The Media Accountability Project  

"I am glad that you quote the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding Israeli military investigations, and their failure to prosecute crimes committed against innocent Palestinian civilians, especially children."

By failing to properly contextualize this issue, your reporting fails to explain the consequences of Israel’s military occupation of East Jerusalem. As such, readers are left without a proper understanding of why Israel’s flag march demonstrates triumphalism and domination over an occupied population, why ‘tensions’ therefore arise, and why Palestinians view the march as a provocation.

I appreciate that you bring attention to the distress felt by the disabled siblings after they received a phone call from Israeli forces warning of an imminent airstrike on their home. Necessary mobility equipment, like wheelchairs for the disabled siblings, was left behind as they were forced to flee their homes. However, in your reporting of Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza, you mention that 15 residential blocks were destroyed without mentioning the loss of Palestinian lives.

"It is rare to read a story from a civilian perspective on war in Canadian mainstream media. Even if far outside the personal experience of the reader, Mr. al-Mughrabi  allows us to see Gazans for once not as statistics but as people, who try to keep the family safe in a place where there is no shelter and no safety, while coping with frightened children who can’t sleep because of the noise and shaking."

By failing to specify the number of Palestinian casualties, you obscure the reality that Israeli airstrikes are not “targeted” considering the majority of casualties were civilians and omit necessary context for your reader in understanding why Palestinian resistance groups have launched rockets in retaliation.

"Gaza has been living under a brutal 15-year-long illegal blockade and siege by Israel, preventing basic goods and medicine from entering the occupied territory. In fact, since 2007, Israel has imposed a land, sea and air blockade on the strip. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Occupied Palestinian territory, Israel’s blockade on Gaza amounts to a 'denial of basic human rights in contravention of international law and amounts to collective punishment.'"

I was glad to see that your article provides more context than many others by mentioning the Palestinian man who was killed hours earlier in an Israeli raid on a refugee camp. This helps provide critical information that many reports chose to omit.

By omitting the fact that Al-Aqsa Mosque is located in East Jerusalem, which is occupied Palestinian territory, you exclude important context regarding the dynamic between Palestinians and Israeli forces, especially the oppression of Palestinians and discriminatory Israeli policies that interfere with the right to religious practices. Moreover, the omission of “occupied” in relation to East Jerusalem is inconsistent with your description of the West Bank as “Israeli-occupied,” implying that the former is not occupied.

"The brief summary omits any mention of the Nakba ("catastrophe" in Arabic), when approximately 750,000 to 1 million Palestinians were expelled from their homes by Zionist militias and internally displaced to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Thus, UNRWA was created in 1949 to help facilitate and provide services to this displaced population. Moreover, the reason that the agency continues to exist today is because Israel refuses to allow those refugees the right to return, in violation of international law."

"The legal status of East Jerusalem as occupied Palestinian territory is firmly established under international law and has been repeatedly confirmed by United Nations Security Council Resolutions. By omitting this fact, you have excluded important context that explains why the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque is contested, and why events there can lead to an escalation of violence, as evident by the rocket strikes and Israeli violence over the last 48 hours."