Palestinian children compelled to participate in a Hamas military parade. Photo: Twitter.

The Associated Press (AP) recently reported that the death of a 15-year-old girl in the flashpoint West Bank city of Jenin during an anti-terrorism raid by Israeli forces earlier this month had “renewed scrutiny of the [Israeli] military’s record of causing civilian casualties.”

In the article — subsequently reprinted by The Washington Post and ABC News — the AP’s Middle East correspondent Isabel DeBre used the funeral of Sadeel Naghniyeh, who was “killed by suspected Israeli fire” while reportedly standing in the driveway of her family’s home — as a hook to highlight the supposedly “rising number of children killed in the heightened violence and the extraordinary risks they face.”

DeBre quotes several people in the first half of the piece, including Naghniyeh’s father, asserting that his daughter dreamed of being a nurse. The article also featured a comment from convicted Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) member Shawan Jabarin, director of the terror-linked NGO Al-Haq, who appeared to suggest that Israeli forces are indiscriminately killing Palestinian civilians.

While highlighting the gruesome reality of civilian deaths in conflict zones is important, the article glosses over, or outright ignores, some very relevant details.

First, the piece presents the risks posed to civilians by armed terrorist groups who hide in densely-populated urban areas as merely an allegation made by the Israeli army — as opposed to an incontrovertible fact. The use of civilians as human shields by Palestinian terrorists is a a well-documented occurrence that has been acknowledged and condemned by even the staunchest critics of the Jewish state.

Second, the article totally overlooks the use of children by Palestinian terrorist groups — either as lookouts or actual combatants.

Despite revealing some telling details about Naghniyeh, including that she was sending photographs of Israeli military positions on the encrypted messaging app Telegram (used by terror networks to communicate) when she died — and that her Facebook profile picture consisted of “an unidentified girl wearing an abaya and holding up a rifle” — little consideration is given to the possibility that she was affiliated with a terrorist organization.