Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square on Jan. 19, 2025, as three Israeli hostages were set to be released from Hamas captivity as part of a Gaza ceasefire deal. Photo: Taken by author

Why are legacy news outlets assisting released Palestinian terrorists in getting away with actual murder?

Using the current Israel-Hamas ceasefire as their cue to place Palestinian terrorists on equal footing as innocent Israeli hostages, some underperforming journalists are sanitizing the bloody records of hardcore terrorists.

“This is not about politics or strategy. It’s about humanity and the shared belief that no one should be left behind in darkness,” Moran Stella Yanai, an Israeli hostage released in the November 2023 ceasefire deal, told the Associated Press in anticipation of the release of more hostages (“Hamas OKs draft agreement of a Gaza ceasefire and the release of some hostages, officials say,” Jan. 15).

The leading wire service boasts to have “done more than any organization in the world to expand the reach of factual reporting.” But recent ceasefire coverage indicates that the news service’s prowess in advancing the faux humanity of terrorists, while obscuring terror victims in darkness.

Thus, after quoting Stella Yanai’s appeal to humanity on behalf of innocent hostages, the AP draws a tidy and unfounded hostage-prisoner parallel:

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, families of Palestinian prisoners gathered as well. “I tell the mothers of the prisoners to put their trust in the almighty and that relief is near, God willing,” said the mother of one prisoner, Intisar Bayoud.

However, there are salient facts that the AP glaringly chose not to advance in its coverage of the Bayouds: Intisar’s son, Habbes Bayoud, is serving a double life sentence for his role in the brutal murders of Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Norzhich, two Israeli reservists who took a wrong turn into Ramallah in September 2000. Presumably, for the victims’ families, Bayoud’s release heralds torment, not relief. But AP neither humanizes their mothers nor notes the unspeakably brutal murders.

And Bayoud is not the only murderer to benefit from the AP’s exculpatory coverage in recent days.

The AP’s stated commitment to the advancement of the power of facts is again on retreat in the Jan. 15 article, “Hamas frees 4 female Israeli soldiers in exchange for 200 Palestinian prisoners as ceasefire holds”:

Rana Raef al-Farra, the daughter of one released prisoner, said she was 7 when her father was sentenced 21 years ago.”I am afraid that I will not know him when he gets out, or that he will not know me,” she said.

The AP neglects to mention that Rana’s father, Ra’if Ramez Helmi Al-Farra, was convicted for his role in killing six soldiers – Roy Nissim, Araf Azbarga, Sa’id Jahaja, Hussein Abu Leil, Adham Shehada, and Tarek al-Ziadne. In the AP’s warped calculation of which facts to advance, the media outlet prioritizes Rana’s concern that her father will not know her over the fundamental journalistic imperative that readers know her father for what he is – a killer.

CBS, too, deploys the dual strategy of expunging the terrorists’ violent crimes while extending sympathetic coverage to the murderers’ loved ones.

“These are not just people. These are our brothers and sisters,” an Israeli woman at a Tel Aviv gathering on behalf of the hostages says in a CBS Weekend News interview.

CBS correspondent Ramy Inocencio then says: “Many might say similar for the nearly 200 Palestinians that Israel released from prison in exchange.”

He proceeds to generously wipe away multiple convictions from a would-be murderer’s record: “Forty-seven-year-old Wael Abu Rida reunited with his family after a dozen years. He was half-way through a 25-year prison term for joining Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a US-listed terror group.”

But Abu Rida was not sentenced to 25 years only for belonging to Islamic Jihad. He was also convicted of attempted murder, arms possession, spying, liaising with an enemy agent, among other crimes.

The pardons parade continued at NBC. About “the dean of prisoners,” aka Muhammad Al-Tous, NBC cited the laundered rap sheet recounted in a statement from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club: “Tous, 67, was arrested in October 1985 and sentenced to lifetime imprisonment ‘on the grounds of his resistance to the occupation’ and his affiliation with the Palestinian faction Fatah.”

NBC fails to decode “resistance to the occupation,” which in this case means leading attacks on five civilian buses, in which 16 were wounded, ordering the murder of three people, and taking part in two additional murders.

“57-year-old prisoner Raed Al-Saadi was also among those to be released,” NBC’s elliptical coverage continues. “Al Saeedi [differing spellings in the original] was detained in 1989 at the beginning of the 1978 Intifada, it said, and ‘sentenced to two life sentences and 20 years,’ the statement said.”

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club doesn’t bother noting Al-Saadi’s crimes – the killing of civilians and soldiers – and neither does NBC.

While the lopsided ceasefire stipulates the freeing of killers in exchange for innocent hostages, there is no journalistic dispensation to manufacture pretend parity between terrorists and terror victims.

Tamar Sternthal is the director of CAMERA’s Israel Office.