Palestinian children pay price of Israel's Summer Rain offensive

[Violet_Crumble]

On a humid afternoon, an hour or two after lunch, Nadi al-Attar, 12, set off on a donkey-drawn cart with his grandmother Khariya and two of his young cousins to pick figs from a small orchard near their home in northern Gaza.

Ahmed, 17, one of the cousins, remembers the moment when the shell struck, but pauses as he tells his story to nervously rub the muscles at the top of his thighs. The shell that hit their cart that afternoon sliced off his left leg just above the knee and his right leg halfway up his calf. He still has an aching pain in his bandaged stumps.

They had stopped the cart and two of the boys jumped off. "They went to collect something, some metal bars, and then they came back to the cart," he said. The boys hoped to sell the strips of metal for scrap. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) later determined that the metal came from a launcher for a Qassam, one of the crude rockets launched by Palestinian militants from Gaza into Israel. Qassams had been fired from the area that morning, though the militants had since left.
"Then the shell struck. I saw my mother dead and Nadi killed. I saw them dead on the ground," Ahmed said. "I looked down and then I saw my legs were cut away."

Human rights field workers believe an artillery shell, fired from an Israeli military position not far away at the border with the Gaza Strip, hit the cart. Several were fired that day, July 24 - one day in a long and damaging Israeli military operation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1866230,00.html

[orwell]

1. Summer Rain...

...nice euphemism for death from the skies.

This whole situation is horrifying...

[oblivious]

2. 48 children killed, 400 children injured - attacking donkey carts???

[Tom Joad]

3. Our tax dollars at work. A very sad story. Thanks violet.

[Violet_Crumble]

4. It's very sad...

And it did a very good job of putting a human face on the victims. I've noticed that there's a habit by some folk to reduce them to nothng more than statistics who got in the way/shouldn't have been outside/letting terrorists hide behind them, and though I doubt those who need to see and acknowledge the human dimension will even bother reading past the first sentence of the article, I thought it was worth a try....

[Tom Joad]

5. There have been studies of the corporate media, where any death

of a Jewish Israeli, especially a child, is followed up by stories of the families that grieve for them, and about their lives. That's all as it should be. but in the corporate media, the death of a Palestinian child is lucky to get a name, much less quotes from grieving families. Are they children of a lesser god?

http://www.rememberthesechildren.org

[msmcghee]

6. I'd like to see those studies. Got link? nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. There was the research commissioned on the BBC coverage

4.9 The research also included an analysis of the coverage of the fatalities in the conflict. In
the research period, it appears from the most commonly used data (provided by the Israeli
Government and by the human rights group B’Tselem) that the death of an Israeli killed by the
Palestinian side was more likely to be reported by the BBC than the death of a Palestinian
killed by the Israeli side. In the relevant period, the researchers found that there were some
20/23 Israeli fatalities and 98 Palestinian fatalities.

4.10 The researchers say:
" From our small sample of 'specific number' reports, we can make five tentative
observations: that generally the killing of more than one Israeli by Palestinians either by gun
or bomb were reported on by national broadcast programmes; if one Israeli was killed, the
killing was generally not reported; that 'targeted killings/assassinations' of Palestinians by
Israelis and Israeli air or ground raids were generally not reported on by national broadcast
programmes but were reported by BBC News online; that specific numbers of Palestinian
fatalities were generally not reported by broadcast news programmes; and that, if B'Tselem
figures are correct or if BBC News online reporting provides a more comprehensive account
of Palestinian fatalities, a small percentage of Palestinian fatalities were reported by
broadcast news."

http://www.bbcgovernors.co.uk/docs/reviews/panel_report_final.pdf

That only applies to the BBC, of course.

[Scurrilous]

11. NY Times coverage:

Off the Charts

Accuracy in Reporting of Israel/Palestine

The New York Times

<snip>

"This study consists of a statistical examination of The New York Times’ news coverage of the first year of the current Palestinian uprising, and of its coverage of that uprising in 2004. The categories examined are coverage in headlines or first paragraphs of conflict deaths and, as a subcategory, children’s deaths. In addition, we studied coverage of deaths in complete articles for a sample month-long sub-study in 2004. Our findings indicate significantly distorted coverage by The New York Times of these topics. In the first study period The Times reported Israeli deaths at a rate 2.8 times higher than Palestinian deaths, and in 2004 this rate increased by almost 30%, to 3.6, widening still further the disparity in coverage. The Times’ coverage of children’s deaths was even more skewed. In the first year of the current uprising, Israeli children’s deaths were reported at 6.8 times the rate of Palestinian children’s deaths. In 2004 this differential also increased, with deaths of Israeli children covered at a rate 7.3 times greater than the deaths of Palestinian children. Given that in 2004 22 times more Palestinian children were killed than Israeli children, this category holds particular importance. We could find no basis on which to justify this inequality in coverage."

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[Douglas Carpenter]

14. that whole website is an excellent resource....thank you

http://ifamericansknew.org/



And the name sums it all up: IF AMERICANS KNEW


.

[Violet_Crumble]

13. Thanks for posting that link...

I'll have a read through that today :)

[Tom Joad]

9. www.nytimes.com www.sfgate.com www.latimes.com

[msmcghee]

10. Yeah, that's what I thought. n/t

[breakaleg]

7. That's so true.

When I read the news, you hear all of the background on the Israeli casualty while the Palestinian ones are refered to by a body count.

[Scurrilous]

12. The Twilight Zone / The boy who was buried twice

<snip>

"Abdullah a-Zakh identified his son's body by the belt. The shoes and socks also looked familiar, irrefutable proof that he had lost his son. In the morgue of Shifa Hospital, after hours of searching, he found the bottom part of the boy's body. The next day, when Operation "Gan Na'ul" - "Locked Kindergarten" - ended and the Israel Defense Forces exited the Saja'iya neighborhood of Gaza, leaving behind 22 dead and large-scale destruction, the other body parts were found.

Mohammed was buried twice. He was 14 years old at the time of his death. He was killed last week, three days before the start of the new school year, so he never got to enter ninth grade. Did the planners of the operation give thought to the children who would be killed before giving it the satanic name "Locked Kindergarten"? Did the IDF computer that comes up with the names know that there would be five children and adolescents among the dead? Did they think about the popular song that the operation's name evokes? It was unpleasant, very unpleasant (in the words of the song) this week to see the results of Locked Kindergarten in the Saja'iya neighborhood in the eastern section of Gaza City.

This sprawling, overcrowded residential neighborhood was occupied for almost a week by the IDF. The army wreaked destruction in it. A monstrous bulldozer maliciously potholed a few roads, scarring the asphalt with gaping wounds, for no apparent reason. Houses were hit, street tiling was uprooted, electricity poles were cut down, cars were crushed, dozens of trees were destroyed and 22 residents were killed. For almost a week the tens of thousands of residents lived in terror, some of them unable to leave their homes."

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