric casualties have there been among the Israeli civilians of Sderot and the nearby region during Hamas’ long campaign to destroy that town? Got to add the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder victims to the killed and wounded. Didn’t you link to a story not long ago about high levels of stress among Israeli children? It must be at sky-high rates in Sderot.
Nobody will take care of the Jews if the Jews don’t take care of themselves. Hamas is making war against Israel. Both its actions and its talk declare that. Make war on Hamas back, more than the Gazans can stomach. To any states that object, Israel should say “If you love these terrorists so much, you take the Gazans into your own country, so they can send suicide bombers onto your busses and into your hospitals and shoot rockets at your schools. We will not tolerate them any longer.”