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Media Studies 129

Israeli Army in a war crime is given, but it is qualified by information such

as the mention of the Hamas fighters that makes the Israeli bombing seem
a defensive action.
In another New York Times news account, the Palestinian defenders are
more explicitly characterized negatively. They dress in civilian clothes, and

they engage in trickery rather than fighting in the open. Gaza, it reports,
has been turned into

a deadly maze of tunnels, booby traps and sophisticated roadside bombs.
Weapons are hidden in mosques, schoolyards and civilian houses, and the
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leadership ’ s war room is a bunker beneath Gaza ’ s largest hospital, Israeli

intelligence officials say. Unwilling to take Israel ’ s bait and come into the

open, Hamas militants are fighting in civilian clothes; even the police have
5
been ordered to take off their uniforms.
Implicit in this description is the assumption that if the Palestinians use
civilian locations such as schoolyards and hospitals to conduct their mili-

tary efforts, then the Israelis are justified in attacking such sites. Notice that
much of the information presented as fact is a report by Israeli intelligence,
but one does not learn this fact until the end of a long sentence laying out
Israeli intelligence assertions as facts, so that the facts are not presented as
being a skewed report by the invaders designed to justify the invasion.
Sometimes the placement of a phrase such as “ according to Israeli intelli-
gence ” can make all the difference. Placed at the beginning of a report, it
frames it as opinion, but placed at the end, it is a qualifier to material

presented already as fact. The New York Times did not take the trouble to

talk to Hamas and to find out what their intelligence service was saying
about the Israeli invasion.
The reporting by the Times was at times even more polemical. In this
account, the school attack is explicitly justifi ed:

Your unit, on the edges of the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya, has taken

mortar fire from the crowded refugee camp nearby. You prepare to return
fire, and perhaps you notice – or perhaps you don ’ t, even though it ’ s on your

map – that there is a United Nations school just there, full of displaced
Text not available in the electronic edition
Gazans. You know that international law allows you to protect your soldiers
and return fire, but also demands that you ensure that there is no excessive

harm to civilians. Do you remember all that in the chaos? You pick GPS -
guided mortars, which are supposed to be accurate and of a specifi c explosive

force, and fire back. In the end, you kill some Hamas fighters but also,

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