Israel said its three-week offensive was intended to change the reality in the south. Since January, when the military campaign ended, the rocket fire has significantly fallen off and residents here are trying to accustom themselves to a kind of normalcy amid the lingering uncertainty and fear.

This recycles the myth that rocket fire was a constant barrage until the war changed all that-- a point Kershner makes more explicitly later:

According to the Israeli military, some 3,300 rockets and mortar shells were launched from Gaza at southern Israel in 2008, compared with fewer than 300 since the end of the war.

This is highly misleading; much of that rocket fire came at the end of the year-- after the invasion and bombing of Gaza was underway. In fact, a  negotiated peace prevailed for much of the middle of 2008--which is something that you would have learned if you were a careful reader of the New York Times. Right before the invasion, the paper (12/19/08) reported that much of 2008 was quiet:

Israeli and United Nations figures show that while more than 300 rockets were fired into Israel in May, 10 to 20 were fired in July, depending on who was counting and whether mortar rounds were included. In August, 10 to 30 were fired, and in September, 5 to 10.

Rocket fire increased significantly in November after Israel attacked a Hamas tunnel and killed six militants. For a graphic understanding of the rate of rocket/mortar fire, see this (which is based on Israeli figures).

The more natural lesson to draw is that negotiations work better than violence. This is apparently not what the New York Times wants you to believe,  though they did once report that reality. Perhaps it was an accident.

The term "even-handed" is the problem that Israel has with the conclusions in the report. Your criticism of Israel seems so much harsher than that of the Palestinians. Why is that?

CBS News (9/9/09), summarizing a report by Israel's leading human rights group:

Well over half of nearly 1,400 Palestinians killed in Israel's Gaza war were civilians, including 252 children younger than 16, a leading Israeli human rights groups said Wednesday, challenging Israel's claim that most of the dead were militants.... The Israeli rights group B'Tselem on Wednesday published figures it said were compiled in months of research, including visits to families of victims. It said 1,387 Gazans were killed, including 773 civilians and 330 combatants. Thirteen Israelis also died, including four civilians.

So why would the U.N. be more interested in the war crimes that killed nearly 200 times as many people? Thanks to Ifill and the NewsHour for challenging this strange moral reasoning.

By seeking an understanding with Syria, which has cultivated close ties to Iran, the United States could increase the pressure on Iran to respond to its offer of direct talks. Such an understanding would also give Arab states and moderate Palestinians the political cover to negotiate with Israel. That, in turn, could increase the burden on Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, to relax its hostile stance toward Israel.

Israel just recently launched an assault on the Gaza Strip that killed nearly 1,300 Palestinians, including 280 children under the age of 18 and 111 adult women. The Israelis killed roughly 1 out of every thousand residents of Gaza; the equivalent death toll in the U.S. would be almost 300,000.

If you were writing about human beings, you would assume that those massive losses, rather than a lack of "political cover," would probably result in a  "hostile stance" toward the country that inflicted them. Since Landler doesn't seem to think that those deaths are a significant factor in the political situation, he must think he's writing about a very different sort of creature.

The site, IWantAJE.net, lets consumers send electronic letters directly to their cable or satellite provider demanding the channel. It also includes a "Speak Out" forum and a "Hits & Myths" page debunking popular assertions, such as: "Al Jazeera Supports Terrorism," "Al Jazeera Is Anti-Semitic," "Al Jazeera Is Anti-American" and "Al Jazeera Shows Beheadings."...

AJE filled a news vacuum during the recent war in Gaza, when Israel’s decision to ban foreign journalists from the region arguably gave Al Jazeera English a priceless amount of exposure. As the only English-language news organization with a presence in Gaza, its reports and video were widely seen on television sets in the U.S. and Canada. PBS's World Focus aired full segments. And other networks, including NBC News and the CBC, aired video from Al Jazeera English.

Indeed, "traffic on the network’s website... spiked by 600 percent during the war in Gaza." Contrast the fact that "more than half of that traffic came from North America" with current accessibility: "AJE is available in 130 million households internationally but is only carried in the U.S. in Burlington, Vt.; Toledo, Ohio; and Washington, D.C."

Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Ken Picard on Al-Jazeera in Burlington" (6/6/08)

For a piece that is attempting to get a better sense of who's "version" of events is more accurate, the Times reveals its bias from the start, rendering a white phosphorous attack on a house as a "phosphorus smoke bomb," the qualifier "smoke" helpfully suggesting that the bomb, which accidentally incinerated most of a family in their home, was being used legally as a smoke screen.

The Times underlines this point in the second graph by noting that the bomb was "intended to mask troop movements outside." According to whom? That claim is stated is as a fact, with no attribution.

The Times' reporters continue by writing:

The war in El Atatra tells the story of Israel’s three-week offensive in Gaza, with each side giving a very different version. Palestinians here describe Israeli military actions as a massacre, and Israelis attribute civilian casualties to a Hamas policy of hiding behind its people.

In El Atatra, neither version appears entirely true, based on 50 interviews with villagers and four Israeli commanders. The dozen or so civilian deaths seem like the painful but inevitable outcome of a modern army bringing war to an urban space. And while Hamas fighters had placed explosives in a kitchen, on doorways and in a mosque, they did not seem to be forcing civilians to act as shields.

OK--neither side's tale is completely accurate.  But after reading the Times' own account, it certainly seems that the Palestinian "version" is much closer to reality. Nonetheless, the reporters chalk up the differences as part of  "a desire to shape public opinion."

The Times goes on to review--and in some cases debunk--some of the Israeli justifications, including an attack on a school and the destruction of homes. The impact of that investigative work is, yet again, diluted by the framing of the big picture:

Both sides engage in their own denials.

Israelis argue that this war was especially tough because they had waited so long before taking action in response to the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza over eight years.

Yet after Israelis withdrew their settlers and soldiers from Gaza in late 2005, they killed, over the next three years in numerous military actions here, the same number of Gazans as those killed in this war--about 1,275.

For their part, few Palestinian villagers even acknowledged the existence of fighters here. Hamas is now asserting that it achieved a victory.

Let's compare those two forms of "denial." Israelis somehow have convinced themselves that their military has been exercising unusual restraint--while killing over 1,000 people before this latest round of attacks. Palestinians, meanwhile, deny the existence of Hamas fighters in their area-- though, by the Times' own reporting, in the very same article, Israeli claims about the numbers of Hamas fighters in this given area appear to be (in some cases) unfounded.

This equivalence comes amid stories of heart-wrenching suffering--an injured baby left to die on a tractor because Israeli soldiers were firing on family members trying to get to a hospital. Why dress up that kind of reporting with this sort of "he said, she said" balance? Perhaps the sense that the truth is too one-sided.

The Washington Post:

Hamas and its allies have fired thousands of rockets into Israel in the past eight years. The pace accelerated after the Islamist movement, which won Palestinian elections in 2006, routed forces loyal to the rival Fatah party in June 2007 and seized control of the narrow coastal strip. Since then, Israel has implemented a crushing economic blockade and carried out regular military raids that it has said were a response to rocket fire.

This is an extremely selective history. The Post's claim that Hamas "accelerated" its rocket attacks after 2007 ignores the fact that a cease-fire agreement for much of the second half of 2008 drastically curtailed rocket fire into Israel (an agreement that largely fell apart after an Israeli attack in November).

Meanwhile, in USA Today:

Israel wants to ensure that Hamas cannot rearm itself. Before the offensive, Hamas militants fired up to 80 mortar shells and rockets a day at Israel. The number of attacks has declined to less than 20 a day, the Israeli army says.

Well, that depends on what you mean by "before the offensive." During the cease-fire period last year, rocket fire into Israel was well below the 80 a day figure the paper cites. In fact, it was much lower than the 20 a day figure too; it was around a dozen a month. USA Today wants to advance the argument that Israel's violence has 'worked'-- but to do so you must erase certain inconvenient facts.