The NY Times' Gaza blunder on casualties

 Spectator World:

While war raged between Israel and Gaza, the New York Times published a powerful montage of 64 minors said to have been killed in the conflict so far.

Under its famous motto ‘All the news that’s fit to print’, and with the headline ‘They Were Only Children’, America’s paper of record informed us that ‘they had wanted to be doctors, artists and leaders’ and invited us to read their stories.

It was impossible to look at those innocent faces without feeling deeply distressed. This was the human cost of the Israeli war machine, brought directly to your breakfast table, in a way that the vicious Turkish assault on the Kurds in April — or, for that matter, the Royal Air Force’s recent ‘major air offensive’ in Iraq — was not. The unspoken conclusion was clear: the Jewish state was uniquely wicked.

But in the days that followed, things began to fray at the edges. The digital investigations agency DigFind did the job that the Times journalists had neglected, confirming the identities of those pictured. That put rather a different complexion on things.

The first disclosure was that a charming photograph of a girl wrapped in a keffiyeh and smiling confidently in the first row of the collage was not, as the paper had claimed, 10-year-old Rahaf al-Masri. It was an unidentified picture from 2015.

How had the error occurred? Well, the fake image had simply been circulating on Twitter. This had apparently been enough for the New York Times to run with it — though it was not, of course, enough for the sleuths who followed their tracks, nor, one would have thought, for the public.

The unraveling gathered pace. It soon emerged that 17-year-old Khaled al-Qanoi, pictured in the fourth row of the Times’s heartrending montage, was in fact a fighter in the al-Mujahedeen Brigades, a terror group in Gaza.

A straightforward Facebook search brought up multiple images of al-Qanoi aiming rocket-propelled grenades, and posing in front of the militant group’s flag wearing a headband and brandishing an automatic weapon.

Had the Times journalists thought of checking Facebook, they may have found al-Qanoi’s eulogistic ‘martyr video’, put together by his terrorist comrades. Some social media posts carry more weight than others, it seems, where a certain 130 Pulitzer Prize-winning title is concerned.

Things were not looking good for the ill-fated front page. And they were only getting worse. It emerged that 15-year-old Mohammed Suleiman, on the second row of the montage, was the son of Saber Suleiman, a prominent Hamas commander.

Once again, it was unclear why the Times journalists had neglected to look at Facebook. If they had, they would have unearthed a video of Suleiman père et fils in matching combat fatigues, firing a heavy weapon together.

They would also have found photographs of young Mohammed brandishing an assault rifle at home, in the woods and while astride a horse, clad in a military uniform.

Initial reports claimed that father and son had been killed by an Israeli drone strike while ‘on their agricultural land outside the city of Jabalia’. Tending their crops, no doubt.

As the days ticked past, more holes began to appear in the already threadbare New York Times splash. There were suggestions that at least ten of the children pictured may have been killed by some of the 600-odd Hamas rockets that mistakenly landed in Gaza.

None of this makes any of it OK. It just makes it more complicated. Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Suleiman and 17-year-old Khaled al-Qanoi would fit the definition of child soldiers, an outrage found all over the world and one of the greatest social evils of our times. And it should be unnecessary to state that the death of any child, indeed any civilian, in combat is an unspeakable tragedy.
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There is more.

It looks like the NY Times sided with Hamas in its propaganda war against Israel.  That is unfortunately not surprising these days.  They see the terrorist as victims instead thugs making a bogus claim for Israeli territory.  They pretend to be from a country that never existed.  The name Palestinian was imposed by the Romans in an attempt to tie the Philistines to the land.  That has proved to be a bogus claim by the Ancient Romans.  The Philistines were actually Greek interlopers.  The so-called Palestinians of today are actually Arabs from either Egypt or Jordon.  They are trying to make the claim to protect Muslim aggression in the area.