With more and more eyes being peeled towards Gaza these days, it’s hard to tell what’s fact or fiction. A while back, I discovered this great little gem of a blog called Tabula Gaza. The perspective is incredible and the insights are always challenging. Like the first post:

Why is it that I so often see images in the media of Palestinians with big guns, masked men with rocket launchers on their shoulders, images of damage done by homemade rockets that have landed near homes in settlements around the Gaza Strip? So rarely does the media portray the damage done by Israeli tanks, F-16s, Apaches, ground-to-ground missiles, armored bulldozers, snipers and drones, which are used on civilians and militants alike in Gaza. For one, the excess of damage must be difficult to capture and yet, there is more to this story.

According to the Beit Hanoun municipality 80 homes were completely destroyed in the latest incursion, while over 600 were left partially damaged. Homes, schools, colleges, lampposts, shops, streets in ruins, left was a city of rubble. After the initial withdrawal sewage flowed out of broken pipes, rubble of buildings spilled onto streets, the walls around a central cemetery were gone and an 800 year old mosque was a pile of stones and dirt.

The chief of staff at the municipality told me, “Beit Hanoun used to be a garden, today it is a desert.”

Beit Hanoun, being near to the bordering area with Israel is surrounded from most directions by luscious farming land and yet after every incursion the green is less green and more agricultural land is set back five, ten or twenty years. The municipality chief of staff listed this incursion as the 21st on Beit Hanoun, and the most destructive.

The justification for the incursion, during which over 80 Palestinians were killed, was putting an end to Qassams fired into Israel. Recently Israeli and American weapons manufacturers began vying for a contract to create a defense system for Israel to shield it from oncoming makeshift rockets launched out of Gaza. In Gaza you are constantly shown signs that the powers that be have become so near sited that they cannot see the forest for the trees. A good doctor when assessing a patient will determine what the root of the cause is and cure it, a bad doctor tries to quell the immediate pain and sends the patient home with barely any chance of recovery. Our political doctors dealing with the crisis that is plaguing the Middle East are bad doctors.