Israel strikes Gaza

This morning's news:

"Israeli aircraft attacked police and security installations across the Gaza Strip, killing scores of people in the deadliest raid since the occupation of the coastal region ended in 2005, security and medical officials said.

As many as 200 people were killed and 750 injured, including women and children, Mu’awia Hassanien, a Palestinian medical-services official in Gaza, said today. Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, called the air strike a massacre and said it would retaliate. At least 30 rockets were fired from Gaza today, Israel Radio reported, killing a woman in Netivot. "

In expectation of the media's usual expostulations:

"Hamas, and its supporters in the West, can have no complaints about the unfolding Israeli operation. They have repeatedly declared their lack of interest in extending the recently expired ceasefire and their determination to keep on attacking Israel with all the means at their disposal. Indeed, this morning’s air attacks are a sign that Jerusalem views them with the respect and seriousness that parties to armed conflict always owe to their most challenging adversaries.

It’s possible that Hamas’s leaders had started to believe their own propaganda about their organization’s strength and Israel’s moral weakness, and think that they had achieved a level of strategic deterrence such as that which prevails between Israel and Hezbollah. If this was the case, then it’s good that the process of disabusing them of these beliefs has begun before they had a chance to make them a reality. While the vulnerability of Israel to mass rocket attacks against its civilian population and the concomitant restraints on its freedom of action was indeed demonstrated by the Second Lebanon War, the same conflict also demonstrated the foolishness of allowing enemies just over the border to acquire such an arsenal and the infrastructure to support it."

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And here is the usual fare from "alternative" sources:

The US media would like to paint a picture of precise surgical strikes aimed only at Hamas. This is impossible in Gaza, the most densely populated place on Earth. Even the IDF concedes as much: "The IDF emphasized that civilians located in areas whence Palestinians launch rockets and who quarter Hamas operatives in their homes are liable to be hurt. The targets that were hit included training camps and installations as well as police stations, some of whom were located in civilian buildings." Writing in Ha'aretz, Amos Harel also presents an alternative view: "However the Israeli opening salvo is not merely another "surgical" operation or pinpoint strike. This is the harshest IDF assault on Gaza since the territory was captured during the Six-Day War in 1967."
How does a writer reporting and opining about this latest attack on Gaza manage to present it as sheer Israeli brutality, fire raining down on poor starving Palestinians out of nowhere?

There is a tactical scheme to an alternative news reviewer:

- he describes the awful gore of injury and death in the most graphic detail,

- he then resorts to tagging a term on these graphic pictures (massacres, unspeakable atrocities, crimes against humanity, etc)

and most importantly,

- he meticulously excises any reference to what had brought on this attack. Thus we are unlikely to be reminded that

"From January 1 until December 21, Hamas and its allies had launched exactly 1,250 rockets across the border between Gaza and Israel."

and that:

"over 80 Qassam missiles were fired into Israeli towns on Wednesday" alone, or that this has been an on-going policy by Hamas even while a nominal ceasefire was being observed.

So Hamas got the bloody confrontation it was angling for, and Israel, once again, is seen as the bully of the Middle East

So what else is new?

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Update: From Solomonia

And this: Herewith the first in a two-part guide to the 10 most gratuitous, least productive, most resolutely ingenuous claims likely to be hurled in an effort to attack Israel.

Update: From the Augean Stables