Jeremy Hammond, editor of the online Foreign Policy Journal, points out that Israel is no less responsible for the breakdown of its cease-fire with Gaza than Hamas is. His claim, which is verifiable from news sources, challenges the usual American media description of the border conflict as a deadly pingpong game in which Hamas serves—by lobbing rockets across the border into Israel—and Israel merely returns, with measures seen as retaliatory because provocations by Israel are underreported.
"Israel violated the cease-fire from the start," Hammond wrote at the end of December. "According to the U.N. [and as reported by Reuters], Israeli soldiers on numerous occasions fired upon Gaza farmers trying to work their land near the border. An 82-year-old man was injured in one such incident on June 27. In another shooting incident, a Palestinian woman was wounded."
And when the cease-fire began, Israel only raised the number of allowed shipments of food, water, fuel and medicine to Gaza to about 20 percent of normal, according to ex-President Jimmy Carter.
More recently, on November 4—after finding a tunnel it claimed had been dug to funnel militants under the border—Israel hit the Gaza Strip with an air strike that killed five Palestinians and wounded others; forced a shutdown of Gaza City's power plant; and blocked 30 trucks carrying humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.
"Yet," Hammond writes, "the New York Times and other major corporate news outlets have virtually wiped the Israeli violation of the cease-fire [in November] from history. … The New York Times… either finds that violation unfit for print or references it in couched language, such as by saying simply that the truce 'began to unravel in early November', as though this unraveling were some strange phenomenon with no known causal factors."
At press time Israel's current ground offensive in Gaza had killed 900, wounded thousands more, and racked up an unknown toll of disability and death from shortages of human necessities. Has it all made Israel safer? Hammond points out that "although sporadic rocket attacks had occurred during the cease-fire, no Israelis were killed," Israel is now incurring casualties in retaliation for the attack on Gaza.
