TEL AVIV — In yet another example of biased news media coverage of events here, a widely circulated Associated Press article referred to Hamas’s orchestrated, violent assault on Israel’s borders as “this week’s mass killing of Palestinians by Israel in Gaza.”
The article further smeared the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) by claiming that Israel used “disproportionate live fire against unarmed protesters, killing dozens.”
The distorted piece was written by London-based Tamer Fakahany, who serves as AP’s “global news manager.” It was titled, “Mideast conflicts connected by vying powerbrokers.”
The article seeks to outline the different powers vying for regional control and their connections to recent events.
The paragraph that mentions the Hamas assault states (emphasis added):
The ongoing wars in Syria, Yemen, this week’s mass killing of Palestinians by Israel in Gaza, Turkish-Kurdish hostilities, and the potential for an all-encompassing war sparked by an Iranian-Israeli conflagration in Syria or Lebanon, all have tentacles that reach across borders and back again.
Hamas’s campaign this week openly sought to breach the Israeli border with the goal of murdering Jews. Yet, Fakahany chose to frame the events by not focusing on the reason Israel needed to defend its borders, but by instead describing the casualty count as “this week’s mass killing of Palestinians by Israel in Gaza.”
Hamas claims 60 Palestinians were killed in the riots. The news media widely cited the “Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza” as providing those numbers. Many outlets failed to report that the ministry is controlled by the Hamas terrorist group that organized the riots and has a vested interest in inflating such numbers. Hamas has a history of exaggerating these claims and using civilians, including children, as human shields.
The AP article did not get into specific numbers beyond generalizing with the “mass killing of Palestinians by Israel” description. READ MORE
