The AP released a long article on the end of the fighting in the Damascus Palestinian refugee camp. It starts with an innocuous headline. Note the difference between the headline and the lead, and realize that the editors are the ones who write the headlines.
Clashes ease at Damascus Palestinian refugee camp
Days of intense fighting in a Palestinian refugee camp subsided on Thursday and some of the more than 100,000 residents who fled the violence in the capital Damascus began to trickle back, activists and officials said.
Then they natter on about Russia and Russian support of Assad. Because why concentrate on facts like this in the lead when you can push them out of the five-paragraph World News sections? Paragraph six:
More than two-thirds of the roughly 150,000 Palestinian residents have fled the camp since last week when the fighting flared up, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. They sought shelter in the outskirts of the camp, in other parts of Damascus or other cities, or headed to the Syrian-Lebanon border, it said.
Uh-huh. Now, let’s check on the number of wounded and killed Palestinians as a result of the fighting. Oh, wait. You can’t, because the AP doesn’t carry that information in the article. You have to dig around elsewhere to find facts like these:
“People are still leaving in droves,” UNRWA deputy chief of staff Lisa Gilliam told AFP, adding that the organization estimated that around two thirds of the some 150,000 residents of Yarmuk camp appeared to have left.
Fresh fighting on Wednesday on Yarmuk’s outskirts killed a civilian and four members of the pro-regime Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Also this:
“We don’t know where to go or what we are going to do,” said Umm Ahmed, who waited at the Masnaa crossing with her five children and her husband, who she said was wounded when a building collapsed after an air strike.
She said her husband was trapped under the rubble for a whole day and by the time rescue came his leg was gangrenous.
Until last weekend, Yarmuk had provided refuge for hundreds of Syrian families forced to flee their strife-torn towns and cities.
But on Sunday, warplanes launched the first air strike on Yarmuk since the start of Syria’s conflict, killing at least eight civilians. Violence has since raged in the camp.
You won’t find body counts in the AP story. Funny how the deaths of Palestinians get front-page coverage when they die as a result of Israeli actions, but the body counts is virtually ignored by the AP when it’s someone else doing it. Why, you’d almost think there was a double standard about Israel or something.