Guardian's anti-Israel conclusion contradicts its own reporting

Shortly after Oct. 7th, it became clear that the Guardian wouldn’t abide by even the most basic journalistic standards when reporting about Israel and their war against Hamas, or take a moral stand against the terror group which carried out the most deadly and barbaric antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust.

However, though their dishonesty and rhetorical sleights of hand in obfuscating Hamas’ villainy don’t shock us anymore, we recently came across a novel form of deception: a reporter blaming Israel two paragraphs after having noted a (correct) sequence of events showing Hamas was to blame.

The article (‘We don’t feel safe’: after week of bombings, people in Gaza are losing faith in ceasefire, Nov. 1), written by William Cristou and Seham Tantesh, reaches a conclusion that’s inconsistent with the journalists’ own reporting, and includes a significant omission.

Here’s the relevant paragraph:

Zein was one of 115 people killed and 352 injured during 24 hours of Israeli bombardment of Gaza this week, according to the Gaza health ministry. The strikes came after Hamas returned body parts of a hostage whose remains Israeli troops had recovered two years before, and Palestinian militants attacked Israeli troops in southern Gaza.

First, one of the Israeli soldiers “attacked” by “Palestinian militants” was killed, which provides vital context regarding the IDF’s retaliatory strikes on terror targets in the strip.

Now, here’s the sentence two paragraphs later which, in addition to blatant editorialising within a straight news story, contradicts the report’s own sequence of events detailed in the previous paragraph:

The bombings were just the latest in a series of Israeli violations of the three-week-long ceasefire in Gaza.

As we showed above, according to the journalists’ own reporting in the article, it was Hamas who violated the terms of the ceasefire by firing on Israeli troops in southern Gaza (killing one), and by handing over partial remains it claimed belonged to one of the 13 hostages whose bodies are still in Gaza, but were discovered to belong to a hostage recovered by IDF troops in December 2023.

We complained to the Guardian Readers’ Editor, asking that they amend the article to note that one of Israeli soldiers attacked was killed, and to amend the claim that the incident in question represented an “Israeli’ violation of the ceasefire.