Coverage Trends

When a Palestinian attack kills Israelis, the TV news networks are quick to cut to “breaking news” reports. Harrowing footage from the scene and interviews with outraged Israeli government officials are swiftly broadcast, and harsh statements are quickly issued by government and UN officials to appear in tomorrow’s front page newspaper stories. Meanwhile, the relentless killing of Palestinian civilians, many of them children, by the Israeli occupation army goes largely unnoticed and unreported.

In this follow-up to EI’s special feature, “Israel falsely claims “massacre” of “worshippers” in Hebron” (16 November 2002), Nigel Parry and Ali Abunimah look at how Israel is using international outrage about an attack against “worshippers” to justify more ethnic cleansing.

News media and public officials reported that Jewish “worshippers” were killed in a Palestinian ambush in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron on November 15, 2002. In fact, all those who died were Israeli soldiers and armed paramilitary settlers, and the Israeli army admitted that the attackers had directed their attack against the soldiers, and not, as the Israeli government and most of the media reported against “Sabbath worshippers.” EI’s Ali Abunimah and Nigel Parry report.

A special factsheet prepared for the Electronic Intifada by Ali Abunimah and Hussien Ibish, addressing the 6 most common Israeli myths recycled during Israel’s supposed “War on Terror”.

Media reports about the construction of Israel’s so-called ‘security fence’ barely touch on the details of the venture and its implications for Palestinians. EI’s Arjan El Fassed writes about a recently released Israeli map that raises new concerns about Israel’s so-called ‘security fence’.

US media outlets were quick to declare two suicide bombs which killed Israelis an end to a period of “relative calm.” Michael Brown and Ali Abunimah note that the past six weeks have been anything but calm for the dozens of Palestinians killed and injured as Israeli occupation forces continue their destructive rampage away from the media’s attention.

September 2002 marked the 30th anniversary of the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and the 20th anniversary of the murder of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The US media remembered only one of these anniversaries. Guess which one? The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah investigates.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website is attempting to minimize the scale of the IDF’s destruction of the Jenin refugee camp through a Flash presentation.

The fence is not built on the demarcation line, also known as the ‘Green Line’ but is built on confiscated Palestinian land, separates Palestinian communities, denies access to land to farmers, breaks off water lines, and de facto illegally annexes more land and water resources for Israeli consumption.

Although the media does report on the Israeli imposed internal closures of the West Bank towns, the effects of this closure on Palestinian education are under-reported.