Elder of Ziyon has the story. The four-year-old boy, whose lifeless body Egyptian prime minister Hesham Kandil was photographed holding in his arms, was killed in Annazla, near Gaza City.
But the IDF wasn’t attacking in the area at the time of the explosion that killed young Mahmoud. Indeed, it conducted no air attacks at all while Kandil was in Gaza on Saturday, which was the timeframe of the fatal explosion in Annazla, according to neighbors of 4-year-old Mahmoud Sadallah.
The New York Times reports that the damage done in the explosion was too light to be from an Israeli bomb, speculating that it may have been caused by a Hamas-fired rocket falling short of Israeli territory. No one was an eyewitness to the explosion, but neighbors also said that security officials quickly removed the remains of a projectile in the damaged area.
The likelihood of finding the projectile body of an Israeli weapon inside the damage radius on an urban street is very low. The blast strength of the warhead takes care of that. The evidence is strong that a Hamas-launched rocket killed the little boy.
As Elder of Ziyon points out, CNN and numerous newspapers have carried the Kandil photo op. (The European papers don’t blur the boy’s face.) Fewer have carried the photo of the Israeli baby injured in a Hamas rocket attack that killed three people and wounded two babies and a toddler.
CNN and BBC have already been caught out in the use of video in which a Gaza man first faked an injury, and then was seen shortly afterward in the video walking around as if nothing had happened. (See the 2:11 and 2:43 marks in the video.) Elder of Ziyon richly deserves the link-love tonight, because his post on this journalistic atrocity got CNN to correct the error on the air.
J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard online.
Her home blog is The Optimistic Conservative.