Two Israeli soldiers were killed by Palestinian terrorists near Hebron on Friday. Staff Sergeant Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, and Sergeant Yuval Shai Svilem, 20, were killed, and three other soldiers wounded.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a major operation in the Hebron neighborhood from which the attackers came. Soldiers would search homes, confiscate weapons and demolish terrorist infrastructure, repeating the model employed in Jenin and Tulkarm.
What exactly had Israel uncovered in those Palestinian cities?
In Jenin, Israeli soldiers reported discovering more than 100 explosive devices in just two days, along with a weapons-manufacturing workshop and a command center containing materials for making bombs. Explosives were even found hidden inside a washing machine.
In Tulkarm, soldiers found a weapons storage facility containing approximately 100 pipe bombs, eight additional explosive devices and equipment for detonating explosives. They discovered a drone-production laboratory and another bomb-making facility. Some 45 explosive devices had been planted beneath roads to attack Israeli soldiers and vehicles.
Across the broader northern West Bank operation, the Israeli military reported seizing more than 1,300 weapons and destroying over 50 terrorist infrastructure sites.
And how did the New York Times describe these discoveries?
Following Netanyahu’s announcement, the newspaper characterized Israel’s earlier operations in Jenin and Tulkarm as a massive crackdown, emphasizing that tens of thousands of Palestinians had been displaced, homes demolished and roads torn apart. It compared the destruction to Gaza, adding that the Israeli military said it was targeting militants.
The weapons factories, drone laboratories and explosives caches disappeared from its account when it was providing context to that specific account.
The Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, WAFA, offered an even more extraordinary account of Friday’s shooting. Its headline declared, “Preliminary reports of two Palestinians killed by Israeli gunfire in Hebron.”
The article described Israeli forces opening fire on “two young Palestinians,” causing them to fall to the ground. It omitted the two Israeli soldiers killed in the attack and the gunfire reportedly initiated by the Palestinians.
Two Palestinian gunmen who killed Israeli soldiers became two young Palestinians shot by Israeli forces.
WAFA turned Palestinian gunmen who killed Israeli soldiers into victims of Israeli gunfire. The New York Times turned the dismantling of terrorist weapons factories into seemingly senseless destruction of Palestinian neighborhoods.
Different newspapers. The same distortion: remove the Palestinian terrorism, and Israel becomes the aggressor.
