UK Media Watch prompts improved Daily Mail headline on Gaza girl’s death

Though their new headline ("Sick Palestinian girl suffers lonely end") is still, in our view, problematic, it is, nonetheless, a significant improvement over the original in that it no longer makes the explicit claim that the child "died alone", and doesn't attribute blame to the "Israeli permit regime".

Last week, we posted about a complaint we filed with the Daily Mail over the following headline accompanying a June 12th Associated Press (AP) article published on their website.

We noted that the initial claim, by anti-Israel media outlets, that Aisha Lulu, a five-year-old from Gaza who died a brain tumour, passed away alone in a Jerusalem hospital because COGAT refused to grant permission for family members to accompany her, was proven to be untrue weeks ago.  The claim that authorities denied permission to Aisha’s family to accompany her was false, and the girl in fact died in Gaza after she was released, not in the Israeli hospital where she was treated.

Further, the actual Daily Mail/AP article never makes the claim – asserted in the headline – that the girl died alone.

Though editors initially refused to correct the headline, we filed an appeal, which was upheld.

Despite the fact that their new headline (“Sick Palestinian girl suffers lonely end”) is, in our view, still problematic, it is, nonetheless, a significant improvement over the original in that it no longer explicitly claims that the child “died alone”, and doesn’t attribute blame to the “Israeli permit regime”.

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