Moshe Dahan, 19, was an innocent victim. The Israeli teenager was brutally killed by a fanatical Hamas suicide bomber on a busy Jerusalem pedestrian mall last weekend. According to reports, Moshe was unhurt in the blast, but his friend was wounded.

The second bomb killed Moshe minutes later when he ran over to assist a friend. The young man was one of 10 teenagers killed in the two bombs. Moshe’s grieving father told the BBC, “Like a friend not like a son, always happy with us.”

Mohammed Abu Marasa, 15, was an innocent victim. The Palestinian teenager was torn apart by shrapnel in a graveyard while fleeing Israeli Air Force bombing, splattering his bright red blood across the inscription of a nearby gravestone.

Mohammed fled his school when the Israeli Air Force used American-made F-16s in a residential neighborhood to bomb a Palestinian police office close by. The bombardment was in revenge for the earlier bombings during the weekend.

Samih al-Madhoun, another boy, 14, told the BBC, “Mohammed was running for his life. He did not know he was taking himself to his grave.”

They were both murdered. Both had families and loved ones. Both had dreams and aspirations. Both are now dead.

A fanatic killed Moshe with a bomb Saturday. A government killed Mohammed with a fighter plane Tuesday.

There is a clear distinction to be made. Both killings were criminal, but one was perpetrated by an extremist organization and the other by a government fully supported by the United States. In the first instance, the suicide bombers strapped explosives to their bodies and walked down a pedestrian mall crowded with the nightlife of the pedestrian mall on a Saturday night. The first man blew himself up, the bomb packed with nails to wound and kill as many people as possible.

The second bomber wickedly timed his act so as kill people rushing to the scene of the first bomb. Moshe Dahan was one of his victims. Such planning requires sickness.

It is precisely the kind of sickness that festers in the fertile breeding grounds of rampant poverty and choking Israeli occupation that are the Palestinian refugee camps. Organizations like Hamas thrive on desperation of the refugees for popular support. These reasons are certainly not justification for the group’s repulsive crimes, but do furnish a more complete and accurate picture.

In the second instance, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the bombing of Palestinian police and security officers while simultaneously demanding arrests of those responsible.

It was a reckless act of vengeance. Israeli F-16 warplanes and helicopters fired missiles, in midday, at offices in the midst of schools and houses. The missiles pulverized buildings already emptied in anticipation of revenge. In that bombing, Mohammed Abu Marasa was killed, only further infuriating Palestinians and lending support to Hamas, and making it harder for Arafat’s corrupt government to make arrests.

In Geneva, Switzerland, more than 100 countries demanded that Israel refrain immediately from committing grave breaches of the Geneva War Conventions. The United States and Israel boycotted the conference. News of the conference’s decision and the boycott could only be found in European newspapers.

The story is even more complex. According to Robert Fisk of London’s The Independent, past support of Hamas has been curiously forgotten in current analyses.

According to Fisk, in order to undermine Arafat’s popularity, Israel supported Hamas to divide Palestinians against Arafat who was in Beirut, Lebanon in the 1980s. In the Gaza Strip they covertly helped Hamas build mosques in hopes of promoting Islam – to distract them from nationalistic fervor.

Senior Israeli Army officials have openly admitted they were in talks with Hamas after the Oslo agreements. Fisk even said a Hamas leader gave him Shimon Peres’ home telephone number from his address book in Lebanon in 1992.

In short, there is no justification for the crimes committed by Hamas and Israel. However, there is no excuse for the convenient amnesia that plagues American news organizations when providing information on the Holy Land.

Moshe and Mohammed were both teenagers. They were both people. They were both defenseless victims of murder, and the crimes should be treated and reported in that manner.

Omar Tesdell is a sophomore in journalism and mass communication from Slater. He is online editor of the Daily.