AP Adrift: The Houthis’ Maritime ‘Retaliation’ & Hamas’ ‘Relative Moderate’

Like ships passing in the night, the Associated Press’ recent account of Houthi attacks on international commercial vessels skirts around the reality of the far-reaching, destructive and sometimes deadly nautical attacks. 

Thus, in her Aug. 7 article, rookie AP reporter Fatma Khaled reports (“Egypt’s currency edges higher against the US dollar after price hikes“): “Houthis have been attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea in retaliation against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.”

Yet, most of the commercial ships which the Houthis have targeted lack any connection to Israel. As AP itself has written on numerous occasions, including just two days earlier following an attack on a Liberian-flagged ship (“Missile attack by Yemen’s Houthi rebels hits container ship in first attack in 2 weeks“):

The Houthis maintain that their attacks target ships linked to Israel, the United States or Britain as part of the rebels’ campaign they say seeks to force an end to the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. However, many of the ships attacked have little or no connection to the war — including some bound for Iran.

Therefore, Khaled’s spin that the Houthi’s nautical attacks are “retaliation” for Israel’s war against Hamas is hardly above board.

AP’s journalism is also adrift in its Gaza coverage in recent days, unmoored from immutable facts. Thus, in his Aug. 7 article, “Hamas names Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks, as its new leader in show of defiance,” Bassem Mroue refers to the slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as a “relative moderate.”

This “relative moderate” is the same man whose record includes the following “relatively reasonable” sentiments, compiled by Palestinian Media Watch:

  • “We love death like our enemies love life!”
  • “We need the blood of the children, women, and elderly” to “ignite within us the spirit of revolution”
  • “Armed resistance is path, Palestine is from the sea to the river”
  • “Hamas won’t recognize Israel… armed struggle is a strategic choice”
  • “We will liberate West Bank and rest of Palestine just as we liberated Gaza – with Intifada”

Consistent standards likewise fail to provide a much needed anchor for AP’s untethered reporting. Thus, Mroue accepts Hamas’ highly questionable fatality figures at face value, without even supplying any attribution. “The death toll among Palestinians is now nearing 40,000,” he writes, despite AP’s own earlier analysis indicating serious credibility problems with casualty figures provided by the terror organization.

And, then, despite last October’s Al-Ahli hospital fiasco in which Hamas falsely grossly inflated the number of fatalities and blamed them on an Israeli airstrike when in fact a failed Palestinian rocket was the culprit, AP again hurries to report Hamas’ contested fatality figures in a high profile deadly incident. In “Israeli airstrike on a Gaza school used as a shelter kills at least 80, Palestinian officials say,” Wafaa Shurafa and Samy Magdy (last updated Aug. 11, 1:13 am GMT) provide this skewed report:

An Israeli airstrike hit a school-turned-shelter in Gaza early Saturday, killing at least 80 people and wounding nearly 50 others, Palestinian health authories said.

Only three paragraphs later, does AP inform readers:

The Israeli military acknowledged it targeted the Tabeen school in central Gaza City, saying it hit a Hamas command center in a mosque in its compound and killed 19 Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters. Izzat al-Rishq, a top Hamas official, denied there were militants in the school.

While it took AP three paragraphs before reaching Israel’s refutation of Hamas’ claims accusing Israel of at least 80 civilian deaths, it took exactly one sentence to loop back to Hamas with its denial of Israel’s information that the army had targeted Hamas combatants using the educational facility as a terror command center.

Moreover, the AP writers devote multiple paragraphs to claims that the victims were uninvolved civilians. Yet, at no point did they recount that the Israeli military provided the names and titles of the 19 Hamas fighters it said were killed in the school, details which directly call into question the credibility of al-Rishq’s denial that there were militants in the school.

Thus, like the shipwrecked clinging desparately to its life raft, AP holds tight to its enduring double standard in which only Israeli information “cannot be independently verified.” All that laborious effort, and still AP’s journalism sinks ever deeper.

Comments are closed.