When Palestinian terrorists get killed while attacking Jewish civilians or IDF soldiers, terror groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad are quick to laud the “martyr” as a member of their group in social media and on the web, often with a poster showing the terrorist in a heroic pose with a rifle. But the latest from the New York Times is that many of the claimed martyrs were actually just innocents murdered for no reason by the Israeli Army. Written by Raja Abdulrahim and Hiba Yazbek, For Palestinians, a Rush to Claim ‘Martyrs’ Killed by Israel includes interviews with family members who swear that their relative was never a member of any “resistance” groups. We’ll get to these claims in a moment, but first let’s note another serious charge from the Times reporters:
In Israeli military news releases there is little acknowledgment of the civilian toll from its raids into Palestinian areas this year, with the word “civilian” never used in reference to Palestinians. The military generally acknowledges that a Palestinian was killed simply with the phrase “a hit was identified.”
Never? In fact, the IDF’s official twitter feed shows repeated references to Palestinians as civilians. For example, following an IDF raid in Jenin on December 11, there are multiple official tweets on December 12 referring to Palestinians as civilians:
The IDF and its commanders regret any harm to uninvolved civilians, including those who are in a combat environment and in close proximity to armed terrorists during exchanges of fire. 5/6
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) December 12, 2022
The IDF then reiterated the point:
Security forces will continue to conduct counterterrorism activities wherever necessary while making efforts to avoid harm to uninvolved civilians. 6/6
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) December 12, 2022
CAMERA has contacted the Times about this clear-cut error and asked for a correction.
Now regarding the supposedly innocent Palestinian victims of the Israeli Army, it should be noted that this is not the first time Abdulrahim has made exactly these kinds of claims in the New York Times — in an April 16, 2022 article Abdulrahim specifically portrayed Palestinian Mohammed Zakarneh as an innocent victim of Israeli soldiers, when evidence from multiple sources including Palestinian ones, showed that he was an active member of Islamic Jihad and had fired on IDF soldiers from a motorcycle, before being killed by return fire. Islamic Jihad even published his martry’s poster, seen at right.
For more details on Zakarneh and the rest of Abdulrahim’s earlier report see this CAMERA article. In light of her habitually inaccurate claims, it’s worth noting that while in college Abdulrahim won a scholarship award from CAIR, the terror-apologist group that was an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror-financing trial in US history, and that she claimed in a letter to the campus newspaper that it was erroneous to refer to Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘terror organizations’ that have ‘murdered innocent Israeli civilians.’
It’s inconceivable that the Times would hire someone who, in a campus newspaper, had defended Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the Hebron massacre. And yet the Times has no problem hiring someone who did far worse, defending Hamas and Hezbollah.