Ah, the mainstream media are weeping again. The heart of the Toronto Star appears to be bleeding for the forsaken people of Gaza.

How else to explain the unbending expectations outlined yesterday at Jabaliya's central market, where shopkeepers and customers shrugged off the threat of enemy invasion, instead insisting the price of their lone Israeli prisoner of war should be nothing less than the release of many thousands of Palestinian detainees.

"We sit here with no electricity and little water. All the components of our life are ruined. But still, this time we have something Israel wants. And we cannot surrender it for nothing," said Umm Mohammed, 43, a mother of eight.

"We must remain strong, no matter what suffering comes next. Because there are 10,000 Palestinian men, women and children in Israeli prisons. It is they we must save."

Umm Mohammed, by the way, means Mother of Mohammed. Either she chose this moniker to appear more holy, or it was bestowed on her because of her large family. It is also the name Zarqawi's wife uses.

LGF links to an AFP story of the wailings of Latifa Abu Hmed, a mother of seven sons: one dead, six in jail. Why are they in jail?

"I have six sons in prison, four of them for life," says Abu Hmed, sitting in her decrepit home in the West Bank refugee camp of Al-Amari.

"My son, Abdelmonem, was a member of Hamas. He was assassinated in 1994 by Israeli special forces," she says.

"The others, who are in prison, were in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades," an armed offshoot of Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party. They were arrested in 2002.

"A martyr is a martyr. He is buried in the earth and is joined with God. But prisoners are living martyrs," she says.

Her children are not dead or imprisoned because of an unfair Israel. They are dead or in jail because they are murderers and terrorists.