A kindergarten in Beit Ummar. Photo: Elder of Ziyon.

Today, the Palestinian Authority’s official WAFA news agency reported:

Israeli forces Sunday raided and wreaked havoc into a Kindergarten in the town of Beit Ummar to the south of Hebron, according to a local official.

Spokesperson of the anti settlement popular committee in Beit Ummar, Mohammed Awad, informed WAFA that armed Israeli soldiers raided a kindergarten at dawn, after breaking down its main front door and windows.

He said that forces further destroyed the furniture, computers, and children’s belongings, as well as ripped up the tiles of one of the classrooms, before withdrawing from the area.

This was reported elsewhere, always quoting Mr. Awad, whose committee of which he is almost certainly the only member is named “Popular Committee Against Settlements and the Apartheid Wall in Beit Ummar.” The supposedly raided kindergarten is called “Hope for the Future of Children.”

One would think in an age where everyone is carrying a camera in their pocket that photos and videos of this damage would be widely published. But for some reason, I cannot find any photos of smashed computers, broken windows and ripped up floor tiles. No photos of children’s toys strewn about either.

Remarkably, this is not the first time that Mr. Awad claimed that Israeli forces raided a kindergarten in Beit Ummar. In 2010 he gave an eerily similar report about IDF forces ransacking the “Birds of Paradise” kindergarten that was published by Ma’an  — again without photographs and without anyone sending a photographer to document the crime.

As of 2006, there were four kindergartens in Beit Ummar, none of which had the names of the kindergartens mentioned by Mohammed Awad in his reports.

I cannot find any mention of a “Hope for the Future of Children” kindergarten in Beit Ummar before yesterday on any website.

It almost seems as if they are just making stuff up. But we can’t accuse the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian media of doing that, can we?