Nidal al-Mughrabi, pathologically incapable of writing a straight story on the Middle East conflict

Reuters correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi informs us that the leader of terror group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, is to "embark on a regional tour" of Muslim countries in the Middle East (makes him sound like Justin Bieber, no?).

In a piece of just 363 words, al-Mughrabi manages to insert several key propagandistic phrases intended to demonize Israel and lead readers to believe that territory which has only ever been sovereign to the Jews, is by rights, exclusively Arab:

A Haniyeh aide said he will meet leaders in Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Qatar, Bahrain and Turkey and discuss rebuilding the Gaza Strip which suffered damage during a month-long Israeli offensive in 2008-09.
About 1,400 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, and 13 Israelis were killed in the war which Israel said it launched in order to curb cross-border rocket fire from Palestinian militants.

For al-Mughrabi, whose bio says he has worked and lived in Gaza for 15 years, the Israel-Hamas war in 2008-09 was an "Israeli offensive", which the veteran news correspondent is apparently completely unable to verify was precipitated by (thousands of) rockets fired by Palestinians into Israeli civilian communities.  The cause of the war remains mere hearsay.

Yet, if we are to believe the absurd notion that al-Mughrabi cannot ascertain any independent facts with which to confirm the casus belli and can only accept that which "Israel said", are we also to believe that Israeli officials characterized the firing of rockets into Israeli civilian communities as emanating from Palestinian "militants"?   In other words, if al-Mughrabi is citing Israeli officials, is he citing them accurately?

We challenge al-Mughrabi to produce evidence of an occurrence of Israeli officials referring to Hamas rocket crews as "militants".  He won't be able to of course, because Israelis refer to these groups as terrorists, not militants.

So the 15-year Reuters veteran is apparently not only unable to independently verify events leading to the 2008-09 war between Israel and Hamas, he is also unable to cite faithfully, those who can verify these events.

One thing al-Mughrabi is able to do, is advance an ahistorical, Arab-ethnocentric, and racist fiction intended to suggest that the city of Jerusalem rightfully belongs to the Arabs.

The more secular Fatah movement led by Abbas, holds sway in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Palestinians want both areas for a future state with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital.

There is no "Arab East Jerusalem".  It's a racist epithet formerly used to characterize the eastern portion of Jerusalem as it stood for a mere 19 years following the invasion, conquest, and ethnic cleansing of the Jews from the city by the Arab Legion in 1949.

But the term is used quite deliberately today, nearly a half-century after it became obsolete, by al-Mughrabi and his biased colleagues at Reuters in an effort to manipulate readers into believing that Jerusalem is by rights, by history, or by ethnicity, Arab.

This notion is false; it's propagandistic; and it's a violation of both Reuters Trust Principles and Handbook of Journalism for correspondents to peddle it.

But we know how seriously Reuters takes its ethical commitments to the public.