Sky slammed for calling IDF soldiers ‘teenage victims’ and casting doubt over Palestinian civilian death toll

Different treatment of dead Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians killed is perverse

Sky News has been slammed today for a headline that described troops killed by a Hezbollah drone strike on Sunday night as ‘teenage’ victims and appearing to cast doubt on the deaths of Palestinian civilians in an Israeli bombing in Gaza.

The station’s headline, which put the death toll in the Gaza bombing in quotation marks – a common journalistic nuance to indicate uncertainty about the truth of what is written and did not mention that Israel killed them, read:

Israel names teenage soldiers killed in Hezbollah attack – as ’23 die’ in Gaza school strike.

When the story appeared on the broadcaster’s Twitter/X feed it went further, describing the dead troops of the infamous Golani Brigade as ‘teenage victims’, leaving out entirely the fact that they were soldiers killed in an attack during a war. The headline was later changed to include the fact that they were soldiers and to remove the quotation marks around the number of Palestinian victims.

The claim that Israeli civilians are under attack is common among UK politicians and media. In his rush to condemn Iran for its retaliatory strike on Israel earlier this month, Keir Starmer claimed that Iran’s missiles were targeting civilians. In fact, all the targets were military and the only one near civilians was intelligence service Mossad’s headquarters, which is in a residential district – which the Israeli government and its supporters would call using them as ‘human shields’ were it an Arab facility.

Starmer and his Foreign Secretary David Lammy have not yet even mentioned the victims of the school strike and the horrific bombing of refugee tents at a hospital last night that burned families to death, let alone condemned Israel for murdering them.

SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount as it has to be entered by us). Alternatively, if you prefer to make a one-off or recurring donation by simple card payment, please use the form below:

Thanks for your solidarity so Skwawkbox can keep doing its job of inconveniencing the right and helping to build the left!

If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.