What does paradise smell like? To some, it smells like rotting bodies.

"The war is over, and finally the Samouni family can retrieve and bury twenty-nine relatives from the wreckage of their home. I am in the Zeitoun neighborhood on a sunny day, heading toward what’s left of their house.

A horse cart rolls by; a man is driving and two women walk behind—an old one who shows her face and a young one who is wearing the niqab.

All you can see is her eyes.

'What’s in there?' I ask.

'We are pulling out the bodies,' the man replies. 'I just pulled out my grandmother.'

The body is wrapped in a blanket. The old woman opens the blanket. The smell is strong; I am about to vomit. The young woman screams: 'How dare you be disgusted! This is the smell of paradise. It’s too sweet.' And then: 'Don’t talk to her. She is not Muslim.'"

That story is one told by New York Times correspondent Taghreed El-Khodary in "The Smell of Paradise,"
a first-person account in the Columbia Journalism Review of covering Israel's winter military offensive in Gaza.

Israel barred all international reporters from freely entering Gaza during the war. That meant that reporters based in Gaza, like Taghreed, were among the few to be there to witness the conflict.

Taghreed writes of the chaos and anguish, the Hamas intimidation and the everyday defiance.

Taghreed's story is part of a special CJR section on reporting on the Gaza conflict.

Along with Taghreed's piece, there is a long article by Israeli journalist/blogger Lisa Goldman about covering the war from the Israeli side.

"Why were Israelis—both journalists and news consumers—so willing to accept the IDF’s version of events in Gaza" Goldman asks in "Covering Gaza from Israel." "Why did Israeli reporters, normally cynical and irreverent to a fault, fail to ask critical questions during the military operation?"

Goldman suggests that Israeli reporters felt that their patriotism had been challenged by critical coverage of the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and that Gaza gave them a chance to prove Israelis wrong.

"There was just way too much access during the Lebanon war,” Israeli journalist Alon Ben-David told Goldman. “The army was too exposed, in real time. And I think we journalists also had a reaction to the over-exposure that we caused. I don’t think the army is obligated to allow reporters into a battlefield situation.”

Israel has barred its citizens from going to Gaza for years so they had no hopes of covering the war from the inside. (The IDF did take a few Israeli reporters on embeds...) And she found little concern among Israeli reporters about Israel's refusal to let international reporters in to cover Gaza.

Goldman offers this anecdote from Ethan Bronner of The New York Times:

"Ethan Bronner described a telling wartime conversation with an Israeli colleague and friend. 'He said he really didn’t care about the foreign press being prevented from entering Gaza,' recounted Bronner. 'So I said ‘but what if the army is doing bad stuff in Gaza?’' Raising his eyebrows to indicate astonishment, Bronner continued, 'And my colleague just answered, ‘I trust them.’ But why would he trust them? The whole nature of our business is not to trust anyone!”

A third piece, "A Matter of Trust," by J.J. Goldberg, former editor of The Forward, looks at the vastly different coverage of Israel in the US and UK media.

Goldberg suggests that the US media can be more sympathetic than the UK to the Israeli perspective because there is a larger Jewish community in America than in England.

"American coverage of the Middle East was profoundly affected by its traumatic experience after the battle at Jenin in 2002," writes Goldberg. "During the eight-day Israeli incursion into a crowded refugee camp, Palestinian officials issued widely quoted reports of deaths numbering in the hundreds, perhaps thousands. The Israeli army said it was in the dozens. When the dust had settled, a United Nations investigation found that the army was right. That was the event that triggered the yearlong wave of media boycotts...

"The Jenin experience was evident in American coverage of the recent Gaza war from the outset," Goldberg writes. "When Israel barred reporters from entering Gaza, CNN’s cameras showed the fighting as tiny puffs of smoke, seen from a distant hilltop, while its reporters repeatedly noted that they couldn’t get inside to verify the facts. The BBC, by contrast, hired Palestinian camera crews and covered the devastation live. Only midway through the twenty-two day war, once the evidence of massive destruction was inescapable, did CNN start airing extensive footage from Palestinian crews. Whom you turn to first is a function of whom you trust more. And that depends on your point of view."

(AP photo/Bernat Armangue: An Israeli shell explodes in Gaza during the winter offensive)