13-Nov-12: In Gaza, Arab-on-Arab injuries are a daily reality. Why are they so rarely reported?

We have noted here many times that the thuggish rocket-men of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip manage to crash their rockets onto the Arab side of the Gaza/Israel fence regularly. The inevitable injuries and damage that result are, as far as we can tell, never reported. It's only news when the party doing the injuring or damaging is Israel.

In a small effort to correct that distortion, here is a status report from the GANSO website. GANSO describes itself thus:

The Gaza NGO Safety Office (GANSO) is a project of CARE International, funded by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Humanitarian Aid (ECHO) with the aim of providing the information and analysis the NGO community needs in order to implement humanitarian projects safely.

Here's a snapshot of the GANSO "Incident Alerts" page we captured at 10:00 pm, Tuesday night, November 13, 2012.

The "incident" in row 2 reads:

"11/13/2012 13:00 13 NOV, 1300hrs: Pal. ops. fired 1 HMR from E of Jabalia, NG, toward the Green Line. The rocket dropped short and hit a house E of Jabalia, NG. No injuries reported."

We will interpret that for you. In English, in our words, it says:

Palestinian Arab terrorists from among the numerous such murderous groups active here in Gaza under the leadership and direction of Hamas, the Gazan branch of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood, fired a Qassam rocket, likely of the kind manufactured in Iran or China (but that we prefer to call "Home Made Rockets" or HMRs in order to hide what's really going on), in the sort-of-general direction of Israel around 1:00 pm today. They intended to hit civilian Israelis, Israeli property, Israeli schools or Israeli vehicles - in short, anything Israeli. This technique is called taking pot-shots. The rocket, as happens so often when ideological idiots are given access to dangerous tools, did not manage to make it as far as the Gaza/Israel border. Instead it crashed down onto a residential section of the town of Jabalia, a Palestinian Arab settlement located on the northern edge of Gaza City. There, it penetrated the roof of a house. No one dared to report any injuries." 

Interestingly, AFP put out a syndicated news report in the last few hours ["New Israeli warnings on Gaza after rocket fire"] in which this nugget appears:

"Palestinian eyewitnesses on Tuesday afternoon reported new shelling in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, where AFP reporters saw damage to a house."

Image Source

AFP offers no further identifying details. Like all the other news services operating in Gaza, AFP also fails consistently to report on the ongoing phenomenon of Gazan Palestinian Arab rockets falling onto the heads of Gazan Palestinian Arabs. Evidently their customers have no interest in reports of that kind.

This photo (at right) shows the one damaged house in Jabalia that gets into today's news - probably the one seen by the AFP reporter. The caption reads "A Palestinian man inspect damage in his house after an Israeli air strike in the Jabalia refugee camp on November 13, 2012." There's an excellent chance the reporter has either no idea what really caused the damage, or no interest in knowing. Of course, we might be wrong. And so might AFP, but we doubt you will hear them admit that.