The macabre truth is that Israeli life is deemed by the western media to be worth more than a Palestinian life: here is the "hierarchy of death" at work. According to the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem, 565 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces since January 2009, while 28 Israeli civilians and 10 Israeli security personnel have been killed. The asymmetry of this so-called conflict is reflected in the death toll, but it is not reflected in the coverage.
And so it goes for the events surrounding the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers. What was not widely reported by the western media was that – in the raids that followed their disappearance – six Palestinians, including a child, were killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank. As Amnesty International put it, these were "blatant violations of international humanitarian and human rights law".
Perhaps our media will excuse themselves on the basis of motive: whoever killed the three teenagers intended to do so, while Israel only kills civilians unintentionally. Read, then, the report of Human Rights Watch, not an organisation that can be accused of being a den of lefties. Israel's actions "amounted to collective punishment", it declared, because of "unlawful use of force, arbitrary arrests, and illegal home demolitions". Human Rights Watch investigated two deaths and found "there was no evidence that the victim or anyone in the line of fire posed an imminent threat to Israeli soldiers or others". On 17 June, 20-year-old Ahmed Samada was shot dead in Jalazon refugee camp, and yet Israel did not even claim to have come under fire; the same for 17-year-old Sakher Abu Aal-Hasan, shot dead on 21 June.
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