More rockets are raining down on Israel. And more AP media bias goes out over the wires. Look at the cause-and-effect in this lead. Note which action the AP puts first: Israel’s strike on terrorists firing mortars into Israel.
Violence along the Gaza-Israel border heated up on Wednesday, with Israeli airstrikes on militant targets and militant rocket fire at Israel.
When do you find that out? Two paragraphs later.
Israeli aircraft killed a militant from Gaza’s Islamic Jihad faction before dawn on Wednesday, Hamas security officials said. They later targeted two militants who had fired two mortars at Israel shortly before. No casualties were reported in that airstrike.
Got that? Israel struck terrorists who were firing mortars into Israel. The AP completely reverses the order of events, making it look like Israeli actions caused the rocket fire. And, of course, the real cause of the rocket fire? Well, that would be terrorists trying to destroy Israel, from Gaza—a place, where you may not remember, the media used the narrative that if only there weren’t any Israelis in Gaza, the Gazans would no longer try to kill Israelis.
Looks like they were wrong.
Finally, in the very last paragraph of the story—the one that most often gets cut by news editors who need room to run other things—we have this explanation:
A militant incursion into Israel from Sinai last week killed eight Israelis. That was followed by Palestinian rocket attacks and Israeli airstrikes that have not stopped despite a cease-fire reached on Sunday.
So the real headline should be: “Militants fire rockets into Israel in violation of truce,” but of course, they won’t bother writing that story again. They did it a few days ago. Time for the old “cycle of violence” standby.
The Washington Post was worse.
After 48 hours in which air attacks were suspended, an Israeli drone strike killed Ismail Asmar, a senior member of the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad group, in his car in Rafah, near the border with Egypt, according to the military and local medical officials.
During those 48 hours, there were still rockets shot. And I’m guessing that if Israel targeted someone, there was a strong possibility that he was preparing more rockets.