Letter From the Middle East: Children Fill Ledger of Death, No Matter How, or How Many:
"Set in fields of white, pink and red carnations, the giant cooler here, which usually holds vegetables or flowers for sale to an Israeli company, has been turned over to the dead.

It was to this cooler that, inevitably, the Palestinian doctor came Wednesday morning, when, just as inevitably, the latest Israeli Army raid touched off a parallel struggle to define reality. Were there, in fact, children among the dead, as the Palestinians claimed? How many? Did they die from Israeli sniper fire or from militants' explosives?

The doctor, Ahmed Abu Nikera, had had enough of these questions. In the dank, shadowy room, he yanked and pulled to open the bloodstained white cloth wrapping one of the bodies as tightly as a mummy.

'This is a child,' he said, after he revealed the pale gray face of Ibrahim al Qun, 14. 'This is the exit wound.' He pointed at the ragged, softball-sized black hole where the boy's left eye had been. A sniper's bullet entered at the back of the boy's head, he said.…"

Along with the chaos of gunshots, tank shells, planted bombs and armored bulldozers that accompanies life here, there is a dense fog of war. There is also a war of fog, of often fuzzily presented but always sharply conflicting versions of reality.

Like so many characteristics of this conflict, the tension over competing truths is shared across the desert, in Iraq. There, American soldiers and insurgents are not only fighting very different kinds of battles, but also describing very different ones. In the end, it seems that the contest of descriptions matters more, at least to the leaders and to the analysts who guide them.

Whether the casualties on any given day are on one side or the other or both, there is also, in a dark space somewhere, a reality. There is a dead child; there is an exit wound.

How many dead children is too many is a question often asked by Palestinians and Israelis, but it shows no hint of being resolved.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/international/middleeast/21MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=