What began as a straight forward news item, based on a report from the Palestinian news agency Ma’an, is now being blown into another blood libel, involving bits of dead bodies and Israeli drones targeting innocent Palestinian children.

Several outlets ran the original story, datelined Sunday, March 11, 2012:

“A Palestinian youth was killed on Sunday after Israeli military aircraft carried out airstrikes on a suspected rocket launch sites near the town of Jabaliya in the Gaza Strip.”

It’s a sad story, it’s the stuff of parental nightmares. In the mad violence that surrounds the Gaza strip, born by the inhumane attacks of Palestinian thugs on Israeli civilian targets, every child lost is a bitter casualty.

The IDF spokesperson’s office maintains that “during the course of the latest escalation, at least 20 terrorist and 4 civilians were killed. This is a direct result of terrorist organizations operating from within densely populated areas, deliberately targeting Israeli civilians while endangering Gaza residents.”

In other words, the four unfortunate civilians died because they were standing too close to rocket launching Jihadist teams.

Altogether, some 200 rockets and mortar shells were shot at Israeli civilian populations within a rather large radius of the Gaza strip in the four days that followed al-Qaisi’s killing. I visited a kindergarten in Nir Oz, two miles from the border, where a mortar shell had landed outside a kindergarten just one hour before the place would have been filled with toddlers. Palestinian callousness when it comes to targeting children has been part of the public record since before 1967.

Which is why the new campaign being launched these days by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights is so outrageous, it crosses well into the macabre and the cynical in ways that wouldn’t have shamed, say, American comic genius Larry David on a particularly nasty day.

“Trauma of Israeli airstrike haunts Gaza family,” was the headline of a new Ma’an story, which was, really, a heavily scrubbed “update” of their original story.

The traumatized relatives of a 12-year-old boy killed by an Israeli airstrike say they are scared to leave their homes since his death.

“We are scared to go out, and find a part of Ayoub’s body on a tree, in the street, in the garden. Since the attack, we all sleep in the same room, with all the children because we are afraid.”

This is followed by what has to be the Hallmark Card version of war victimization:

Ayoub Asalia was struck by an Israeli drone as he chased a puppy on his way to school in Gaza on March 11.

and:

PCHR said there were no fighters in the area at the time of Ayoub’s killing. The targeting and killing of a child is a war crime, it said in a statement.

It was newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst who coined the phrase: Give me a mother, a baby and a dog, and I’ll give you a magazine cover that sells. This one has it all, except in a chilling, Bizarro World kind of way. You have a mother who is traumatized by the body parts of her baby who was killed chasing a puppy. One gets a sense of a celebration of gore in an appalling deathfest.

The Jewish Press contacted the IDF Spokesperson’s office for details on the specific March 11 incident and received this response:

On Sunday, March 11th, Israeli aircraft targeted rocket launching pits that had been used by terrorist organizations to launch rockets. During this targeting, an uninvolved civilian who had initially been observed near the launch site in what appeared to be preparations for a rocket launch, was hit. While the IDF regrets non-combatant casualties, it is ultimately the responsibility of the Hamas and other terror organizations, who operate from within densely populated areas and render Gaza civilians as human shields.

The location that had been targeted had been the launch site of numerous rockets during the previous days, including rockets targeting the Israeli cities of Ashdod, Gan Yavne and Beer Sheva. Intelligence indications also suggested that a terrorist was en route to the site to launch additional rockets.

A source in the IDF southern front confirmed that the civilian in question was, indeed, a child, who was killed while playing near the rocket launching pits.

Leave it up to the PCHR to turn a story of parents whose child ran off into a deadly zone, into a story of Israeli drones chasing after children and their puppies.

That version of the story is entirely made up, says author Barry Saw, founder of the Netanya Terror Victims organization, whose new book “Israel – Reclaiming the Narrative” promotes effective ways of responding to Palestinian propaganda.

“I’ve been fighting for years the lies and the frauds of the Palestinian narrative,” Shaw told the Jewish Press. “The Palestinians should tell us, was the drone aiming at the puppy or the kid?” In other words, was this a case of violating children’s rights or animal rights? he joked.

Barry Shaw employs humor to shoot down this and similar gory Palestinian stories which are comprised of half truths and outright lies. The most important thing, he stresses, is not to get caught in apologizing or trying to explain a story which was devised as a weapon against the Jewish state.

“This is typical Palestinian fiction, when they cook up these emotional stories, to try and gain sympathy,” he says.

In Shaw’s view, the dog’s name in the story would depend on how big it was: it should be named “Kassam” if it’s a small puppy, and “Grad” if it’s a big one. “Because Kassams and Grads were the only things targeted in Gaza when 200 rockets were fired at innocent Israeli civilians. Enough of the lies already.” (© 2012 JewishPress. 03/23/12)