NYT: Hamas upgrades = success / Israel defends = disaster

The NYT today features two articles about Israel’s war against Hamas that are rather revealing. One is Striking Deep Into Israel, Hamas Employs an Upgraded Rocket Arsenal, and the second is In Dense Gaza, Civilians Suffer They are revealing both for what they say and don’t say as well as their juxtaposition.

In the first, the reporter describes the efforts Hamas has made to upgrade its arsenal to threaten (and attack) Israel.

For Hamas, a group largely confined to a sliver of land along the Mediterranean Sea, attacking Israeli cities with a rocket barrage has proved an effective strategy to reduce the advantage of Israel’s expensive arsenal of fighter jets and warships.

That strategy was used successfully by Hezbollah militants against Israel in Lebanon in 2006, although Hezbollah had access to missiles and rockets far more sophisticated than those being used by Hamas. Israeli officials said that Hamas was still relying on unguided rockets, rather than guided weapons like the Iranian-made C-802 cruise missile that Hezbollah used against an Israeli ship during the summer of 2006.

Notice how the first paragraph quoted first starts with describing Hamas’s limitations and then tells us that the terrorist group has come up with “an effective strategy.”

Hamas and other militant groups have lobbed thousands of rockets into Israel since 2001. The difference now, officials said, is that Hamas is using more of the imported Katyusha rockets, which have a longer range than the crude, homemade Qassam rockets it relied on in the past. Officials say the group has been emboldened to improve its arsenal since it routed its rival, Fatah, in 2007 and assumed control of Gaza.

“Lobbed,” I suppose, is an improvement over “nagged,” but “fired” would have been more accurate. And “fired thousands of rockets at civilian targets” would have more accurate still. “Lobbed” is what you do to a baseball when throwing to a young child.

An American counterterrorism official said it was rare for Hamas to try to smuggle complete weapons systems into Gaza. More frequently, he said, rocket parts were taken through the tunnels and assembled inside Gaza by Hamas munitions experts.

For years the Israelis have complained that Hamas has been smuggling in weapons and most of the media report but pay little attention to those claims. Well they’ve been pretty well confirmed now, haven’t they?

Israeli officials have said their objective in carrying out airstrikes on Gaza is to end Hamas’s ability to carry out further rocket attacks. But analysts said that goal could require Israeli ground troops to strike into Gaza, in operations that could run the risk of fighting an entrenched guerrilla war in a densely populated area.

“The problem you have to consider from an Israeli perspective is that you score most of your victories from the air in the first 48 hours. Afterward, you get into punitive damage,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

So the Times gets an expert who claims that all the Israseli attacks are now “punitive.” (The second day of the war Sunday.) This is important for the second story about the toll Israel’s attacks have taken on civilians in Gaza. But notice in this article about Hamas’s weaponry there’s not a word about the damage done to civilians in Israel. The article remains dry and technical and vaguely admiring of Hamas. No personal touches like in the other article.

In April, the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center released a report saying Hamas had been engaged in a military buildup since the group took control of Gaza in June 2007. The report cited data by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, asserting that Hamas had smuggled at least 80 tons of explosives into Gaza since then, and that the group had obtained advanced antitank weapons.

A senior Hamas leader called the report an “exaggeration” intended to scare Israelis.

Even now that Israeli claims about Hamas’s weapons smuggling are being confirmed the Times avails itself of an opportunity to get a denial from Hamas and leaves it at that.

As I noted this first article is rather dry and technical, the second article, the one about Israeli damage to Gaza is not.

The day before, Dr. Madhoun, a general practitioner, was in an ambulance responding to an Israeli strike at the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza. Another missile hit the ambulance. The driver, Muhammad Abu Hasira, died instantly. Dr. Madhoun lingered for a day, dying of his wounds on Wednesday in the intensive care unit of Shifa Hospital, where hundreds of people have been brought since Israel began its heaviest assault on Gaza in three decades.

The dentist cried.

“He was just doing his work,” said the dentist, who would not give his name. “He’s a doctor, and I can’t understand why Israel would hit an ambulance. They can tell from the cameras it’s an ambulance.”

All we have here is the claim of the dentist. Do we know that Israel targeted the ambulance? Or was the ambulance in the wrong place when Israel attacked a legitimate target? But to set the tone of the report, we learn that Israel killed a doctor who was helping save others.

It has always been this way, over years of conflict here, that civilians are killed in the densely populated Gaza Strip when Israel stages military operations it says are essential for its security. But five days of Israeli airstrikes have surpassed past operations in scale and intensity; the long-distance bombardment of the Hamas-controlled territory has, however well aimed at those suspected of being militants, splintered families and shattered homes in one of the most densely populated places on Earth.

Israel “says” that its attacks “are essential for its security.” Left unsaid, is that the reporter doesn’t think so. And of course he ends with the idea that Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth, a claim that is convenient but dubious.

Among the total dead — between 320 and 390, according to the United Nations — Palestinian medical officials say that 38 were children and 25 were women. The United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees said 25 percent of those killed had been civilians. Israel said it knew of 40 civilian deaths but that it was still checking.

Now the math here is pretty sketchy. If the death toll so far is the lower number, 320, then 63 dead is less than 25 percent of, but the reporter doesn’t tell us that the percentage is wrong or even leave it out. And of course if the possible number of dead range from 320 to 390 it says that the count isn’t very accurate. Elder of Ziyon noted on Tuesday a somewhat lower number of women and children killed. And of course that doesn’t take into account that a 17 year old with a weapon might still be classified as a child. (It’s an observation I’ve seen elsewhere, but don’t remember the source. UPDATE: The source is here. I’m embarrassed!)

On the issue of civilian casualties, Israeli officials maintain that they do not take aim at civilians and do everything possible — like using precision-guidance systems, up-to-the minute intelligence, leaflets and phone calls to targeted areas — to avoid hitting them.

They say killing and wounding civilians only undermines their primary mission: to stop Hamas from firing rockets into civilian areas of Israel.

“I haven’t seen too many tears shed in Paris, London or Berlin over the fact that we have hit Hamas targets,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert. “So we have many reasons, both moral and political, for doing the utmost to make sure that our strikes are as surgical as possible.”

Further complicating matters is that fact that Gaza is the size of Detroit, with one and a half times as many people. The military and government facilities of Hamas are intertwined with buildings where Gaza’s civilian population lives and works. Israelis say Hamas fires rockets at Israel from civilian neighborhoods.

Left out of this discussion is any mention that the Geneva conventions explicitly declare that placing military resources in civilian areas does not render them immune from attack. And while it’s true that the Geneva conventions are contradictory on this point, doesn’t the Hamas tactic of locating its military facilities in civilian neighborhoods warrant a judgment of some sort?

Finally, of course, Israel doesn’t just “say” that Hamas fires from civilian neighborhoods, that’s a fact that’s been confirmed. Again the reporter weasels out of reporting by reducing it to an Israeli claim.

In the debate over civilian casualties, there is no clear understanding of what constitutes a military target. Palestinians argue that because Hamas is also the government in Gaza, many of the police officers who have been killed were civil servants, not hard-core militants. Israel disagrees, asserting also that a university chemistry laboratory, which it claims was used for making rockets, was a fair target in an attack this week, even if it could not show conclusively that those inside the laboratory at the time where engaged in making weapons.

This debate is between a terrorist organization and a lawful government and the Times, of course, introduces nuance when there is none. Why should Israel have to show that a laboratory was being used for weapons production at the time it was it?

The report contains two more stories of civilans who were killed or injured in Israeli attacks, so you know which side of the debate the reporter and paper are on. Recall too, that the report about Hamas’s upgrading its weaponry didn’t focus on any Israeli who was hurt or killed by Hamas’s attacks.

Taken together these two reports perfectly illustrate the bias that is rife in so much of the reporting from Israel.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.