AP botched coverage of Israel’s fight against Islamic Jihad and the deteriorating peace process with a lead paragraph containing outright misinformation:
Israeli troops killed three Palestinian militants, including the suspected mastermind of a suicide attack, in a West Bank raid just hours after the two sides had reached a tentative new truce deal.
“The two sides?” Sounds like Israel violated an agreement with Islamic Jihad. But Israel isn’t party to any truce—the cease fire is a strictly inter-Palestinian affair tenuously cobbled together by Mahmoud Abbas, as the NY Times makes clear:
“We are not partner to any agreement between various terror groups and the Palestinian Authority,” said Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. “We deal only with the Palestinian Authority.”
