Today's New York Times takes the time to report on the misery of the Gazans during the IDF incursion, painting a sympathetic picture of families displaced by the fighting. Steve Erlanger manages to portray the Palestinians in Gaza as victims of the Israelis while never mentioning the broader context of the conflict:

Khairi Edbary and his family of eight normally share a tiny concrete house with his brother and his family of eight, with a raw dividing wall of concrete blocks providing a touch of privacy. These days, however, the house is almost empty. The Edbarys live on the eastern edge of the broken runway of what was once the Gaza airport, which has now been taken over by Israeli troops.

Like many of the people here, mostly poor farmers, the Edbarys have heeded the Israeli call to evacuate their homes to escape the fighting and are sleeping in United Nations schools in nearby Rafah. ...

In the last week, the agency has opened two schools in Rafah to house the displaced people of Shuka and southern Gaza. There are about 1,000 people in 136 families at the two schools, sleeping on thin mattresses in empty classrooms, said Jamal Hamad, an agency spokesman, “but the numbers are increasing every day.”

Initially, people like Fayez Sawarka, 40, stayed at home. But the Israeli incursion into the airport and its neighborhood, with tanks and armored bulldozers and artillery, destroyed some of the narrow roads and made it difficult if not impossible for farmers to get to their fields or to bring in food.

The second half of Erlanger's story revolved around the deepening humanitarian crisis that the Gaza incursion has created. However, Erlanger never bothers to mention the cause of the crisis, which was an act of war committed by terrorists with direct associations with the ruling party in the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians brought this response on themselves, and they now have to live with it or get rid of the leaders who provoked it.

The Times reveals its bias in its singular focus on the misery of the Gazans. The UN's chief on site makes the only mention of Palestinian attacks on Israelis, and that only briefly, I do not recall the Times running a series of articles on the misery of Israelis in Sderot, who for months have had Kassam rockets raining down on their heads from Gaza launch sites. The Times, to my knowledge, never published an in-depth sympathy piece on the fear and despair caused by Palestinian terrorist attacks on falafel stands or commuter bus bombings in Israel.

No one doubts that the Palestinians in Gaza live in misery. Sympathy for them only extends to their historical selection of the worst leadership they could possibly find. The Palestinians in Gaza have had billions of dollars in Western investment and aid, and they have destroyed it with their terrorist attacks and acts of war. They are the authors of their own misery. If the Times wants to highlight their humanitarian crisis, it would do so more honestly if their reporters pointed out that central fact.

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