Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Do They Use Editors at the G&M?

Read this article and try to make sense of it.
The Islamic Hamas movement says one of its members has been wounded in an Israeli air strike in the southern Gaza Strip.

The air strike comes hours after a roadside bomb along Israel's border with Gaza killed an Israeli soldier and wounded three others.


Okay. So the ceasefire was apparently broken by Hamas's roadside bomb to which Israel retaliated with an air strike. The article points out that the bomb may have been planted before the ceasefire, but that's not the point. The point is: Hamas went first; then Israel.

Read on.
In what appeared to be an unconnected incident Tuesday, Palestinian security officials said Israeli troops along the border shot and killed a 27-year-old man and wounded two others. Dr. Moaiya Hassanain of Gaza's Health Ministry said the dead man was a farmer. The military had no immediate comment.

And this happened before or after the roadside bomb? And how can anything in such a small area be considered "unconnected"?

The article says that Israel declared a ceasefire on January 17 and Hamas followed suit. Except ...
In the days immediately following the ceasefire there was shelling by Israeli gunboats and some gunfire along the border — including the killing of two men Palestinian officials identified as farmers — but there were no serious clashes until Tuesday.

Er, what? In "the days"? How many days? How many shells? Why isn't the fact that Israel continued shelling Gaza after "unilaterally declaring a ceasefire" up near the top of the article where Hamas is blamed for breaking the ceasefire?

If we're supposed to consider the Globe and Mail to be a newspaper, shouldn't they edit these articles so we can tell in what order the events happened? Did the Israelis kill 3 farmers, during a ceasefire, to which Hamas responded by using an IED to kill 3 soldiers? Or was it the other way around?

Events happen in relation to time. Believe it or not, it actually matters which ones happen first.

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