Weekend Roundup of Ha’aretz Errors

Following two commendable corrections last week, Ha’aretz unfortunately continues to slip up with shoddy translations and sloppy reporting.

On Friday (April 5), the usually sharp Amos Harel erred on two points in his article “New IDF commander charged with preventing another intifada,” which appeared in both English and Hebrew. He wrote:

Most importantly, more unarmed Palestinians have been killed − eight since January, including the two teens killed Wednesday night east of Tul Karm by IDF fire.

Sources in the IDF’s Central Command say the preliminary investigation into that nighttime incident reveals that the two Palestinian teens, together with others, had moved close in the dark to an IDF fortified position carrying seven incendiary devices. (Emphasis added.)

Palestinians carrying seven incidendiary devices are “unarmed”?

In a second inaccuracy in the same article, Harel reports:

Palestinian excoriation of Israel over Abuhamdieh’s death from cancer while in an Israeli prison also has a political goal − the opportunity for the PA to pressure Israel into releasing the 123 Palestinians incarcerated since before the Oslo Accords in 1993. (Emphasis added.)

But, as was reported by Harel’s very own paper last week, Abuhamdieh died “on Tuesday morning at the Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva,” and not in an Israeli prison.

Finally, today, on the eve of Israel’s Holocaust Remebrance Day, the English edition publishes (in print and online) the following photograph and caption alongside an article about the pre-war diary of Jewish girls in Warsaw:
 
 
This photograph, of a healthy, well-dressed, smiling bunch of Jewish youth lounging by the water’s edge is “a Holocaust-era photo?” Hardly. As the Hebrew edition of the very same article and photograph notes, the photograph dates to the years before the war. Once again, someone is asleep at Ha’aretz‘s helm.

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