Saturday, October 3, 2015

Palestinian Fabrication of Settler Child Shooting Not Corrected by Palestinian News Agency

The Palestinian Ma'an news agency reported today (12.40 p.m.) the story of a child shot  by an Israeli settler in the so-called occupied territories near Kalkilya. The Palestinian 'narrative' was that a settler car stopped near the six-year-old boy, shot him and drove away. The older brother saw that the car had Israeli license plates. Other media also picked up and printed the story.
The Ma'an agency 'updated' the story at 17.50 p.m. to show that the report was 'single source', relying only on the 'family's' version. It also reported that the IDF was investigating.
The truth came out this afternoon even before the Ma'an 'update'.
About 16.00 Haaretz and Ynet both reported the results of the IDF investigation. It turns out that the child shot himself while playing with the gun of his brother, who serves in the Palestinian Authority police.
The boy's family fabricated the story (you can also say lied) to prevent the older brother from getting into trouble and to get an added Palestinian Authority stipend as an unfortunate 'terror victim' of Israeli settlers.
When I posted this at 7:35 pm on October 3, Ma'an has still not added the results of the IDF investigation that it had reported was being conducted.
The child is reportedly currently in stable but still serious condition and on life support.
When I checked back this morning, I saw that Ma'an left the original story was still intact, but it had a link that 'challenges' that version in a different article at 10.59 pm, Israeli army rejects involvement of Israelis in Qalqiliya shooting, even though the original story had already been preempted. Finally, they do admit in the challenge that:
Palestinian Authority security sources said that they were following up on the child's death after initial reports from relatives appeared to be false.
The Israel Today print edition, on Oct 4, 2015, reports that "Palestinian sources" are furious with the family for lying and for the older son's negligence with his police weapon.
So much for 'timely and objective' news reporting by this Palestine-based news source. Of course, the false story still exists on the Ma'an site and is reverberating on the internet, which is, of course, what the Palestinian media are really interested in. The token link to the IDF challenge exists to keep up the appearances of perfunctory objectivity.
The real story of violence on October 3 was the murder of two Israelis and injury of two more in Jerusalem.

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