“…one man was killed in a strike in the Jebaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza. Separate airstrikes killed five other Palestinians — including a young teenage boy east of Gaza City and three children — two brothers and their cousin — who were playing in southern Gaza, according to Health Ministry official Moaiya Hassanain. One of the three reportedly was decapitated…”

That’s MSNBC.

Notice that this information is buried in the center of a long column, in paragraph 12, long after a casual reader’s eye has wandered away.

What does the reader retain?

1. The headline:  

Israel lets 300 with foreign passports exit Gaza –

Airstrikes hit mosque, Hamas homes; troops await possible ground assault

(Comment: Obviously the airstrikes also hit civilians and children, but that doesn’t make it to the headlines. And that tag about waiting for a ground assault lets you know implicitly that whatever is going on now is NOT an assault. 

2. Paragraph one:

“Israel bombed a mosque it claimed was used to store weapons and destroyed homes of more than a dozen Hamas operatives Friday, but under international pressure, the government allowed hundreds of Palestinians with foreign passports to leave besieged Gaza…”

Notice the word “claim,” which sounds even-handed; it makes you think the piece is neutral. Then, notice the use of the phrase “Hamas operative” that is also repeated in the body several times before the civilians deaths are described. 

Now here’s Die Welt‘ s opening paragraph: 

“Israel killed a senior Hamas leader in an air attack on his home on Thursday, striking its first blow against the top ranks of the Islamist group in a offensive that has claimed more than 400 Palestinian lives. Nizar Rayyan, a cleric widely regarded as one of Hamas’s most hardline political leaders, had called for renewed suicide bombings inside Israel.

“The deadliest conflict in the Gaza Strip in four decades has killed at least 412 Palestinians and wounded some 1,850. About a quarter of the dead were civilians, the U.N. estimates….”

It also doesn’t mention the casualties today at the top, but at least it tries to provide some context for the story.

There has to be a better way than this.  So much for our obsession with “IQs”, “quants”, “geeks”, “rocket science”, “smart bombs” (like the 2000 pounder dropped on Gaza earlier this week). We’ve had a year where all this high-powered intelligence, delinked from common-sense and conscience, turned out to be as sub-prime as any of the debt it was sending out to the four corners of the globes.

We have more technology and science at our finger tips than any civilization in history – so much as we know of it.

But when it comes to conflict resolution (a poli sci term I detest), we’re back to the mindless world of carnivores and sharks.

Over 60,000 Muslims protested the attacks on Gaza, in countries ranging from Turkey to Egypt, Jordan, Aghanistan, and Indonesia.

They were joined by protestors in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, Omar Barghouti provides the context for the media disinformation on the assault on Palestine:

 “An Israeli army spokeswoman went further stating. “Anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target.” Given that, in the ghetto of Gaza, Hamas is effectively the “ruling” party  — it was democratically elected, after all — and its network of social and charitable organizations are the largest provider of social services to the impoverished and besieged population, all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, public schools, hospitals, universities, law and order organs, traffic police, sewage treatment and water purification stations, ministries providing vital services to the public, mosques, public theatres and many non-governmental institutions can technically be considered “affiliated” with Hamas. Lest the reader feels that this is an exaggeration, today, in the first hours of the first day of the new year, the Israeli air force already bombed the following “targets” in Gaza: the Palestinian Legislative Council, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Justice. Earlier, several mosques were pulverised to the ground. So were main buildings in the Islamic University of Gaza, which serves 20,000 students. Ambulances and private homes were not spared either…..”