A few weeks ago, Donald Macintyre mistakenly declared the entire family of ten-year-old Mohammed Badran to be dead as part of an almost 4,000 word report from Gaza for the New Statesman. HonestReporting pointed out how the initial error, which had been corrected, cast into doubt Palestinian casualty figures, not to mention the accuracy of some of the reporting coming out of the conflict.
But it got worse when it turned out that the father of Badran who was actually killed later in an air strike, was revealed to be a Hamas operative, something that Macintyre’s report had failed to acknowledge.
So it’s to Macintyre’s credit that he has revisited the story and acknowledged some of the missing pieces in a new article for the New Statesman, albeit focusing attention on the debate over what constitutes acceptable collateral damage when targeting terrorists:
But the story of the Badrans was not over yet. The day after I filed an update to let readers know the family was alive, it became obsolete: on 9 August, Mohammed’s father, Nidal, was killed in an air strike on a mosque in Nuseirat.
The 44-year-old was a policeman – and therefore on the Hamas payroll, as he had once been on that of the Palestinian Authority. He was killed, his brother claims, while preparing for dawn prayers. Residents near the mosque were warned by the Israel Defence Forces to get out and someone alerted the local imam, who then left. No one warned the other three men in the mosque at the time.
Whatever Nidal Badran was doing that morning, it is now almost certain he and the men killed with him were Hamas activists. Described by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights as “members of an armed group”, they may have belonged to Hamas’s military wing. Either way, the targeting of the Badrans’ house days earlier was surely no accident.
