Britain’s Guardian Newspaper Hides Death of Palestinian Child by Hamas

A Guardian article published this week about the death of a Palestinian toddler in Gaza during the recent conflict between Israel and the Hamas terror group failed to mention the child died from a Hamas rocket that misfired and landed in Gaza and not from an Israeli airstrike.

The article was also rife with other inaccuracies, including the boy’s name and age.

The opening paragraphs of the piece, written by Stefanie Glinski, state:

In the last month of her pregnancy, May al-Masri was preparing dinner when a rocket landed outside her home in northern Gaza, killing her one-year-old son, Yasser.

Masri had felt the explosion’s shockwave when the attack happened last month, but was largely unharmed. Running outside once the air had cleared, she found her husband severely wounded and her child’s body covered in blood.

With her husband in a West Bank hospital – and likely to be there for months to come – Masri gave birth to a healthy boy a few weeks later. However, the trauma of the attack, and the grief of her loss, have made it difficult for the 20-year-old to bond with or breastfeed her newborn baby.

May’s escalation of violence in the long-running Israel-Palestine conflict killed 256 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. Yasser was one of the 68 children killed in Gaza, according to the authorities there.

Nowhere in the article does Glinski bother to explain to her readers that Israel didn’t launch rockets into Gaza, and that the rocket that killed the child belonged to a Gaza based terror group and was one of several hundred that misfired and fell short of their target.

As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which first reported on this, notes, the Guardian or other British media outlets failed to mention the fact some 15 percent of the 4,360 rockets fired at Israeli population centers from Hamas misfired and landed in Gaza.

CAMERA’s report also noted both Israeli and Palestinian NGOs had already reported the boy was indeed killed by a rocket fired by a terrorist group in Gaza.

In addition, the journalist wrote the boy was a one-year-old called Yasser when in fact he was a two-year-old named Yazan.

Finally, the report observed the article was published on the Guardian’s “Global Development” page, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

CAMERA said:

By obfuscating Hamas’ responsibility for the death of al-Masri and other Palestinian children during the war — which is consistent with the media outlet’s broader failure to hold the extremist group responsible for their prioritization of destroying Israel over the basic social and economic needs of Palestinian residents — the primary cause of the conflict and Gaza’s under-development will continue to elude readers.