South Beach Hoosier

South Beach Hoosier's comments follow the article below, which ran on p.14A of Saturday's
Miami Herald.
See if you notice what's missing in the way of both facts and context.
____________________________________________
http://www.miamiherald.com/519/story/421419.html

The Miami Herald
February 16, 2008
U.N. official decries Gaza closure
BY KARIN LAUB
Associated Press

The eight-month closure of Gaza has created ''grim and miserable'' conditions that deprive Palestinians of their basic dignity, the U.N.'s humanitarian chief said Friday.

Later Friday, a powerful blast went off in the house of a senior Islamic Jihad activist, killing him, his wife, daughter and three neighbors, medics and an Islamic Jihad spokesman said. Islamic Jihad said an Israeli airstrike targeted the house, but Israel denied it.

John Holmes, undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, visited Gaza during the day and urged that the territory's borders be reopened to relieve the suffering.

Israel and Egypt severely restricted access to Gaza after the Islamic militant group Hamas seized the territory by force in June. Since then, only a few dozen trucks carrying food, medicine and other staples have been permitted into Gaza every day, while most exports are banned.

The closure has driven up poverty and unemployment, and the U.N. says some 80 percent of Gaza's 1.4 million people now get food aid.

''All this makes for a grim human and humanitarian situation here in Gaza, which means that people are not able to live with the basic dignity to which they are entitled,'' Holmes told reporters in Gaza.

The extent of suffering in Gaza has been a subject of dispute. Palestinians and human rights groups say hardship is widespread, while Israeli government officials have accused Hamas of trying to manufacture a humanitarian crisis for political gain.

Holmes toured Gaza's largest hospital, speaking with dialysis patients and inspecting the neonatal unit. He also visited an industrial zone that once employed 1,800 Palestinians but has been idled by the border closure.

It was Holmes' first visit to Gaza as humanitarian affairs chief, part of a four-day trip that also includes a stop in the Israeli town of Sderot, which has been hit hard by rocket fire from Gaza. His four-vehicle convoy, marked by blue U.N. flags, drove through potholed, muddy streets without a Hamas police escort.

The U.N. envoy started the day at Gaza City's Shifa Hospital, where administrators told him they were worried about a possible breakdown of overburdened generators and that they needed spare parts for medical machinery, like dialysis machines.

In recent weeks, rolling blackouts of several hours a day have been the norm in Gaza, a result of reduced fuel shipments by Israel.
__________________________________________________________
Yes, that's right, never mentioned in this A.P. story was any and all mention of the Hamas-led demolition of the walls along the Egytian border just three short weeks ago, and the resulting mad dash by tens of thousands -hundreds of thousands?- of Palestinians into Egypt.
http://www.slate.com/id/2182754/

(How many have returned to Gaza so far? How many will refuse to leave Egypt? How many who did return came back armed with weapons? Now those are questions I want to see answered!)

In the world view of the A.P., that mad dash never happened.
It's a mini-version of Bobby Ewing's shower in DALLAS, circa 1985-86.
It was just a dream.

When Wikipedia, below, is ten times more accurate than the A.P., it's all over but the shouting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip