The Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent, Peter Beaumont, pulled off quite a feat in a Nov. 13th report on ‘violence in the region’: he managed to report on two separate Palestinian terror attacks in Hebron without noting that the perpetrators were Palestinian.
First, here’s the headline and strap line.
Now, here’s the entire text within the section of his report dealing with a Palestinian attack on Israeli motorists on Friday which killed two:
An Israeli man and his 18-year-old son have been shot dead in an ambush attack on their car south of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.
The victims were driving with five other family members when they were ambushed by a gunman near Otniel, a settlement in the southern Hebron hills.
The gunman was believed to have been hiding by the side of the road for an Israeli vehicle to drive by. He escaped by car after the shooting. The two dead men were identified as Ya’akov Litman and his son, Natanel.
Noam Bar, a paramedic for Magen David Adom, Israel’s equivalent of a national Red Cross, said: “When we arrived at the scene, we saw seven people outside of a van, two of whom, a man in his 40s and an 18-year-old youth, were lying unconscious with gunshot wounds to their upper bodies. They were showing no signs of life, and there was no other choice but to pronounce them dead at the scene.”
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said: “We will get to these despicable murderers and bring them to justice as we have in the past. We will fight terror in any place it is needed.”
We’re informed that the Israelis died in “an ambush attack”, but not that a Palestinian was of course the one who launched the attack.
Beaumont then pivots, after a few transitional passages, to another incident in which an Israeli was shot by a Palestinian gunman.
Friday’s incidents follow last week’s sniper fire on a crowd of Jews at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron’s Old City, which wounded two, and Thursday’s raid by undercover Israeli soldiers and security agents on a Hebron hospital, in which a Palestinian man was shot dead.
Again, two Jews were wounded by “sniper fire”, but we’re not told that Palestinians fired the shots.
Yet, note how Beaumont does manage to explain that, in a separate incident on Thursday, a Palestinian in Hebron was killed by Israeli security personnel.
This isn’t the first time the Guardian has erased Palestinians from stories about terror attacks against Israeli Jews. In November 2014, the Guardian deleted references to the Palestinian identity of the attackers in a Reuters story about the deadly assault on worshipers at a Jerusalem synagogue, despite the fact that Israeli police had already identified the attackers as Palestinians.
Once again, the Guardian has demonstrated their bias when reporting on Israeli-Palestinian issues – specifically, a pattern of obfuscating even the most unambiguous examples of Palestinian culpability for terror and violence.
