“Deadly Gaza Suicide Blast Idles 4000; Palestinians among 7 hurt at gateway to jobs in Israel”
This is how the San Francisco Chronicle headlined a Jan. 15 story on four Israelis killed at a Gaza checkpoint. The attack was perpetrated by Raeem Al Raiyshi, Hamas’s first female suicide bomber and the first mother detonating herself in order to kill Israelis.
A look at the article as it originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times that same day, underscores the inappropriateness of the Chronicle’s headline mentioning only Palestinians inconvenienced or hurt, but not Israelis who were murdered in the attack. Despite the Chronicle headline’s overt omission of Israeli casualties in this shocking attack by a Palestinian mother of two, the paper defended it, arguing that no apology was warranted and that not all the editors viewed the headline as “dismissive of the Israeli victims.”
That the Chronicle considers Palestinians injured and delayed to work headline news the day after suicide terrorism takes four Israeli lives shows a gross skewing of the facts and borders on outright misrepresentation of the event.