A headline at The Washington Post, "Four fragile lives found ended in evacuated Gaza hospital", is a puzzle to solve, a gemstone of passivity where human agency glints mysteriously in the facets. Whose lives? Who found them? Who ended them? The last part of the sentence, at least, makes clear that it wasn't cops killing themselves or others in America. The grammar crime draws attention to another kind, plainly described in the copy:
The five premature babies were particularly vulnerable. They needed oxygen, and medication administered at regular intervals. There were no portable respirators or incubators to transport them. Then the IDF delivered an ultimatum, al-Nasr director Bakr Qaoud told The Washington Post: Get out or be bombarded. The nurse, a Palestinian man who works with Paris-based Doctors Without Borders, saw no choice. He assessed his charges and picked up the strongest one — the baby he thought likeliest to bear a temporary cut to his oxygen supply. He left the other four on their breathing machines, reluctantly, and with his wife, their children and the one baby, headed south….
Two weeks later, the pause in hostilities allowed a Gazan journalist to venture into the hospital. In the neonatal intensive care unit, Mohammed Balousha made the awful discovery. The decomposing bodies of the four babies.
This sort of headline has become a special case of the Streisand Effect, where mangled grammar draws attention to the mangled priorities of the editors responsible—and to the stories they're trying to shade. You could even use this sort of headline as clickbait.
