Hezbollah massacred a dozen children and teenagers in the Druze village of Majdal Shams in northern Israel. But the Washington Post knows who to blame—and it’s not the Iranian-backed terror group. Rather, the once venerable newspaper chose to train their fire on the Jewish state.
On July 27, 2024, Hezbollah launched missiles into Israel, murdering twelve children and wounding more than forty people. Many of those murdered were kids playing a soccer game. Footage of their tiny, dismembered bodies circulated on social media shortly afterwards. Hezbollah initially claimed the attack, only to deny it later.
Hezbollah has been launching missiles into Israel since Hamas perpetrated the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre. Hezbollah, which de facto rules Lebanon, is Iran’s foremost terror proxy. Hezbollah, like its master in Tehran, calls for Israel’s destruction.
As CAMERA has documented, Hezbollah is a formidable foe. The terrorist organization maintains a global presence and has an estimated 150,000 missiles, many of them precision guided. Indeed, Hezbollah’s capabilities led then-U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to call them the “A Team” of terror groups, with more munitions than many European nations.
The Biden administration, the United Nations, and others have discouraged Israel launching a full-scale campaign against Hezbollah, variously arguing that they seek to prevent a “wider, regional war” and that Jerusalem should focus on its military campaign in the south, against Hamas and other Gaza-based Iranian proxies. Thus far, the Israeli military has only launched low-level retaliatory strikes in response.
But that “wider, regional war” is already here, with Iranian-backed terror groups attacking Israel from Yemen, the Red Sea, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The attack on Majdal Shams has sparked widespread outrage, including in Israel and among the Druze community.
As JNS reporter Neta Bar observed, “For Syrian Druze, the residents of Majdal Shams are relatives, countrymen and coreligionists, and any harm to them is a direct attack on all Syrian Druze.” Bar’s dispatch, entitled “Syrian Druze fed up with fence-sitting after Majdal Shams massacre,” offered a detailed look the community’s response to the attack, highlighting both their perspective and a look at relevant history.
The Washington Post, however, chose to focus, not on Hezbollah’s mass murder of children playing soccer, but on Israel’s response. The Post’s July 29th front-page, above-the-fold, story, “Israel hits targets in Lebanon” featured a whopping six bylines but very little common sense. Indeed, the dispatch was datelined as “Majdal Shams, Golan Heights”—implying that the Golan Heights is not part of Israel.
The Post’s story was accompanied by a photograph of Alma Ayman Fakher Eldin, an eleven-year-old girl who was slain on the soccer field. Underneath the picture, however, the Post wrote: “Relatives on Sunday mourn Alma Ayman Fakher Edlin, one of 12 victims of a strike on a soccer field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. While Israel and the United States blame Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group denies connection to the attack [emphasis added].” To echo and give undue credit to Hezbollah’s claims is risible.
Indeed, as the analyst Eitan Fischberger pointed out on July 27th—more than 24
