Hezbollah Massacres Children and the Washington Post Blames Israel

(July 30, 2024 Update: On July 30, 2024, the day after this article was published, the Washington Post published a correction noting that “The headline and subhead that accompanied a July 29 Page One photo and article about Israeli strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon did not provide adequate context. The headlines should have noted that the Israeli strikes were a response to a rocket strike from Lebanon that killed 12 teenagers and children in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.”)

Hezbollah massacred a dozen children and teenagers in the Druze village of Majdal Shams in northern Israel. But the Washington Post knows who to blame—and it’s not the Iranian-backed terror group. Rather, the once venerable newspaper chose to train their fire on the Jewish state.

On July 27, 2024, Hezbollah launched missiles into Israel, murdering twelve children and wounding more than forty people. Many of those murdered were kids playing a soccer game. Footage of their tiny, dismembered bodies circulated on social media shortly afterwards. Hezbollah initially claimed the attack, only to deny it later.

Hezbollah has been launching missiles into Israel since Hamas perpetrated the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre. Hezbollah, which de facto rules Lebanon, is Iran’s foremost terror proxy. Hezbollah, like its master in Tehran, calls for Israel’s destruction.

As CAMERA has documented, Hezbollah is a formidable foe. The terrorist organization maintains a global presence and has an estimated 150,000 missiles, many of them precision guided. Indeed, Hezbollah’s capabilities led then-U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to call them the “A Team” of terror groups, with more munitions than many European nations.

The Biden administration, the United Nations, and others have discouraged Israel launching a full-scale campaign against Hezbollah, variously arguing that they seek to prevent a “wider, regional war” and that Jerusalem should focus on its military campaign in the south, against Hamas and other Gaza-based Iranian proxies. Thus far, the Israeli military has only launched low-level retaliatory strikes in response.

But that “wider, regional war” is already here, with Iranian-backed terror groups attacking Israel from Yemen, the Red Sea, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The attack on Majdal Shams has sparked widespread outrage, including in Israel and among the Druze community.

As JNS reporter Neta Bar observed, “For Syrian Druze, the residents of Majdal Shams are relatives, countrymen and coreligionists, and any harm to them is a direct attack on all Syrian Druze.” Bar’s dispatch, entitled “Syrian Druze fed up with fence-sitting after Majdal Shams massacre,” offered a detailed look the community’s response to the attack, highlighting both their perspective and a look at relevant history.

The Washington Post, however, chose to focus, not on Hezbollah’s mass murder of children playing soccer, but on Israel’s response. The Post’s July 29th front-page, above-the-fold, story, “Israel hits targets in Lebanon” featured a whopping six bylines but very little common sense. Indeed, the dispatch was datelined as “Majdal Shams, Golan Heights”—implying that the Golan Heights is not part of Israel.

The Post’s story was accompanied by a photograph of Alma Ayman Fakher Eldin, an eleven-year-old girl who was slain on the soccer field. Underneath the picture, however, the Post wrote: “Relatives on Sunday mourn Alma Ayman Fakher Edlin, one of 12 victims of a strike on a soccer field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. While Israel and the United States blame Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group denies connection to the attack [emphasis added].” To echo and give undue credit to Hezbollah’s claims is risible.

Indeed, as the analyst Eitan Fischberger pointed out on July 27th—more than 24 hours before the Post’s story—Al Mayadeen, Hezbollah affiliated media, took credit for the attack on Mount Hermon, where Majdal Shams is located. At 6:49pm Israeli time, shortly after the missiles slaughtered children playing soccer, Al Mayadeen tweeted “We bombed the Hermon Brigade headquarters in the ‘Ma’ale Golani’ barracks with ‘Katyusha rockets.’” As Fischberger noted on X, Majdal Shams is right next to Maale Golani. Katyusha rockets are famously inaccurate, and indiscriminate attacks have long been part of Hezbollah’s repertoire.

The Post’s front-page coverage—fixating on Israel’s low-level response instead of the human tragedy at Majdal Shams and the outrage of the Druze community—is hardly unusual. Regrettably, it’s part of a pattern, both among legacy media writ large, and at the Post itself.

Since October 7th, the newspaper has variously referred to the mass rapes perpetrated by Hamas as merely “alleged,” echoed antisemitic claims that Israel “harvests” Palestinian organs, inaccurately portrayed the Jewish state as responsible for murdering babies, and regurgitated, sometimes word-for-word, propaganda from Hamas, a U.S. designated terrorist group. The Post even knowingly employs a reporter, Hajar Harb, who celebrated October 7th on social media. As CAMERA has pointed out, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are able to murder children thanks to their mouthpieces in the Western press, the Washington Post foremost among them.

 

Comments are closed.