This iconic image made its way around the world. Fighting back tears at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, Egyptian Prime Minister held 4-year old Mahmoud Sadallah in his arms and called on Israel to end its military operations.
A PR gift for Hamas, eager to portray the IDF as vicious child killers.
While the boy was allegedly killed by an IDF airstrike, it occurred during the time that a ceasefire was in effect for the visit of the Egyptian PM. A ceasefire that Hamas broke, firing more rockets while even Israel refrained from launching airstrikes.
The truth has now emerged. Credit to some journalists for admitting, for once, that Israel was not the responsible party. The Sunday Telegraph reports (emphasis added):
But there were signs on Saturday that not all the Palestinian casualties have been the result of Israeli air strikes. The highly publicised death of four-year-old Mohammed Sadallah appeared to have been the result of a misfiring home-made rocket, not a bomb dropped by Israel.
The child’s death on Friday figured prominently in media coverage after Hisham Kandil, the Egyptian prime minister, was filmed lifting his dead body out of an ambulance. “The boy, the martyr, whose blood is still on my hands and clothes, is something that we cannot keep silent about,” he said, before promising to defend the Palestinian people.
But experts from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights who visited the site on Saturday said they believed that the explosion was caused by a Palestinian rocket.
There is only one party that not only deliberately targets innocent Israeli children but also has no qualms about putting the lives of Palestinian children at risk.
The media must acknowledge that dead babies and children play an essential role in Hamas’s propaganda war. The media must be responsible for checking the veracity of Hamas casualty claims.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
