[sc:graybox ]The following critique by Richard Behar and Gary Weiss can be read in its entirety in the New York Observer.
On February 13, 2015, the Associated Press published and distributed an article that stirred the conscience of the world. It gave its many readers—“AP news content is seen by half the world’s population,” according to the wire agency’s website—a disturbing picture of Israel as a serial violator of the norms of warfare, wantonly and indiscriminately slaughtering civilians during last summer’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
The AP had conducted what it called “the most painstaking attempt to date” to determine who was killed in Israeli strikes on houses in the war. The New York-based news agency examined 247 airstrikes on homes—interviewing witnesses, visiting attack sites and compiling a detailed casualty count. Its probe determined that out of 844 dead from those strikes, 508 (or just over 60 percent) were children, women and older men, “all presumed to be civilians.”
Hanan Ashrawi, executive committee member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told the AP: “Either they [Israelis] have the worst army in the world that constantly misses targets and hits civilians, or they are deliberately killing civilians.” If most of those killed are civilians, she added, “You cannot call them collateral damage.”
The AP took it one step further, citing what it called “preliminary” UN figures that 66 percent of the overall Palestinian death toll during the war (not only from house strikes) was civilians.
There was some rebuttal from Israeli officials but the general approach of the article, which was illustrated with eight searing photographs, seemed designed to substantiate Ms. Ashrawi’s vehement comments. The AP found that children under 16 made up one-third of the total deaths, that in 83 strikes on houses (or what it calls “residential compounds”), three or more members of one family died, and that the killed included just “96 confirmed or suspected militants,” just more than 11 percent of the total (“though the actual number could be higher since armed groups have not released detailed casualty lists”).
It was the stuff of which journalism award submissions are made.
Read the rest of the critique in the New York Observer.
Related reading: Forbes Journalist’s Devastating Critique of AP
Featured image: CC BY-NC-SA Lance Page/Truthout via flickr with modifications by HonestReporting
