Western media make much of crimes allegedly committed by Israel against Palestinians. Yet when Arab regimes torture or kill Palestinians, or when armies and militias in war-torn Syria slaughter them by the hundreds, the response is largely silence—including on the part of the Palestinian Authority. Khaled Abu Toameh writes:

[A]ccording to a report published this week by the Working Group for Palestinians in Syria, 2,596 Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of the conflict in that country in 2011. But this is a news item that has hardly found its way into mainstream media in the West. Even Arab media outlets have almost entirely ignored the report. . . .

The reason for this apathy, of course, is clear. The Palestinians in Syria were killed by Arabs and not as a result of the conflict with Israel. Journalists covering the Middle East do not believe that this is an important story because of the absence of any Israeli role in the killings. . . .

That Palestinians are being killed by Arabs does not seem to bother even the Palestinian Authority, whose leaders are busy these days threatening to file “war crimes” charges against Israel with the International Criminal Court. As far as the Palestinian Authority is concerned—and the media, the EU, the UN, and human-rights groups—the only “war crimes” are being committed by Israelis.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.