Yassin was by far the most senior Palestinian militant killed in more than three years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Since September 2000, 474 people — the majority of them Israelis — have been killed in 112 Palestinian suicide bombings. [more]
I would like to point your attention here not to any more details or comments on Yassin, Hamas, or Israel's official policy of murdering people it doesn't like--with reason or no--and the civilians that happen to be in the way, or even on the Hamas strategy of suicide bombing (which of course I emphatically condemn), but to a rather obvious omission that this paragraph begs: in this three years of Intifada, how many Palestinians were killed?
I see this a lot, it seems. The media--American, at least--will report the number of Israelis that were killed since Intifida, but most of the time the number of Palestinians killed in the same time period will go wholly unmentioned.
Well, I'll tell you. I'll give you the other half of the bookends to the number of 474 fatalities suffered on the Israeli side: according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, as of this writing,
the total number of Palestinian deaths in West Bank & Gaza since Sept 29th, 2000 is: 2,780.
I think--what with my rather elementary grasp of the basic concepts of 'formal journalism'--that if you are going to mention the total casualties of one side in a war, that it is really only perfunctory, it would seem, that you also mention the casualties on the other side . . . don't you think?
Does only one side suffer in a war?
And here, dear reader, I would like to plead with you two things (and I am only addressing the compassionate among you): whenever you see any reports of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine in the media, I beseech you to look for two things:
1) When the number of Israeli deaths since Intifada are given, are the numbers for Palestinian deaths also given?
2) Since Intifada, how much land have the Israelis stolen from the Palestinians? And to be fair: how much land have the Palestinians stolen from Israel?
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