UPDATED: Reuters Removes Story Which Turned Murdered Civilian into Mossad Spy Officer

When Israel briefly delayed the release of a convicted Palestinian murderer last month, Reuters sought to tug at our heartstrings — not because the victim’s family would soon be seeing the killer escape justice, but because the prisoner’s mother had hoped for a quicker release ("Gaza's mother's hopes for return of long-jailed son dashed").

It was an odd subject for a human-interest story. The prisoner, Diaa El Agha, had brutally murdered an Israeli, hacking him to death with a pick axe. Readers, though, were invited to await his release along with his mother.

But that isn’t the only odd bit in the story. On four separate occasions, Reuters' English-language article describes the victim as a Mossad intelligence officer. 

Once as the first line of the news agency’s summary embedded at the very top of the story: “Son jailed for killing Israeli Mossad officer.”

Twice more in consecutive paragraphs, attached to the two buried and brief references to the crime in paragraphs nine and 10:

Diaa El Agha was imprisoned in 1992, aged 17, for killing an officer of the Israeli spy agency Mossad.

On his family's website a newspaper report shows a picture of an Israeli soldier holding up the pickaxe used to kill the Mossad agent.

And again in a narrated video Reuters embeds above the story: “Diaa was 17 when he was imprisoned in 1992 for killing an officer of the Israeli spy agency Mossad.”

The Arabic version of the same story, too, twice misidentifies the victim as a Mossad officer.

But Amatzia Ben-Haim, the victim whose name is absent from the story, was not a Mossad agent. In his listing on Israel's National Insurance's web site, which is dedicated to civilian victims of terror attacks, Ben-Haim is memorialized as a father of three and a husband, who had his years of military service and his time in reserve duty with the Sayeret Matkal elite commando unit. When he moved on to civilian life, he worked for his kibbutz’s factory programming irrigation systems for farmers. He was murdered in the line of civilian duty, while diagnosing a broken irrigation system in a greenhouse.

An account of the murder later appearing in Times of Israel detailed the incident:

Amatzia would go to these farms, install the systems, and often go back to maintain them or to troubleshoot them if needed.  Some of these farms were in the Gaza Strip, prior to the Israeli evacuation of all farms and settlements in Gaza.

It was on one of these trips that Amatzia was helping one such farmer in the Gaza strip, focused entirely on an irrigation line that may have been clogged, or a computer lead that may have malfunctioned. He did not pay attention to the young teen working nearby with a hoe, weeding the furrows. It was to be Amatzia’s last day on earth, as the teen brought the hoe down on Amatzia’s head, killing him instantly, widowing Amatzia’s wife, and orphaning his children. The teen, wishing to become a member of Hamas, was told to “kill a Jew” as the required initiation into the murderous terrorist organization.

On what basis does Reuters characterize the civilian victim as a Mossad officer? The piece doesn’t say. It’s just a fact, stated again, and again, and again, and in case readers missed it, yet again.

For what purpose? Seeming, to conceal the fact that the Diaa El Agha murdered a civilian, so that readers are more inclined to sympathize with the subject of the story, his impatient mother.

It might seem surprising that a serious news organization, whose commitment to “unbiased and reliable news” is promised at the bottom of each story, would rewrite a civilian victim as an active intelligence officer. Then again, it might not. On Jan. 30, CBS News falsely described 29-year-old hostage Arbel Yahoud as a soldier, though she was a civilian. The piece was corrected after CAMERA notified CBS of the error. Two weeks later, on Feb. 16, the Los Angeles Times falsely claimed that most of the remaining hostages in Gaza were soldiers. After CAMERA informed the paper that the overwhelming majority were in fact civilians, it eventually corrected the error once members of the public weighed in as well.

CAMERA has called on Reuters to likewise correct its errors. Stay tuned for any developments.

With research by Tamar Sternthal and CAMERA Arabic. Hat tip: Tablet Magazine.