On Friday, the IDF killed a 26-year-old American woman named Aysenur Ezgi Eygi who was taking part in a protest against settlement expansion in the West Bank. The woman was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers in the town of Beita near Nablus on Friday.
The Times framed what’s currently only a Palestinian claim as an indisputable fact, and, further, fails to include the IDF response, as other outlets did.
For instance, here’s how the BBC reported it:
Local [Palestinian] media reported that Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was shot dead by Israeli forces as she took part in a weekly protest against Jewish settlement expansion in the town of Beita near Nablus.
Israel’s military said it was “looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area”.
In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said: “During Israeli security forces activity adjacent to the area of Beita, the forces responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them. “The IDF is looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area. The details of the incident and the circumstances in which she was hit are under review.”
We complained to Times editors, asking that the article be amended to reflect that it the woman’s death by ‘IDF fire’ is only, at this point, an allegation, and to include the IDF statement on in the incident. Recall that the Accuracy Clause of the Editors’ Code states that “The Press, while free to editorialise and campaign, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact“.
Yesterday, Sept. 9, we noticed that the article had been corrected. Here’s the new sentence, which, as you can see, no longer blames Israel for Eygi’s death:
On Friday, a 26-year-old American woman named Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was shot dead while taking part in a protest in the town of Beita against settlement expansion in the West Bank.
Separately:
We haven’t heard back from the outlet on a complaint we sent two weeks ago concerning an article in the Sunday Times which erroneously referred to convicted terrorist murderer Marwan Barghouti as a “political prisoner”.
Even worse, though editors promised us back in June that they’d investigate an article by Catherine Philp which shamefully questioned ‘whether or not’ Hamas used rape as a weapon of war, we still haven’t received a reply, and the article has not been amended.
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I think I might have grown up with a Aysenur Ezgi Eygi. It’s such an American name. So midwestern. Wait a minute, which way is west again? Hey, you know who also was “shot in the head”? Those Jews hostages in Gaza. But maybe I’m mistaken. I haven’t kept up with the British press lately.