Razing Amona

"Palestinian homes are being systematically bulldozed all over the West Bank,"
What Gradstein didn?t mention-- and what someone who relied on NPR for their Middle Eastern news would have little idea of -- was that this has been in no way a period of calm for Palestinians. In fact, in the three-week period that Gradstein referred to, at least 26 Palestinians were killed by occupation forces-- more than one a day.
Media critic Ali Abunimah documented the killings in a letter of protest to NPR (1/8/02), starting with 13-year-old Rami Khamis Al-Zorob, shot in the head on December 13 while playing near his home in Rafah, Gaza. Most of the deaths cited by Abunimah were of unarmed civilians; six were minors, ranging in age from 12 to 17.
(1/6/05) Morning Edition aired a correction of sorts: "We could have given more context for his statement. We said it was in response to violence, but did not specify that the violence was an Israeli tank shell that killed seven Palestinians." What the correction still left out was that the Palestinians were all children, ranging in age from 10 to 17.
Days before the advertisement appeared on April 8, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights had been arrested while participating in nonviolent civil disobedience against Israeli demolition of houses. "Palestinian homes are being systematically bulldozed all over the West Bank," said a bulletin from Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia. "In this case, there isn''t any pretense of ''security interests'' or ''military targets.'' The houses destroyed yesterday and today belong to ordinary Palestinian citizens whose only crime is the wish to have a roof over their heads."
But the portrayal of Israel as the innocent victim in the Gaza conflict is hard to square with the death toll in the months leading up to the current crisis; between September 2005 and June 2006, 144 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli forces, according to a list compiled by the Israeli human rights group B''tselem; 29 of those killed were children. During the same period, no Israelis were killed as a result of violence from Gaza.
In the three weeks leading up to the Hamas raid, three separate Israeli missile strikes killed 20 innocent Palestinians and injured dozens more. One incident, the shelling of a family on the beach in Beit Lahiya, garnered much U.S. media attention at the time, but the very same media seemed unable to recall it only a few weeks later.
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