Nidal al-Mughrabi picks up the lie and runs with it

Yesterday, we wrote about Reuters mendacious coverage of the explosion of a Palestinian Grad rocket in Ashkelon, Israel.  Today, in a story on Israel's military response to the attack, correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi picks up where Amir Cohen and Douglas Hamilton left off, parrots some of the same propaganda and injects some of his own:

The militant group [Hamas] has a rocket arsenal of crude, homemade projectiles and longer-range rockets smuggled in through tunnels under the border with Egypt.

For years and in scores of stories, Reuters has sought to minimize the danger and devastating effects of Palestinian rockets by referring to them as "crude, homemade".  As Hamas has been able to acquire and launch rockets with increasing range and lethality from countries like Iran, Reuters is less able to dismiss these attacks with loaded language but as seen above, that doesn't prevent propagandists like al-Mughrabi from trying.

Continuing:

No one was injured by the blast [in Askelon], which police said was caused by a 122mm, Chinese-made Grad rocket. But the attack ended over a year of calm for the Israeli city closest to Gaza... The [2009 Israeli] offensive largely ended rocket fire into Israel from the Gaza Strip.

No one was injured by shrapnel, but several Israelis were treated for shock.  And as we documented in our previous post, the assertion of "over a year of calm" is a bald-faced lie.  As is the notion that the 2008-09 Gaza war "largely ended rocket fire into Israel".