After the Washington Post, whose anti-Israel bias has been noted for decades, twisted the story of Israel protecting Palestinian babies from Gaza in Israeli hospitals to instead focus on the children’s mothers being separated from their children, the leader of a think tank focused on Middle East policy blasted the paper.
“Israel’s war with Hamas separates Palestinian babies from their mothers,” the Post titled the piece.
“What is the gist? That several dozen Palestinian mothers and premature infants have been separated because of the war, the latter all cared for in unidentified hospitals in Israel or the West Bank,” Robert Satloff of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy noted. “‘Tragedy’ is a much-used term in a conflict that began with Hamas’s murder and kidnapping of Israeli babies—a fact interestingly not mentioned in a story about babies and this war—but no one dies in this story; these Palestinian babies are all safe and protected.”
“There is the uncomfortable fact that some of these babies are being cared for in Israel — yet the whole story rests on the inhumanity of Israel’s alleged policy of denying re-entry permits to some mothers, preventing them from reuniting with their children, but the reporters do not appear to even have sought comment from Israeli officials, allegedly because ‘staff members fear reprisals from Israeli authorities,’” Satloff wrote. “Really? What sort of reprisals? Did the reporters document any examples of such reprisals? Did they even ask?”
“In a war filled with death, the Washington Post took a fundamentally good news story about premature babies from Gaza cared for by compassionate people across enemy lines and turned it into a horror story, with diabolical Israelis lurking overhead,” he declared. “Along the way, reporters who stated with precision what infant items are on the floor of blown-out buildings in faraway Gaza repeated unverified accusations against unnamed Israeli authorities by unnamed administrators in unnamed hospitals in unnamed Israeli cities. If that isn’t the one-sided editorialization of news, what is it?”
“The Post, one should recall, labels its news coverage of the conflict ‘Israel-Gaza War,’ an editorial decision which implies Israel is at war with Gaza, rather than the more-accurate ‘Israel-Hamas War,’” he pointed out.