A father and son became the latest Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism when a gunman opened fire on them at a carwash close to the West Bank town of Huwara on Saturday afternoon.
Shai Silas Nigreker, 60, and Aviad Nigreker, 28, from Ashdod, had reportedly come to get their air conditioning fixed before they were shot at point-blank range by an unidentified assailant who fled the scene on foot.
Israeli investigators are currently probing the possibility that employees at the carwash tipped off the terrorist after hearing the two men speak Hebrew.
Much of the media coverage of the attack near the flashpoint village, which was the scene of a revenge rampage by settlers in February following the murder of two Israeli brothers by a Hamas terrorist, linked their deaths to rising violence in Huwara and the entire West Bank.
The BBC, for example, reported:
This year, the village has seen several shooting attacks in which Israeli settlers and soldiers have been targeted – including the killing of two brothers in February.
That triggered a deadly rampage by a large crowd of settlers in one of the worst such acts in years. There have also been other instances of settler violence.”
Similarly, the wire agency AFP published a piece that stated:
Huwara, a Palestinian town near the city of Nablus, has seen a number of attacks on Jewish settlers or the Israeli military since early last year.
Settlers have also responded with revenge attacks on the town and surrounding villages.”
While the above paragraphs may seem fairly innocuous, they are actually anything but.
Although the majority of those attacked in Huwara were — as the BBC and AFP pointed out — either Israeli soldiers or settlers, the attack on Saturday is proof that Palestinian terrorists do not specifically target settlers.
Yet, both the BBC and AFP failed to include the fact that Shai and Aviad Nigreker were both residents of the southern Israeli city of Ashdod and were not — as both news reports suggest — settlers living in the West Bank settlement.
Palestinian terrorists do not specifically target so-called “settlers,” but Israelis. Shai and Aviad were murdered in cold blood because they were identified as Israelis, and it would have mattered not one iota to their killer whether they had been from a West Bank settlement or Tel Aviv.
But the bottom line is that the majority of Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism are civilians. Whether they are settlers or not is immaterial, and outlets like the BBC and AFP should write about them like they would any other innocent casualty of terrorism — without tacit victim blaming.
Attackers do not check who they are attacking. Israelis, settlers or not, are attacked simply for being Israeli.
This footnote by @BBCNews‘ @YolandeKnell implies that the victims were residents of the area. They were from Ashdod.https://t.co/HF5kzIpe7F pic.twitter.com/rbNginYXUC
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 20, 2023
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Photo credit: Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images
