Two versions of the same story went out about the Hizbullah/Israel trade of remains for a prisoner. In the earlier version, the background on the Samir Kuntar story went like this:
A larger swap is extremely emotional for Israelis because it would likely involve Samir Kantar, the longest-serving Lebanese prisoner.
Kantar is serving multiple life sentences for infiltrating northern Israel in 1979 and killing four Israelis, including a 28-year-old man, the man’s 4-year-old daughter and two Israeli policemen.
He was convicted of killing the girl by smashing her head against rocks and then with a rifle butt. During the incident, the girl’s mother smothered a 2-year-old daughter to death while hiding from Kantar.
There’s no context. Someone at the AP made it look like Smadar Haran just killed her baby. Two of the early versions went out with the above misinformation. But then, someone noticed. The updated story:
The release of Kantar would be particularly difficult for Israelis to accept.
He is serving multiple life sentences for infiltrating northern Israel in 1979 and killing four Israelis – a 28-year-old man, the man’s 4-year-old daughter and two Israeli policemen.
Kantar repeatedly smashed the young girl’s head against a rock and crushed her skull with a rifle butt. Her mother, while trying to silence the cries of her other daughter, accidentally smothered the 2-year-old.
There’s still not enough context—but let Smadar Haran tell you what happened.
They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,†I thought.
The AP couldn’t get the details of the attack right. They implied that the mother was a murderer. And they felt it was not important enough to name the victims. Bad enough that Israeli victims of terror are almost never named, while the terrorists have their names plastered all over the news. But for the AP to misinform the world on the reason Yael Haran died—that’s inexcusable.