Illustrative: Israeli police at the scene of a car-ramming terrorist attack near a market in Jerusalem on Monday, April 24, 2023. Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters.

Just after 4 PM last Tuesday, 20 loud gunshots shattered the usual quiet in the central West Bank community of Eli, in what turned out to be yet another deadly assault on innocent Israeli civilians.

According to local officials, two Palestinian terrorists armed with automatic weapons entered a hummus establishment near the settlement’s entrance, murdering three people, as they sprayed bullets at restaurant staff and customers. Another civilian was shot dead while filling up his car at the adjoining gas station.

On Tuesday night, the slain victims were named: Elisha Anteman, 17, from Eli; Nahman Mordoff, 17, from Achiya; Harel Masood, 21, from Yad Binyamin; and Ofer Fairman, 63, from Eli. At least four others sustained various degrees of injuries.

One of the terrorists was shot and neutralized on the scene by an armed civilian. The second attacker fled in a stolen car, triggering a two-hour manhunt that ended in Tubas — over an hour north of Eli — where he was killed after resisting arrest.

Thousands of Israelis were asked to shelter in place while authorities checked reports of a third shooter.

Meanwhile, the Hamas terror group promptly praised the attack, and identified killers Muhannad Shahada and Khaled Sabah as members of its Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Local media noted that the two were imprisoned together three years ago in the Hamas wing of Israel’s maximum-security Megiddo prison.

4 Israeli civilians were murdered by Hamas terrorists at a gas station near Eli in the West Bank yesterday afternoon.

They were:
Nachman Mordoff, 17
Elisha Anteman, 17
Harel Masoud, 21
Ofer Feirman, 64 pic.twitter.com/AEGwTVcLXm

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 21, 2023

Amid the first funerals for victims on Tuesday evening, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh announced that he had met with senior military officials in Iran, including Revolutionary Guards Force commander Hossein Salami. In a statement, the Hamas terror chief warned that the shooting outside Eli was “only the beginning,” threatening that the next attack would be “stronger.”

Since the start of the current terror wave some 15 months ago, 56 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian acts of terror, the vast majority being civilians.

In a worrying development, attacks in the West Bank have increasingly been carried out by organized and well-trained terrorist cells, in line with the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate’s assessment, made several years ago, that Tehran and its proxies would attempt to provoke a widespread flareup throughout the disputed territory.

However, in their reporting on the Eli massacre, several media outlets opted to frame the unprovoked murder of four innocent Jews, including two children, as being a “tit-for-tat” response to last Monday’s IDF raid that targeted members of US-designated terrorist organizations in the northern West Bank city of Jenin.

It’s legitimate for journalists to cite Hamas’ assertion that the well-planned killing spree near Eli was somehow a “response to the crimes of the occupation in the Jenin camp yesterday and the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque [sic].”

But when this false equivalence is presented as fact, legitimate reporting turns into what some have dubbed “terror journalism.”

Let’s be crystal clear.

The IDF raided Jenin to arrest members of terrorist orgs.

Hamas gunmen shot and murdered civilians at a gas station.

THAT ? WAS ? NOT ? A ? RAID ?@australian please update your story.https://t.co/o81bh4aHvK pic.twitter.com/Gki2lbDFIk

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 21, 2023

In what was perhaps the most egregious example of this shocking moral perversion, The Australian’s headline described the events in Eli as a “revenge raid.”

The Times of London, for its part, similarly wrote of a “revenge attack by Palestinian militants,” without attributing the claim to Hamas.

PBS Newshour anchor Geoff Bennett downplayed the vicious attack by referring to the victims as mere “settlers.”

At the same time, the PBS report failed to mention that two of the slain Israelis were minors, while explicitly noting that “Palestinians are mourning five people killed in [Monday’s IDF] raid, including 15-year-old Ahmed Saqr, whose family grieves.”

Crucially, evidence from multiple Palestinian sources suggests that Saqr was part of a group of violent rioters who had thrown rocks at Israeli troops.

Enough with the moral equivalence. Is it too much to ask that the media stop excusing the cold-blooded murder of Israeli children?