MIDDLE EAST: Watching Gaza, from up close and afar
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To no one’s surprise, pan-Arab television news networks such as Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera flooded the airwaves Saturday and Sunday with gruesome images from Gaza, where an Israeli operation to stop to rocket attacks on southern Israel has left scores of Palestinians dead.
But it was somewhat surprising to see how little attention Iraqi news channels gave to the Palestinians’ plight. The crawlers scrolling at the bottom of the screen gave regular updates on Palestinian casualties. But the big news by far is the visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Iraq.
Some in The Times’ Baghdad Bureau sardonically suggested to me that after five years of violence in Iraq, they are unmoved by the suffering of the Palestinians.
Our own Richard Boudreaux, bureau chief in Jersusalem and former boss of our Baghdad office, described the scale of the Israeli offensive in Sunday’s Times:
Hundreds of Israeli armored and infantry soldiers crossed into northern Gaza before dawn Saturday, advanced several miles on militant strongholds in Beit Hanoun and Jabaliya, and dug in for what was expected to be several days of fighting. They targeted sites they said were rocket factories and bunkers manned by launch crews. An airstrike destroyed a truck carrying 160 rockets, the army said. After dark, Israeli warplanes killed seven members of the Hamas-led police force in southern Gaza, two in a car in Khan Yunis and five in a mosque being used at night as a police barracks in Rafah. Three missiles fired from the air early today destroyed the Gaza City building housing Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s offices, which were vacant at the time.
Ashraf Khalil, a former Baghdad staffer (and fellow Chicagoan) who is the latest addition to the Jerusalem Bureau, also reported about a new controversy that erupted after an Israeli official warned Gazans in the harshest of terms:
By allowing constant rocket barrages from Gaza on nearby Israeli cities, the Palestinians, [Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan] Vilnai said, were ‘bringing upon themselves a greater shoah because we will use all our strength in every way we deem appropriate, whether in airstrikes or on the ground.’
Shoah is often translated as Holocaust, but can also mean disaster.
The Times’ Op-Ed section includes a provocative piece by Yossi Klein Halevi describing Israeli’s growing lack of compassion for the plight of Palestinians.
...today the guilty Israeli has become nearly extinct. Just as we came to realize during the first intifada that the occupation was untenable, so we have now come to realize that peace is impossible with Palestinian leaders for whom reconciliation is a one-way process.
— Borzou Daragahi in Baghdad