Resurrection UPDATED April 9th 2010 : What an appropriate weekend for this story! On Tuesday, it was reported that a 15-year old in Gaza had been shot dead by IDF forces at a 'Land Day' demonstration (Land Day - March 31 - is the day that the 'Palestinians' and their 'Israeli Arab' brothers protest the alleged confiscation of 'Palestinian land' by Israel). The IDF denied the story, and therefore I didn't run it on Tuesday night.
Now Maan, the same outlet that reported the story in the first place, is reporting that the kid had been arrested by the Egyptians at the Egyptian end of a smuggling tunnel, and has returned home to his family on the Gaza side of Rafah.
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There appears to be a contradicting story here:
The Palestinian Ma’an news agency said Farmawi’s mother was surprised to find her son alive four days after he was allegedly killed. His death had been confirmed by medical professionals in the Gaza Strip.The IDF, however, firmly denied allegations that Palestinians had been killed during demonstrations on Land Day, which marks the 34th anniversary of the killing of six Galilee Arabs during protests against land confiscations.
but he was bleeding they said. was it some kind of religious thing or was it a menstrual cycle?
'Left bleeding'
He said the boy had been left "bleeding for hours" before a medical team was allowed to collect his body.
However, amid confusing reports, unnamed Palestinian sources also said the boy's death "may have been an internal matter", without giving further details.
After Muhammad returned home, Dr Hasanien said: "We were getting wrong reports from the officer in the field and we announced later in the day that we did not find the body."
He added: "Anyway, thank God the boy is alive."
Maan reported that 17 Palestinians, including 12 minors, had been held by Egyptian forces shortly after they arrived through one of Gaza's smuggling tunnels near Rafah.
The detainees were returned to the border by security forces on Friday.
April 7, 2010 – A Palestinian teenager, reported to have been shot "by Israeli forces" and "left bleeding for hours" before Israel allowed paramedics to evacuate him, has emerged, alive and (more or less) unharmed.The discovery that the boy, Muhammed Faramawi, was in fact held by Egyptian police after entering Egypt through a tunnel from Gaza forced a number of news outlets, including the BBC and New York Times, to backtrack from earlier reports about the "killing." But disturbingly, other mainstream news organizations that reported the boy had died have failed thus far to update readers.
News Sources that Backtrack
The BBC led a March 31 story with the allegation that Israel killed the boy:A Palestinian teenager has been shot dead close to southern Gaza's border, Palestinians say, as at least five other Gazans were wounded elsewhere.Muhammad al-Faramawi, 15, was killed on Tuesday by Israeli fire near Rafah, the Hamas-run health ministry said.Three days later, a BBC headline announced: "Gaza boy reported killed returns home alive."
The New York Times, too, reported that although it was unclear who actually killed the boy, "Palestinian officials said the youth, Muhammad al-Farmawi, was killed by Israeli soldiers close to his home in the southern Gaza town of Rafah."
The March 30 story added:
By nightfall Tuesday, Palestinian ambulances were still waiting to coordinate their entry into the border area with Israel in order to retrieve the boy’s body, according to Dr. Muawiya Hassanein, director of emergency medical services in Gaza.And by Saturday morning, the Times updated its readers:
Same with AFP, which reported that "Gaza medics and witnesses said [al-Faramawi] was killed by Israeli forces," and subsequently updated its readers with news of the boy’s arrest and release. Even partisans, such as the Palestinian Ma’an media agency and anti-Israel activist Nigel Parry, subsequently backtracked from their greatly exaggerated reports of the boy’s death. News Sources that Failed to Update ReadersA 14-year-old boy thought to have been killed either by Israeli gunfire or from internal Palestinian violence last week turned up unharmed at his family’s house after trying to sneak into Egypt via smuggler tunnels and being held by Egyptian security officials, his parents said Saturday.Al Jazeera’s English Web site, however, seemingly never bothered to alert its readers to the facts after telling its readers that "a 15-year-old Palestinian boy has been killed ... after Israeli troops opened fire at Israeli Arabs and Palestinians protesters marking the ‘Land day.’"
But it was hardly only Al Jazeera that so dramatically disregarded the tenets of professional journalism. Some Western news outlets, too, told readers of the "death" and never looked back.
The Independent, whose coverage of the Middle East conflict might very well be more partisan than that of Al Jazeera, reported, as fact, that "a Palestinian teenager was killed and 12 wounded when Israeli soldiers opened fire on demonstrators near Gaza" (3/31/10, World in Brief, Pg. 32).
A March 31 brief in the Washington Post noted that "the head of emergency medical services in Gaza said" the boy was killed.
CNN’s online breaking news blog, This Just In, reported on March 30:
And a brief in the Ottowa Citizen cited "medics and witnesses" who claimed Israel was responsible for killing the boy. Apparently none of these news sources published corrections or follow up stories, leaving their audience to believe misinformation about Israel shooting dead the Palestinian teenager.[A] 15-year-old boy was reported shot to death at the Rafah airport in Gaza, said Muawiya Hassanein, director of ambulance and emergency services in Gaza. Additional information about the reported death was not immediately available.
Muawiya Hassanein, the head of emergency services in Gaza, who has long been a cited in the Western media as a source of information on Palestinian casualties, was clearly a central figure in spreading the false allegations. But in the days after it became clear that Hassanein disseminated false information, Western media outlets continue to unquestioningly cite Hassanein's claims about other incidents.Meanwhile, none of the news organizations that backtracked from their early reports of the supposed killing bothered to (publicly) examine how and why they were misled, with the possible exception of the BBC, which quoted Hassanein as explaining, "We were getting wrong reports from the officer in the field and we announced later in the day that we did not find the body."
