Five children, two accountsFrom an errant rocket to an airstrike, in nine days · 7 to 17 August 2022
7 to 17 August 2022
Five children, two accounts
On 7 August 2022 five children were killed in a cemetery in the Jabaliya refugee camp. They were between four and sixteen. They were in the cemetery because it is one of the few open spaces in the camp. What killed them took nine days to settle in American newsprint, and this archive holds all three stages of it.
“Israel said some of the deaths were caused by rockets that fell short.”
Ann Arbor NewsAssociated Press · CP-2022-028
“Israel says some of the children were killed by rockets that fell short. The Palestinian rights group Al Mezan attributes all of the deaths to Israeli fire.”
Saint Lucie News TribuneAssociated Press · CP-2022-035
“…was caused by an Israeli airstrike and not an errant Palestinian rocket.”
The Boston GlobeAssociated Press · CP-2022-051
The first version is Israel’s account, printed as Israel’s account. The second is the account and its contradiction, set side by side and left there. The third is a finding: the Palestinian Center for Human Rights examined the shrapnel and concluded the blast came from an Israeli airstrike.
The Associated Press printed its own observation against itself. The same seven paragraphs that carry the finding also carry this: “When The Associated Press visited the site, it saw none of the usual signs of an airstrike by an Israeli F-16 or drone, adding to suspicions that the blast was caused by an errant rocket.” AP had looked, had not found what it expected to find, had said so, and ran the contrary conclusion beside it anyway. That is what a correction looks like when nobody calls it one.
None of the five children are named in any of the three clippings. The archive holds one from five days earlier that does name four other Gazan children killed that week, three of them with ages, which is how the press decides who is a name and who is a number.
This is the same sequence as Sabra and Shatila, forty years apart, settled in nine days instead of by a commission of inquiry. The next time a first report says a death was an accident, note the date on it, and look for what the same reporters filed nine days later.