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Media Studies 131

deployment of an international force to monitor a ceasefire and protect

Palestinian civilians. At the United Nations in New York, Secretary - General
Ban Ki - moon called the attack on the school “ totally unacceptable ” and the
UN demanded an investigation. Israeli media, however, played down the
event. Its main evening news program opened, not with the Palestinian
deaths in Jabalya, but with a story of the four Israeli soldiers killed in
the previous 24 hours. All had been felled by errant shots from fellow
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Israeli forces. The Jabalya school deaths were the third item on the news-
cast, following a piece on the funeral of one of the soldiers, an Israeli
Druze. Commenting on the Jabalya tragedy, an IDF [Israeli Army] spokes-
man said that troops had fired mortar rounds at the school only after

militants barricaded inside shot mortar shells at the Israeli forces. … The
deaths bring the total number of Palestinians killed in 11 days of fi ghting
to 660, Gaza medical staff say. That figure does not include the number

of Hamas militants Israel is said to have slain during the three days of
8
its ground assault.

Notice how this report takes into account what is wrong with the NYT
reporting. It comments on the excuses offered by the Israeli Army for an
atrocity rather accepting them at face value. It thus avoids using them to
frame and preempt the reporting of the facts of the war crime. It also point-
edly juxtaposes excuses with facts, placing the Israeli Army claim that

Palestinian resistance fighters were using civilians as human shields with a
statistic regarding the huge number of Palestinian civilians killed during
the invasion. The implication is that not all of them could have been

simple “ human shields. ” And it uses verbs such as blazed , which suggest
the overwhelming use of force by the Israeli Army against a largely civilian
population.
News reporting often merely reports recent facts and fails to contextual-
ize events by providing a sense of history. The Globe and Mail avoids this
by supplying some historical background to the events in Gaza:

The first is about provenance: Hamas and Hezbollah did not exist before

1982. They are the ideological stepchildren of the Likud party and Ariel
Sharon, whose embrace of violence, racism and colonization as the means
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of dealing with occupied Arab populations ultimately generated a will to
resist. The trio carrying on Mr. Sharon ’ s legacy – Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak
and Tzipi Livni – seem blind to the fact that the more force Israel uses, the
greater the response in the form of more effective resistance. The second

analogy is about technical proficiency. Hamas and Hezbollah have both

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