CJPME wrote to the Associated Press on March 7 and March 9, 2023, regarding issues with their coverage of Israeli violence in the West Bank. Regarding three of these issues, AP stories were either updated to include accurate information and language, or the feedback was incorporated in later reporting.
1) CJPME took issue with the way that AP described Palestinians killed, which used the qualifier: “around half of them were militants.” CJPME noted that this was inaccurate and misleading, and that such language implied that their deaths were inherently justified. In subsequent AP articles, this language was first changed to "around half of them affiliated with militant groups," and later to simply and more accurately say they were “killed by Israeli fire during military arrest raids and other confrontations so far this year.”
2) The AP had originally described the settler violence in Huwara without mentioning that a Palestinian had been shot and killed, even though they did mention that two Israelis had been killed earlier in the day. After a CJPME complaint, the article was updated to include this information.
3) The AP’s article on March 6 provided an inaccurate number of illegal Israeli settlers, claiming that since 1967, “500,000 Jewish settlers have moved into dozens of settlements.” After complaints from CJPME, subsequent articles have corrected this problem to say that there are “more than 700,000 Jewish settlers.”