The Guardian’s June 17 edition of ‘Picture Desk Live’ included the following photo depicting a day in the life of Gaza residents:
Here’s the caption:
A Young Palestinian crawls under barbed wire during a summer physical training camp run by Hamas in Gaza City
Now, it doesn’t take too much investigative work to note that the Palestinian youth attending this “summer physical training camp” is crawling beneath barbed wire, not exactly a routine activity at a regular youth summer camp. In fact, the original image (at Getty) by the same photographer, Mohammed Abed, includes a caption which notes that the youths are indeed engaged in “military exercises”.
Additionally, the photojournalist site Demotix includes several photos of the same ‘camp’, and includes a title: ‘Palestinians participate in military style exercises run by Hamas‘.
Here’s Yahoo reporting on the same camp, which include captions clearly stating its military purpose. This photo at Yahoo, for instance, has a caption clearly indicating that these youths are being taught how to properly fire a rocket-propelled grenade.
A peak beyond the Guardian obfuscation clearly indicates that the ‘camp’ provides training for future jihadists. Indeed, every summer both Hamas and Islamic Jihad reportedly train more than 100,000 Palestinian children (as young as six) in “resistance” (terrorism), the destruction of Israel, the “right of return” and other elements of the groups’ radical Islamist ideologies.
The decision by editors at ‘Picture Desk Live’ not to inform readers of the paramilitary nature of the youth camp represents yet another example of Palestinian child abuse that the Guardian won’t report.
(See also a post at the blog ‘This Ongoing War‘ on a similarly misleading caption at The Telegraph beneath a photo of ‘summer jihad’ in Gaza.)
