Gaza Conflict

Reuters has posted that Egypt may be able to mediate and immediate end to the Gaza bombing (link).  I hope so.  This is a humanitarian crisis.  From the linked article, "some 115 Palestinians have died in a week of fighting, the majority of them civilians, including 27 children, hospital officials said."  

Below is a graph I made of the deaths in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from 2000 to 2011 (data from here).  Many Palestinians are being killed, many of them children, in the conflict over the future of Israel and Palestine. 

Every single death on either side is a tragedy.  These are people, like you and I, with friends and families.  However, the relative numbers show that the way this is often presented in the Western media (Palestinian militants firing rockets onto Israeli civilians) is not the complete picture, and this, especially the last six years, does not help convince us that Israel is practicing a great deal of humanitarian restraint.