O, the pathos; O, the hardships; O, the suffering of it all!

The Gray Lady seems to have opened up a Gaza sub-bureau to supplement its Jerusalem team in its efforts to stir up empathy for the hard lot of the Gazans – purportedly imposed upon them, of course, mainly by Israel.

Reporters Diaa Hadid and Majd Al Waheidi, writing with a Gaza City dateline, spell it all out for us in the June 13 edition with an article headlined, “A Gaza ‘Tunnel Millionaire’ Falls on Hard Times.”  It seems that a Gazan fellow who was making out very well (relatively) financially by smuggling a long list of contraband through the illegal tunnels between Egypt and Gaza has been reduced to the honest work of tea-vending because the tunnels have been closed down.

WHEN Mohammed Sawiri was rich, he bought his lover a cellphone so they could secretly text. He was a “tunnel millionaire,” one of the thousands of Palestinians who became wealthy overnight, by Gaza standards, earning $18 a day hauling goods through one of the hundreds of passageways under the border between Gaza and Egypt.

The high school dropout was 17 when he began working in a tunnel. Now, at 23, Mr. Sawiri sells 25-cent cups of tea, Turkish coffee and Nescafé in a Gaza park, facing an ice cream shop where he once ate $1.25 vanilla ices. On a good day, he makes $5, and instead of texting his lover, he slips her letters.

Poor fellow! Not only has his stream of ill-gotten gain been eliminated, but his love life has been damaged as well.

But Swahiri’s tribulations are far from the only ones related in this Palestine pity-party propaganda piece.  We learn of Mohammad al-Ghoul, 6,  and his “sibling,” Abdul-Rahman, 13, forced to selling newspapers in the streets., and that, “Many Palestinians rely on candles for light because of hourslong power cuts, made even worse by Israel’s bombing of the local power station last summer.”

We learn of, “A 15-year-old beggar slowly walked around the park, trailed by her younger sisters, 13 and 9, their faces, torn clothes and bare feet smudged with dirt, their toenails painted pink.”  Worse yet, we’re told:

“Why would I do this if I didn’t need to?” she [the older sister] said. “My father is blind, and my mother is sick.”

“And she’s pregnant again,” said the younger sister, sighing.

Mr. Sawiri whispered that the 15-year-old moonlighted as a $5 prostitute.

Maybe the Gray Lady turned gray from worrying about the way Israel oppresses the hard-luck people of Gaza whose only fault is to support a government that carries out vicious attacks on the Jewish State and its citizens.

But not to worry, there’s a solution after all. Just follow the RAND folks’ prescription for financial health and prosperity all around if Israel will just commit national suicide. The Times, once again, places all the blame on Israel in its editorial, also in the June 13 edition:

Given the political climate in Israel, where the new hard-line government appears implacably hostile to a two-state solution, there is no prospect of a quick revival of peace talks. That reality was reinforced this week when Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said he did not believe that a Palestinian state could be achieved in his lifetime.

The “big lie” repeatedly told about Benjamin Netanyahu is reiterated with respect to Yaalon as the paper’s editorial writers deliberately attempt to confuse the meaning of not believing something will happen with the libel that the two leaders refuse to allow it to.

I wonder sometimes if the Times’s editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, ever remembers when his father, “Abe,” a senior executive  at the paper for many years, was forced to write his byline as “A.M. Rosenthal because the ruling family thought that “Abe” sounded too Jewish.