What’s missing from this headline?
Rocket hits Israeli city near Egypt border
Let’s think about it before reading the lead paragraphs. A rocket was fired into Israel and hit a city of many thousands, a city right neear the Egyptian border. Hm. What could possibly be missing from this headline?
The origination point of the rocket, perhaps?
A rocket fired from Egypt’s Sinai desert hit a southern Israeli resort city early Thursday, police said, raising new concerns about militant activity in the mountainous peninsula. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the Sinai was becoming a “terror zone.”
No injuries were reported in the overnight strike against Eilat, a normally tranquil Red Sea vacation spot. Eilat is set to welcome thousands of visitors this weekend for the Passover holiday.
And note that since the very first sentence tells you where the rocket originated, this was the editor’s choice–to minimize the attack on Israel from Egyptian territory. And though it’s extremely rare that rockets are fired from Egypt, but you don’t find that out until the eleventh paragraph of a seventeen-paragraph story.
Palestinian militants regularly fire rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel, but launches from Egyptian territory are rare.
Thursday’s launch appeared to be the first cross-border rocket attack from Egypt since Mubarak’s fall. Rockets last hit Eilat and the nearby Jordanian town of Aqaba in 2010, killing one person and wounding four.
That would be the attack that killed and wounded Jordanians, not Israelis, probably the only reason it was mentioned. Because the AP tallies all Israeli counter-attacks and enumerates all Palestinian casualties. The reverse is almost never the case, just as the news media rarely name Israeli victims of terror, while always naming dead Palestinians.
Happy Passover, Israel! Do you like the gift that Egypt sent you?
In every generation, they rise up against us. Yeah, we’ll be saying that tomorrow night.