It is now clear that Israel was not responsible for the killing of the Palestinian family on the beach in Gaza last weekend (see the Jerusalem Post). It looks as if it was the Palestinians who had killed their own children by mistake. Shrapnel removed from the wounded Palestinians turned out not to be Israeli ordinance; there was no blast crater of the kind that would have been expected following a shell landing, while the evidence at the scene suggested instead a mine exploding from below; and all the shells fired from the Israeli gunboat had been fired significantly earlier than the disaster on the beach.

This was the incident, remember, that Hamas used as an excuse for its announcement that the ’truce’ with Israel was now over. So the reality of this episode was that the Palestinians killed their own children in some kind of accident (presumably involving explosives which they were intending to use to murder yet more Israelis), promptly blamed Israel for it and cynically used it as a pretext for a further campaign of mass murder.

So what’s new?

This latest libel, in the mould of the killing of Mohammed al Dura (almost certainly killed by Palestinian fire, as has been all but conclusively demonstrated in reconstructions by European journalists) and the ‘massacre’ of Jenin that was nothing of the kind, was once again uncritically swallowed and regurgitated by western media. Honest Reporting has a round-up of the way the incident was falsified by the Palestinian Authority and the western media all rushed to damn Israel over an incident on which they not only had no reliable information but where it was obvious from the start that the Palestinians’ claims were suspect, not least because of the way they obstructed attempts to inspect the evidence.

So what’s new?

Meanwhile, more than 100 missiles have been fired at Israeli towns from Gaza since the weekend. The Palestinians are using their own people as human shields by firing from densely populated areas, thus making it impossible for Israel to take out these firing sites without civilian casualties. The bombardment of Israel, however, has been all but ignored by the UK media; it is referred to only in passing, if at all, while the same media eagerly transmit a libel that demonises the target of this warfare. No country on earth would be expected to put up with such a bombardment of its citizens. Israel has no alternative but to take action in Gaza to stop it. Yet as soon as it does, the same media which eagerly regurgitates Palestinian lies and libels to demonise Israel while ignoring or minimising Palestinian violence against it will turn on Israel for defending itself.

Monstrous.