Sky News omits Hamas affiliation of slain Palestinian teen

The Oct. 19th death of 15 year old Taha Mahmeed (Taha Ibrahim Mohammad Mahmeed) in the Palestinian town of Tulkarm was the subject of a Nov. 18 article and video report by Sky News reporter Mark Stone, and led with the following incendiary headline.

The article begins:

It took a while, but we reached eventually. We’d come to meet the Mahmeed family.

“The martyr’s family?” a man says when we ask for directions.

The “martyr” is a 15-year-old boy. Ibrahim and Naheda Mahmeed lost their son two weeks ago. They had watched from the balcony of their home as Taha was shot dead below them.

Readers then see the following image and caption:

The article continues:

The whole thing was caught in a horrifying video filmed by Taha’s sister, Sarah. She had been on the balcony at 3.30am on 18 October.

Taha had heard that the “occupier forces”, as they call them, were in their town. He and a friend had gone out, a few metres from his home, to see what was going on.

As Taha leaned his head out into the main road, there were three shots. Taha fell to the ground. Sarah’s screams on the video are piercing and haunting. She’d just filmed her brother being killed.

They are killing children, all the children who were killed were like Taha, they went to buy things in the shops and rockets fell on them. “And children, aged 10, 11, 14… and Taha was 15. Most of them are under 20.”

The article and video failed to provide even the minimum context regarding the IDF’s anti-terror campaign that day, nor note the large number of Israeli civilians killed (even excluding the Oct. 7 massacre) in terror attacks emanating from the West Bank during 2023 which has prompted such raids.

Times of Israel reported the following on Oct. 20:

An Israeli officer was killed and nine others were injured in intense clashes with Palestinian gunmen in a refugee camp near the West Bank city of Tulkarem Thursday, Israeli authorities said.

Israel carried out a rare drone strike during the fighting in the Nur Shams camp, killing several Palestinians amid wide unrest in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority said.

Master Sgt. Maxim Razinkov was fatally wounded by an improvised explosive device that was hurled at Border Police forces carrying out an arrest raid in the camp. Another nine officers were lightly wounded, police said.

The Palestinian health ministry reported that 12 Palestinians were killed in the drone strike and in other clashes on Thursday, with another one killed in overnight fighting. Two more Palestinians were killed in clashes elsewhere in the West Bank.

Israeli security forces arrested at least 10 wanted Palestinians, according to the Israel Defense Forces and police.

Police said officers battled Palestinian gunmen in the area, and demolished several explosive devices that were intended to have been used against the forces.

At some point after article was originally published, Sky News finally noted a few details about the circumstances surrounding the teen’s death, but that was merely a short IDF statement.  The Times of Israel article about the same incident was, again, reported a month prior to Stone’s Sky News report. So, he either didn’t research the incident before filing his report, or he decided not to use the available information.

Additionally, what Sky News viewers and readers aren’t told is that Taha was a child soldier, a terrorist affiliated with Hamas, the group which announced his death and acknowledged it took place ‘during confrontations’ with the IDF.

Here’s the full translation, via our colleagues at CAMERA Arabic:

“[The top is a Quranic verse about martyrs]

To the masses of our mighty Palestinian people and the free persons of our Islamic and Arab nation, the Islamic resistance movement Hamas mourns itmartyred hero Tah Mahameed who ascended on Thursday, 19/10/2023 at dawn by the fire of the occupation in the Nur Shams refugee camp east of Tulkarm during the confrontations of the al-Aqsa Flood campaign.”

As we noted in a post yesterday about Stone’s failure to delete a X post that peddled disproven allegations about Palestinian ICU patients dying at al-Shifa hospital, his visceral anti-Israel bias, particularly since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, has been egregious, even by the standards – at outlets like the Guardian – that we’re sadly all too used to.

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1 Comment

  1. says: Grimey

    Besides the anti-Israel bias reported herein, the BBC deliberately failed to report the circa 26 Labour MPs’ uprising against Starmer’s refusal to call for a ceasefire.
    This is because the BBC is blatantly left-wing and does not want disunity in the Party to be known. What a national disgrace !

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