Hass’ Mea Culpa
In a rare acknowledgment of error, Ha’aretz‘s Amira Hass today acknowledges that an earlier report she wrote was mistaken, thanks to her Palestinian source who lied:
A mistaken report needs to be corrected. Two weeks ago I wrote about a young man who claimed he was expelled from the West Bank to Gaza. He was born in Gaza but had lived in the West Bank since he was 7, he said. The military spokesman’s office informed me that it was not familiar with the case, but I’ve heard that line before – for example, in reference to Palestinians who were used as “human shields” during Operation Cast Lead. The fact that the army says it doesn’t know about an incident doesn’t mean such an incident hasn’t taken place.
But this time, it turns out that there was no evasive maneuver here, and there was a real reason this case was unfamiliar to the Israel Defense Forces: The young man has lived with his family in Israel for many years. And it was from Be’er Sheva, not the West Bank town of Dahariya, that he was expelled. For him, the lie he told reporters, myself included, is perhaps a fraction of a lie. After all, the distance between Dahariya and Be’er Sheva is small, the borders are artificial, the lifestyle is similar, relatives live on both sides of the Green Line. But as far as I am concerned, his tale is a full-fledged lie that piggybacked on the great media interest, the first of its kind, in the situation of Gaza natives who live in the West Bank.
Over the last few months, all sorts of rumors were disseminated, but were easy to spot right away as being totally unfounded: the rumors that 20 Palestinians were expelled as a single group to Gaza, that a Shin Bet questionnaire was distributed in four homes of native Gazans, that dozens of deported Palestinians were gathered in a protest tent in Gaza. These false rumors came on the heels of a Haaretz report about an amended military order, No. 1650, that is aimed at preventing infiltration into the West Bank.
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