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New York Times Gaza Fish Tale Has “Important Details Missing,” Israeli Army Says

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avatar by Ira Stoll

Opinion

A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri / File.

The Israel Defense Forces and a media watchdog group are pushing back against a New York Times article blaming Israel for “devastating” Gaza’s fishing industry.

“There are important details missing” in the Times article, the IDF said from its Twitter account. The IDF said they sent the Times a statement, but the Times “unfortunately” omitted the statement from the article.

In the statement the Times failed to include, Israel said that “terrorist organizations use the fishermen population to smuggle weapons and equipment.” It also said the IDF “allows fishermen to make a living from fishing in the permitted areas near the Gaza Strip without limitation, and does not act against those who do not violate the maritime security restrictions.”

The IDF says its soldiers have even helped to rescue Gaza fishermen in distress “and saved their lives.”

“Attempts to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip by sea are a constant security challenge. Terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip ultimately use these weapons to attack Israelis,” the IDF said, calling these “important details in telling the full story.”

The director of the Israel office of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, Tamar Sternthal, pointed out that contrary to the New York Times claim that the Gaza fishing industry had been devastated by Israel, data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics show that the number of Gaza fishing boats more than doubled to 1,739 boats in 2019 from 707 in 2005. The number of fish caught also more than doubled, to 3.9 million in 2019 from 1.5 million in 2009, Sternthal said, citing the Palestinian statistics.

The fish story was only one example in a recent onslaught of anti-Israel New York Times coverage. Taken together, it depicts Israelis as monsters, not only cruelly imposing misery on innocent Gaza fishermen, but also ambushing innocent Lebanese goatherds. The same Times reporter, Raja Abdulrahim, who wrote the fish tale also, for a different news article, found a man along Israel’s border with Lebanon who “said that last year he was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to an interrogation facility in Israel.” That article, at least, includes a sentence from the Israeli Army, which said that the man “had ‘infiltrated’ Israeli territory and that his interrogation had yielded valuable information.”

You’d think that Palestinian thugs viciously snatching an Israeli Druze from a hospital would be something even the Times would disapprove of, but somehow the Times managed to write up that one as a feelgood example of international cooperation to win the body’s eventual return. “Ahmad Tibi nevertheless emerged as a key player behind the scenes. He called officials in the Gaza Strip, who called Islamic Jihad leaders in Lebanon, who in turn called their operatives in Jenin, according to Mr. Halabi, the mayor,” the Times reports. This is portrayed as heartwarming rather than a horrifying exposure of the reach of this international network with deep ties into Iranian-dominated Lebanon. And the villains, are, in the Times’ view, incredibly, the Israelis, rather the thugs who stormed the hospital and reportedly disconnected the Israeli from life support. The Times asserts that the events “shined rare attention on the Israeli practice of holding onto the bodies of slain Palestinians accused of terrorism.” The Times article ends by citing Ahmad Tibi about “wider Palestinian anger at Israel’s policy of withholding the bodies of dead Palestinians.”

The Times article concludes:

Dozens of “Palestinian families are waiting for their beloved sons,” Dr. Tibi said. “For their corpses seized and captured by the Israeli occupation.”

Never mind that Arab terrorists are holding the bodies of Israeli soldiers, or that the Arab terrorists would be given funerals as heroes if their bodies were returned. The Times always manages to find a way, regardless of the facts, to deny Israel any benefit of the doubt, to portray Israelis as malevolent aggressors, and to paint the Arabs as innocent victims. From Gaza to Lebanon to the West Bank, if it is the New York Times doing the reporting, it’s the same old skewed story.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

The opinions presented by Algemeiner bloggers are solely theirs and do not represent those of The Algemeiner, its publishers or editors. If you would like to share your views with a blog post on The Algemeiner, please be in touch through our Contact page.

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