OopsieWorld

"Bungling" Armies, "Hurried" Journalists, a whole world run by Inspectors Clouseau:

Before dawn on January 15th, an Israeli special forces unit killed a Palestinian mother and her 24-year-old son in their home. The mother had three bullets in her; the son 15. The Israeli soldiers also shot and wounded the woman's husband and four other family members: young women were shot in the pelvis and chest, young men in the foot, chest, torso, liver. The firing lasted over an hour. Then the Israeli squad shot at an arriving ambulance and prevented it for 45 minutes from tending to the dying, bleeding family.

It was all the result of a "misunderstanding," as the Israeli press put it.

[...]

The LA Times mentioned it in two sentences in the next to the last paragraph of a 20-paragraph story titled "Israel Eases Curbs on Palestinian Election" (and got the facts wrong); the New York Times reported it in the last two paragraphs of a 24 paragraph story. The Washington Post and Newsday reported it in their briefs columns. Not one reported the raid correctly.

[...]

The LA Times had a headline on an Israeli soldier who had been slightly wounded by Jewish settlers in the West Bank (the 150 to 200 rampaging settlers had also torched a Palestinian family home and destroyed numerous Palestinian shops, but the Israeli soldier's injury was the headline).

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who apparently had no space for a report on Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians, carried a headline story about "Anti-Jewish acts" on the rise, and included a report of a person "hit on the head with a plastic bottle." The victim "suffered a cut and a black eye." The article mentions that some incidents had been perpetrated by people "who hold a specific grudge against Israel." Why anyone should hold such a grudge remained a mystery for its readers.

The New York Times had a long news report entitled "Anger in the West Bank Helps Hamas Win Hearts," but nowhere in this extensive article does the Times mention the Israeli killing of a mother and son the day before, an incident that might conceivably contribute to anger at Israel. A few days later the Times ran another long story from Nablus. This one again leaves out any mention of the killings. In approximately a dozen stories about Israel-Palestine, many of them lengthy, the killing of a mother and son were given a total of three sentences at the very end of an extremely long report on something else.

[...]

On the "Associated Press Worldstream" wire, AP sent out a story headlined "Israeli troops kill Palestinian mother and son in apparent mistake, Palestinians say."