Blood libel in Ha'aretz?

Before reading anything about the State of Israel killing yet another small child you had better read this article about "blood libel" on the Engage website by Anthony Julius. I mention this because Ha'aretz has now reported that Israel killed a four year old Palestinian boy in Gaza this morning, or rather that he died from wounds sustained last night.

Gaza hospital officials said early Friday that a four-year-old boy had died of wounds sustained Thursday by IDF shelling during the operation.

The piece had originally appeared as:

A 4-year-old boy and 40-year-old woman were among four Palestinian civilians killed Friday during an Israel Defense Forces operation in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun, Palestinian sources said.

That was removed together with any reference to a 4 year old being killed by Israel's moral army. Perhaps they were fearful of the "blood libel" charge. Or perhaps they were just checking the story. Well now the piece has reappeared as above and so they have presumably got confirmation of this latest child killing by the State of Israel. When the story had disappeared altogether I did a google search for "4 year old boy" killed israel. It yielded 19,000 sites. That doesn't of itself mean anything. Many of the sites could have been about 4 year old Israelis being killed but the first site to appear was the New York Times from 1989 with a headline 4-Year-Old Boy Killed In Clash in West Bank.

A 4-year-old Palestinian boy was shot to death in the West Bank today during a clash between demonstrators and the Israeli police, Arabs and the army said.

Palestinians identified the boy as Amjad Nasser, from the village of Kufr Kad, near Jenin. Officials at Jenin hospital said the boy died from a gunshot wound in the chest. A military officer said the army was investigating the incident after ''a policeman was forced to fire his gun during a stone-throwing demonstration in Kufr Kad.''

I'm sure this killing of children by the most moral army in the world and the most powerful army in the Middle East has been going on since way before 1989 but nowadays Israel can't always rely on the sympathetic press that it used to get in those days. So now we have a leading lawyer writing a hopelessly irrelevant article (or is it a book? I haven't actually read it) on a false allegation that used to be levelled at Jews in medieval times and feudal societies in the hope that it will be conflated with a truthful allegation that the State of Israel kills children. Those zionists, what a bunch!