A handful of readers have written this week regarding our coverage of the fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza area.

Here’s a portion of one email: “I note your bias toward the Palestinians, whereby you have published several stories about the impact of the Israeli airstrikes but virtually nothing about the impact of the many rockets fired by Hamas from the recently awarded lands that Israel gave up to the Palestinians.”

This story is another one that falls mainly to our wire editors. For the past week, since this last round of violence began, on most days the bulk of the news stories and pictures have been about Israeli bombs dropping on Hamas targets. As of Friday, the United Nations reported more than 400 Gazans killed and four Israelis.

We cannot ignore telling the news as it happens.

But what we can and should do is be sure each of those stories contains the context of why Israel says its striking out against Hamas – because of Hamas rocket attacks on southern Israel.

Our stories this week have included that context.

On Tuesday we ran two stories on the conflict, one noting the United Nations’ tally of civilians killed by Israeli bombs and another detailing Hamas rocket attacks and offering a slightly longer look at the conflict.

On Wednesday, we covered the story locally when about two dozen people carried signs in front of the US District Courthouse in Tacoma protesting Israeli strikes. Our reporter also talked to the lone person at the protest defending Israel, and he sought out members of the local Jewish community who did the same.

In a 10- or 12-inch daily story, we are not able to retell the entire history of MidEast violence, but we’ll continue to do our best to provide some context.