Friday, February 08, 2008
Elder of Ziyon
Hamas policemen seized a convoy of humanitarian aid bound for the Palestinian Red Crescent on Thursday evening, the second convoy it has taken from the aid agency, aid employees said.This article was essentially ignored by newspapers and other Web news outlets outside of Israel, and only a handful mentioned it buried in other articles about Gaza. And absolutely no one goes slightly beyond the article to ask the basic question of how much of Gaza's "humanitarian crisis" is being engineered by Hamas itself.
Policemen from Hamas halted 14 trucks filled with food and medicine at a checkpoint after it crossed an Israeli checkpoint into Gaza on Thursday, said employees of the Palestinian Red Crescent, who declined to be named, fearing reprisals from ruling group Hamas. A Hamas official said the aid was seized because the organization was distributing aid to former Fatah fighters and not to impoverished Palestinians.
Employees from the Red Crescent said they were meant to distribute the aid to some 8,000 needy Gaza residents from lists of people the organization keeps. The aid came from the organization's regional headquarters in Jordan, an employee said.
...The food aid was unloaded in the warehouses of the Hamas Ministry of Social Affairs, and two trucks of medicine were taken to a nearby Hamas-run hospital, he said.
The employee said that it was the second time Hamas policemen seized aid meant for the Red Crescent. Last month the group seized the aid from warehouses.
On a similar note, the number of Qassam rockets fired at Israel has increased dramatically in the past few days compared to a relative lull for a couple of weeks. This issue is also being all but ignored by news outlets, mentioning them in passing in other articles about the Egypt/Gaza border, for example. The fact that there are as few casualties in Sderot as there are is nothing short of a miracle.
Finally, yesterday's AP story of Hamas hiding rockets in a school was also picked up by only a dozen or so newspapers worldwide according to Google News counts.
Each of these stories show that Hamas and its partners are engaging in daily war crimes according to the Geneva Conventions. Shooting indiscriminately at civilians, using civilian areas to hide legitimate military targets and confiscating humanitarian aid are all explicitly illegal in international law as well as humanitarian law.
While Israel is constantly being accused of war crimes, either explicitly in the media or by their quoting handpicked "experts" to confirm the bias of the reporters, Palestinian Arab terror actions - all of these three in the past 24 hours - get a free pass, either ignored completely or reported in a passive manner.
The media is a big part of the problem, and a large reason why Hamas feels that it can act with impunity.
