Dear Editor:
The article "The War in Gaza is Making Thousands of Orphans" is just one of a constant drumbeat of articles, in The New York Times and other newspapers, highlighting suffering in Gaza. Like almost all those articles, it omits even hinting at crucial context and information one should be able to expect, such as the war being started with a barbaric massacre executed by Hamas with the participation of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah, other Gaza terror groups and thousands of ordinary Gaza "civilians," the proportion of civilian casualties being far below the norm for modern urban warfare, and the way Hamas deliberately uses civilians as human shields and considers each civilian casualty a strategic asset. Never reported is whether the families involved contain terrorists belonging to Hamas or one of the other terror groups, participated in October 7, or are among the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs supporting Hamas and proud of October 7.
In sharp contrast, we rarely see articles about the innocent people in Gaza who are suffering the most, the hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, subject to horrendous conditions (itself a gross understatement) and not infrequently murdered. We see almost no articles about the large number of Israeli families driven from their homes by the constant bombardment of rockets, artillery, RPGs and other projectiles launched not just by Hamas, but from Lebanon by Hezbollah and from Yemen by the Houthis.
Nor do we read much about the starvation and suffering in Darfur or Yemen or Myanmar or any one of the several other places where the suffering is comparable to or greater than that in Gaza.
One cannot help but wonder whether this imbalance has anything to do with the fact that the enemy Hamas is determined to destroy is the world's only Jewish state and the people targeted for genocide in the Hamas charter are the world's Jews.
Sincerely,
Alan Stein