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This would have been a heavy day of news anyway, even without the spectacle of the half-sunk Hudson River airplane. The United Nations compound in Gaza City was set on fire by Israeli bombardment. ABC's Simon McGregor-Wood blamed artillery shells filled with burning white phosphorus. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon happened to be in Israel at the time. He called the attack an "outrage." Prime Minister Ehud Olmert responded with "regret." CBS' Richard Roth recorded the plea of a Gazan woman: "What is the safe place for us to go?" "Not the UN compound," Roth responded rhetorically. The fire started just as IDF censors relented and allowed some journalists to cross the Gazan border from Israel. NBC's Martin Fletcher hopped on an armored personnel carrier to find "a whole region cleared of Palestinians." The access hardly helped his reporting: "We have no idea what is going on inside the town not even what is causing this plume of smoke above the city." That was United Nations food warehouses being incinerated. Israel "insists all its actions are in self-defense," McGregor-Wood pointed out.
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