Marya Aman

If the NYT search function is correct, today was the first time they ever wrote about Marya Aman, a little Palestinian girl, now 8, who was riding in a car blown up by the an Israeli rocket in May 2006, collateral damage in the assassination on a busy highway of an Islamic Jihad leader on his way to the hospital to see his wife, who had just given birth. Marya is now a quadriplegic, permanently confined to an Israeli hospital (she is also on a respirator). I wrote about Marya in 2007 here, here, and here, but the NYT evidently waited until it could do a sentimental moral-equivalence story about Marya’s friendship with another 8-year-old, an Israeli boy in the same hospital, brain-injured by a Hamas rocket. The Times waits until the 16th paragraph to mention the details of the Israeli attack and that her mother, brother and grandmother were also killed in the blast, and until the 17th to note that Israel tried to deport her to certain death in Gaza. It says that her father still has “no official status.” In 2007 that meant he didn’t dare risk setting foot outside the hospital for fear of being summarily deported; I can’t tell from the NYT story exactly what it means now. Questions like that might have been answered if the NYT didn’t act as if it were the only news source in the world and maybe used Teh Google. At least Marya’s younger brother, also seriously injured by the rocket, is now in the same hospital.