Palestinian mourns death caused by Palestinian rocket - is not news?

 Tablet Magazine    Yesterday, we were treated to another in a series of backpedals, when the Associated Press corrected a caption to the heartbreaking picture above, which faulted an Israeli air strike for killing the infant son of a BBC reporter during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense last November. Here’s what the caption to this picture, which graced the cover of countless papers across the world, has been for the last four months:

“Jihad Masharawi weeps while he holds the body of his 11-month old son Ahmad, at Shifa hospital following an Israeli air strike on their family house, in Gaza City. The Israeli military said its assassination of the Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari, marks the beginning of an operation against Gaza militants.”

The correction came as a result of a United Nations report yesterday casting doubt on the narrative of Israeli blame, which in addition to marking the first time in history that the Washington Free Beacon and the United Nations have ever agreed, suggested the death was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket. [...]

Does this seem ridiculous to you yet? It should. In the midst of the findings, Armin Rosen at the Atlantic tweeted this, which sums up how this fits with a horrifying list of highly charged accusations leveled against Israel over the years that were ultimately discredited:

Al Dura. The Jenin Massacre. The Swedish organ-harvesting ring. Forced sterilization of Ethiopian immigrants..you’d think the media would have some humility about discredited anti-Israel stories. You would be wrong.

At a certain point, this stops being about the facile media coverage of extraordinarily polarizing events. The battle for the truth and blame is simply mimicking the conflict itself.