https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-takes-responsibility-who-else-does-gaza-hamas-war-bombing-ab8f4556
The breaking-news alerts on your smartphone seldom tell the whole story. Journalists are masters of compression, and the alert is a direct line to readers’ eyeballs. No room for elegance. No space for slant. So instead of complexity you get the short version—the convenient take or the capsule commentary.
Usually that’s enough to get the gist in a busy world. But every once in a while you get more than you bargained for in a bubble notice. You get facts that go beyond the news and reveal a deeper truth.
“Breaking News,” bleated my iPhone Tuesday morning with an alert from the Journal. “Israel has taken responsibility for a strike that has killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu said it was unintentional.”
War is hell. Everyone knows that. Bullets don’t discriminate. No bomb is smarter than the person who dispatches it. When the skies are full of lead, accidents are bound to happen, and when they do, political spinmeisters step forward to deny, deflect, delay and distract.
Not here. Israel has taken responsibility. What a concept.
And what a contrast with its adversary. The only thing Hamas takes responsibility for is doing what it loves: spreading terror and delivering death. When a bomb goes off in a marketplace, it claims responsibility. When a crazed maniac knifes random people on a bus, it claims responsibility. But when the subject is its failure to give Gazans a better life, Hamas throws up its arms. It didn’t take responsibility for the lies it told about the misfired terrorist rocket that hit Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital in October, or for that matter for using the hospital as a command center. It doesn’t take responsibility for the human calamity it has unleashed on its people with the unspeakable atrocities of Oct. 7.
