Covering Palestine

The note above the story

36 clippings, 1977 to 2002, in which an American newspaper told its readers that an Israeli military censor had seen the story first.

An Israeli sergeant whose first name is Gil said the van ran a red light, approached at 40 mph and struck the two military police officers, a man and a woman, who had been posted at the corner to keep order among the hitchhikers.

That sentence ran in the Huntsville Times on 11 October 1991. The reporter had the man’s surname. The sergeant gave it to him. A censor ordered it out, and the sentence was rebuilt around the hole so the man could still speak.

The deletion isn’t the unusual part. The paper said so, above the dateline, before a single word of the story:

The head of the Huntsville Times story. Under the headline, set in italic above the dateline: Editor’s note, Israeli military censors delayed this report until next of kin were notified. The censors also ordered the last name of Sgt. Gil deleted.
Huntsville Times · 11 October 1991 · CP-1991-060

Somebody in Alabama decided the reader should know.

They never agreed on how to say it

Reporters filed, the censor read, and what came out went to American newspapers. That much is documented. What happened next isn’t. In Alabama and North Dakota and New Jersey, an editor held a censored story and decided whether to mention it. Across 36 clippings they reached for 27 different sentences.

Censored tells you nothing: not what, not where, not how much. Delayed… who made no changes tells you the censor read every word and let it all through. Both describe the same office. Only one lets you picture it.

The same sentence, 4 times over

On 16 February 1992, 4 of these papers ran one Associated Press story under 4 different headlines. Above all of them sat the identical sentence. One set it with a broken letter, deiayed, which is how you know each paper set the line itself.

The same sentence as Dickinson Press set it
Dickinson Press
The same sentence as Press and Sun Bulletin set it
Press and Sun Bulletin
The same sentence as THE HOM[E NEWS] — masthead truncated set it
THE HOM[E NEWS] — masthead truncated
The same sentence as The Herald Palladium set it
The Herald Palladium

The disclosure travels with the story. It arrives already written. So every time a paper runs a censored story without one, a person took it off.

On 29 October 1988 the Laredo Morning Times (CP-1988-057), The Monitor (CP-1988-055) and the Tri-City Herald (CP-1988-056) all printed the note that came with the story. The Odessa American ran it eleven days later with two things taken out (CP-1988-058). The note is gone, so nobody in Odessa is told a censor saw it. And the story stops early, on questions have been raised about their tactics, with an end-of-story rule beneath it.

The Laredo Morning Times printing. Under the headline, in italic: Editor’s note, the following story was submitted to the Israeli military censor, who ordered significant deletions. Then the Yatta dateline.
The note printed. Laredo Morning Times · 29 October 1988 · CP-1988-057
The Odessa American printing of the same story. The headline runs straight into the same Yatta dateline with no editor’s note between them.
The note taken off. Odessa American · 9 November 1988 · CP-1988-058

Same story, same opening words. The sentence that told Laredo a censor had seen it is simply not there in Odessa.

The scar you can see

Twice the censor’s order stayed visible, because the sentence had to be built around it. Sgt. Gil, above. And a year earlier, aboard an Israeli patrol boat off Lebanon, the Associated Press introduced a captain this way:

Chen, whose full name could not be used in keeping with military regulations, was surrounded by a bank of squawking radios linking him to other Israeli patrol craft as well as radar and other shore installations.
Hickory Daily Record · 4 July 1990 · CP-1990-034
The head of the Hickory Daily Record story, with its own editor’s note about a deletion.
Hickory Daily Record · 4 July 1990 · CP-1990-034

No editor’s note. The restriction sits in a subordinate clause, a fact about Chen rather than about the paper. The reader meets a man with half a name and no explanation.

Where it is exact

The notes almost never say how much. Three times, something was counted. The New York Times of 11 August 1982 printed the censor’s work inside the body text in square brackets — [18 words deleted here by censor], and at the top, [original dateline changed by censor] (CP-1982-058). A Reuters dispatch out of Gaza on 8 July 1977 told its readers it had gone to the Israeli military censors, who requested under Israeli law that 166 words be deleted (CP-1977-025). And one evening in June 1982, in the middle of The CBS Evening News With Dan Rather, the screen went black for four seconds while an announcement read 22 seconds deleted by Israeli censors (CP-1982-068).

Eighteen words. A hundred and sixty-six words. Twenty-two seconds. Those are the only measurements anybody printed. Every other note is the same event with the size removed.

The second decision

Two decisions sit in every one of these clippings, and only one happened in Israel. The first is the censor’s: what the world is allowed to learn. That one has a law behind it, an office, and a paper trail.

The second is American: whether the reader is told the first happened. That one has nothing behind it. No law required the Huntsville Times to tell its readers the surname had been taken out. Nothing stopped the Odessa American from dropping a sentence that arrived in its own copy. It happened over and over for a quarter of a century, in towns with no stake in any of it, and nobody kept a record, because the only record is the page.

The censored sentence is gone. The note above it survived.

What this page is not. These aren’t every censored dispatch in the American press, or even every one in this archive. 137 clippings here mention a censor; these 36 are the ones where the page itself carries the disclosure, in 27 identifiable newspapers. A paper missing here is a paper nobody collected, not a paper that printed nothing. Where a masthead was cut off, the record says so rather than guessing.

Last updated 2 November 2026

In most of the places news comes from, a government controls what leaves. Next time you read a dispatch from one of them, look above the dateline before you look at the story. Somebody decided whether to put anything there.

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Collected and checked by Maria Robles · maria@rozumstudio.com