A ten year-old Palestinian child, Nuran Deab, was shot dead on Monday in Rafah, after Palestinians fired shots in the air. The Palestinians arrested a suspect on Tuesday evening. But as HonestReporting.com records, intitial false claims by Palestinians that the child had been shot by Israeli soldiers were promoted as correct by a number of outlets, including the Independent newspaper and the UN (of course):

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gence France-Presse, under the headline 'Palestinian schoolgirl shot dead by Israeli troops in Gaza,' prominently quoted the PA prime minister condemning it as 'a crime.' The Israeli denial of responsibility was buried at the very end of the AFP report. The Independent based its story on a UN official who directly accused the IDF of firing on Deab, then passed off IDF spokespersons who denied culpability as 'plainly embarrassed.'Knight Ridder-Tribune quoted both Ahmed Qurei decrying the shooting as an IDF 'war crime,' and a UN official condemning 'the Israeli military's indiscriminate firing into civilian areas.'

They then compounded their offence by ascribing a 'revenge' motive to subsequent Palestinian terror, ignoring the fact that the Palestinians have been constantly firing shells and mortars at Israeli towns and settlements:

'As we've seen repeatedly in this conflict, the terrorists use minor grievances ― oftentimes fabricated ― as pretexts to rationalize their murderous acts against civilians. When media outlets report these statements from Hamas, et al., without directly questioning their merit, the media become a tool exploited by terrorists to promote their anti-Israel campaign'.

As in Iraq, the more barbaric the acts of terror, the more the media allow themselves to be manipulated to reverse murderer and victim -- and then the more likely it is that more acts of terror will be committed to repeat the propaganda victory. The media who perpetrate this outright inversion of the truth truly have blood on their hands.