Nonfiction Reading Response from UpFront

The article "How the Murder of Four Teens Started a War" by Patricia Smith describes how the killing of these four teenagers sparks a fight between Israel and Hamas. Hamas is a Palestinian group that controls the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory in Israel. There has been tension between the Israelis and Palestinians for six decades. The tension started after World War II when the U.N. decided that Jewish people needed a state for themselves, Israel. In fact there is so much tension that even the slightest wrong turn will end up in some sort of fight.

Before the article even starts you see pictures of the four teenagers who were killed: Israelis- Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach and Palestinian- Muhammad Abu Khdeir. These pictures show that these boys were happy, innocent people and the author put these pictures here to make you feel upset about what happened to them. In describing how the Palestinian was killed Smith says, "Khdeir was bludgeoned with a wrench and then set on fire." Smith uses imagery to get her point across. She also uses loaded words like bludgeoned, to beat someone repeatedly, to show the reader the horrible things that people do. To prove her point even further Smith uses this quote from Shibley Telhami, a political science professor at the University of Maryland. "The murder of the four teens 'are horrible under any circumstance...But in and of themselves they would not have dragged the sides into this fight if both sides weren't ripe for an explosion.'" Smith put this in the article to show the readers that something like this was bound to happen sometime soon.

            The fact that people felt the need to kill teenagers to get attention really struck a chord with me. I think that it is completely unnecessary for these teenagers to be killed. It also made me realize that people will go to extremes just to prove a point. In all, I agree with the author that the initial four killings shouldn't have happened. What started out as a few deaths turned into a huge fight between the two countries and ended with the killing thousands of innocent people.