Israel Is the Bad Guy in the Eyes of the Media, Once Again

On Friday, Israel began Operation Breaking Dawn, striking Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) targets and assassinating the senior-most PIJ commander, Tayseer al-Jabari, in what Israel says was a preemptive strike against PIJ terrorists in Gaza.

Israel’s southern communities had been locked down since August 2 after Israel arrested PIJ senior member Bassam al-Saadi in Jenin, a city in Samaria (in the West Bank). Reportedly, al-Jabari was preparing imminent attacks against Israel, including firing anti-tank missiles near the border.

Israel struck 170 targets in a 66-hour period, including PIJ bases, terrorist attack tunnels, weapons factories, and the residential buildings of PIJ leaders, killing two PIJ commanders, including al-Jabari. Israel claims every major PIJ leader has now been killed.

PIJ retaliated, shooting over 1,100 rockets at civilian areas in Israel. An unexploded rocket hit a residential area in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, and some Israelis were slightly injured while running to bomb shelters.

The Iron Dome, one of Israel’s missile-defense systems, intercepted 96 to 97 percent of the rockets fired on Israel. Forty-four Palestinians were killed in this round of fighting. A cease-fire went into effect at 11:30 p.m. Sunday, and except for a barrage of rockets fired by PIJ eight minutes later, it has held. A senior Israeli diplomatic official said PIJ had been dealt a “very significant blow” and was set back decades by the operation. 

Many media outlets put their usual anti-Israel spin on the story. The Associated Press ran a headline reading, “Israeli strikes on Gaza kill 10, including senior militant.” The word “terrorism” is not mentioned once in the story. The AP uses the euphemistic term “militants” to describe Islamic Jihad, also omitting the word “Palestinian” from the name.

The AP also refers to Hamas, the terrorist group that runs the Gaza Strip, rather euphemistically, as “militant.” Both of these groups are designated as terrorist groups by the U.S. government. What the Israeli prime minister called a new wave of terrorism this past spring, which saw the murders of 21 Israelis in multiple deadly terrorist attacks around Israel, this AP story describes as “a wave of attacks inside Israel.”

NBC’s headline was “Israel Strikes Gaza, with Palestinian Militant Commander and girl, 5, among the dead after days of tension.” NBC showed its bias in the headline by not identifying the commander as a member of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad and by allowing readers to infer that Israel targets innocent civilians such as the five-year-old girl.

Al Jazeera published an article with the headline, “Photos: Children Killed as Israel Bombards Gaza,” describing the Gaza Strip as a “besieged Palestinian enclave.” Al Jazeera refused to call PIJ a terrorist or militant group, instead describing PIJ as the “Palestinian Islamic Jihad Group” and referring to the terrorists as “fighters.”

The Guardian’s headline was, “Israel Strikes Gaza amid tensions following arrest of Palestinian militant.” Arsen Ostrovsky, an international human-rights lawyer, took the liberty of fixing the Guardian‘s headline on Twitter, rephrasing it as “Israel Strikes Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, after relentless threats by the terror group to hit Israeli civilian centers”:

Many left-wing media outlets frequently place the blame on Israel for its conflicts with the Palestinians and Palestinian terrorist groups, which are proxies for Iran. The New York Times ran a headline that omitted any mention of Palestinian rockets, saying, “Israel Strikes Gaza as Tensions Rise.” The Times article mentions the rocket response in the second sentence of the subheading, saying, “Militants responded with a volley of rockets into Israel.” The Times makes the 1,100-rocket barrage launched at Israeli civilians sound like a game. They also neglect to mention the PIJ by name in the subheading, instead referring to the terrorist organization as “a Palestinian militant group.” See the pattern?

Israel is often blamed for civilians killed during conflicts with Palestinian terrorists (even though Palestinian terrorists use women and children as human shields), but rockets from Palestinian Islamic Jihad actually killed more Palestinian civilians during the fighting than Israeli bombs did. The Associated Press tweeted, “Close to one-third of the Palestinians who died in the weekend of fighting . . . may have been killed by errant rockets fired by the Palestinian side, according to an Israeli assessment that appears consistent with AP reporting.” Surprisingly accurate and fair reporting.

The AP should have included the video evidence that shows an errant rocket being fired from Gaza and then going off course and landing in Jabalia, which killed five Palestinian children. Here is an instance captured by Hezbollah’s Mayadeen outlet showing a long-range missile being fired from Gaza City and then malfunctioning and falling inside a civilian area in Gaza. 

Avi Mayer, a former spokesman for the foreign press for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), posted videos that reportedly show the IDF aborting operations because of the possibility of civilians being killed: 

The fact that the media routinely view Israel’s conflict with its terrorist neighbors — PIJ and Hamas — through a lens that finds a moral equivalence between both sides is not only bad journalism, it’s morally repugnant.