Ha’aretz and New York Times whitewash deadly airstrike on sleeping Gaza family

Early Sunday morning, an Israeli missile struck meters away from the Hassan family home south of Gaza City, destroying the shoddy structure and crushing the sleeping family inside. Nour Hassan 27-years-old and five-months-pregnant with her third child and two-year-old Rahaf were killed. Two teenage boys rushed to the scene and found a boy from the family crying next to a road dozens of meters away. He had been blown away in the blast, but miraculously only lightly wounded. The father, Yahya Hassan, was pulled from the wreckage, seriously injured but alive.

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that an “Israeli strike causes nearby house to collapse”, portraying a vague image that the shockwave was so powerful that a house in the vicinity simply fell apart, as if the missile struck dozens or hundreds of meters away. Here was the Haaretz headline:

The New York Times headline called the bombing of the family “retaliatory,” implying that they were at least partially to blame for being bombed. The headline also qualified the deaths as “Palestinians say,” as if the New York Times was unable to verify the deaths:

Isabel Kershner goes on to whitewash the attack, reiterating its supposedly “retaliatory” nature and that it was “against Hamas,” parroting the Israeli military’s claim. Instead of simply admitting that the bombing killed the sleeping family, Kershner says the missile strikes “led to the deaths of a pregnant Palestinian woman and a toddler” – as if the bombing started a series of events that ended with their deaths, thereby removing responsibility from the culprit.

I visited the site of the bombing several hours after it occurred. As is visible in my photographs, the missile struck just a couple of meters from the Hassan family home.

If the Israeli warplanes meant to target something nearby, the Hassan family was sentenced to death as collateral damage. Given the shack’s short distance from the location of the strike, it is, at best, misleading to assert that the missile strike was “nearby”. While it is unclear if the sleeping Hassan family was the intended target, it is abundantly clear that the house was directly targeted.

The Israeli military claimed that they were targeting a “Hamas weapons manufacturing facility,” but I found no evidence of a tunnel or any military equipment, let alone a “weapons manufacturing facility.” Of course, the military presented no evidence of the charge and Israeli media outlets accepted the official line.

Even more absurd is that Israel wiped out a family in Gaza under the banner of attacking Hamas as Hamas itself continues to repress rocket fire from other armed groups.

It is possible that Yahya Hassan was involved in armed resistance, but family members and neighbors have denied that charge, describing him as a simple farmer. Even if Hassan was a fighter, slaughtering his family from a warplane while they slept would likely constitute a war crime. Besides, there are tens of thousands of young men who train as fighters and live with their families. To bomb every single fighter, or the enormous network of tunnels throughout the besieged enclave, would require carpet bombing the entire Gaza Strip.