With all the coverage of the Gaza border, these five out-takes deserve closer attention:
Washington Post on one family’s reunion:
Along one teeming road in the Egyptian part of Rafah, a Hamas security official who had been stranded on Egypt’s side of the border since June — fearing arrest by Israel during a crossing if he tried to return — met his mother and sisters in the surging crowd. “Eight months I haven’t seen him!” his mother exclaimed after a flurry of hugging and kissing.
The man excused himself for not talking. “I’m on the wanted list,” he explained.
Noah Pollak on Egypt’s role:
Egypt has been hoisted with its own petard, and it is really quite enjoyable to see from a strategic perspective. Hamas probably blew up the border fence with explosives that Egypt allowed it to smuggle into Gaza. Heh.
Daily Telegraph reporter Tim Butcher gets too curious about one man’s shopping spree:
Fertiliser, broken down into half bags for lugging through the many tunnels that arms smugglers normally use for delivery into Gaza, was to be seen as it was manhandled overland.
It was white, oily, crystalline and a dab on the tongue left a sharp, burning sensation.
In most countries fertiliser has a perfectly innocent function but in Gaza militants use it to make explosive.
“Hey, hey, hey,” shouted a man as I took a photograph of a pile of fertiliser half bags.
His aggressive tone jarred with the mood the crowd as he grabbed my camera lens firmly.
Christian Science Monitor on Gaza hunger:
While starvation has not been a problem there – most of the strip’s residents receive food aid from the UN – it’s proved a powerful idea in the propaganda war over Gaza’s fate.
Deborah Orr on collective punishment:
Those Palestinians unfortunate enough to live in camps in Lebanon, for example, are not utterly deprived of rights, and dependent on UN aid, because of Israeli policy alone. Pan-Arab policy also dictates that the Palestinians should live in absolute hardship, lest they decide to play into the hands of Israel, by abandoning the struggle and quietly assimilating and getting on with their lives. . . .
[Hamas] sees the suffering of Gazans as a tool in the fight for international attention, and a necessary component of the only war it can really afford to wage – the propaganda war.
