Israel Matzav

Al-Reuters sinks, keeps digging - Puff piece on Samir Al-Kuntar

Good morning every one.

I was going to get up early anyway since today is a fast day, and I have a little while until I have to go to synagogue....

Al-Reuters has a puff piece on Samir Al-Kuntar, who has been in prison in Israel since 1979 for committing the heinous murders described here. Note the differences between the description Al-Reuters gives and the description at the other link - which was written by his sole surviving victim:

Al-Reuters:

[Al-Kuntar] was 17 when Israeli police arrested him. He was among a four-member guerrilla squad from the Palestine Liberation Front that burst into a flat in Israel's northern city of Nahariya and killed a policeman and another man and his four-year-old daughter.

The man's wife hid in a wardrobe with another daughter but accidentally smothered her while trying to stop her crying.

Smadar Haran (the surviving victim):

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. 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.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl's skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

Amazing how Al-Reuters can humanize a brutal killer, isn't it?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:31 AM