On August 2, 1982, during the First Lebanon War, the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers featured a photograph of a Lebanese baby bandaged head to foot. The caption under the photograph read: “A baby who lost both arms and was severely burned as the result of a bomb dropped by an Israeli airplane.”

At a meeting in Washington, then-US secretary of state George Shultz showed the picture to his Israeli counterpart at the time, Yitzhak Shamir, and berated him, saying: “The symbol of this war is a baby whose arms have been amputated.”

The image had a direct impact on the decision-makers, but the circumstances of the photograph and the caption were incorrect. The baby didn’t lose its arms; it was lightly injured by a shell fired by the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The Western media’s professional and ethical failure in their coverage of the murderous terror attack at the Har Nof synagogue was not a one-off slip. We are dealing instead with an ongoing and shameful phenomenon of misleading and slanted photos, captions and reports about Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, even among the most renowned media outlets that purportedly hold themselves to high professional standards.

Read the article in full at Ynet.