Monday, August 31, 2020
Elder of ZiyonA Palestinian shepherd survived on Sunday evening when a Jewish settler rammed his car into a herd of sheep in an area near Yatta town in southern al-Khalil, south of the occupied West Bank.The shepherd, Ayed al-Shawahin, said that a settler from the illegal settlement of Ma’on accelerated his car and tried to run him over along with his own sheep.He added that two sheep died and at least 10 others suffered injuries in the vehicular attack.
Let's think about this for two seconds. A Jewish "settler" deliberately aiming his car at a bunch of sheep would severely damage the car - but he supposedly hates Palestinians so much that he is willing to pay the thousands of dollars of damage to his vehicle just to run over a few sheep?
It turns out this is this a popular meme that Palestinians have been making up.
The claim was made in May with a similar story of an Israeli "settler" deliberately running over sheep in a field.
I see also a claim from 2016 of a "settler" killing 25 sheep (!) with his car, a 2019 claim of killing 12 sheep and injuring 18 more, and B'Tselem parroted the claims without any verification last year.
Not one of these claims was accompanied with photos of the dead sheep, which is remarkable since everyone has a camera on their mobile phones.
There seems to be one exception: earlier this monthth is photo popped up on social media, also seemingly originating from the Palestinian Information Center Facebook account, with the claim that a Jew had deliberately run over these sheep.
It looks more like a bad traffic accident, and there is no evidence in the photo that this was caused by an Israeli. Oddly, this story did not seem to make it into any Palestinian media like the official Wafa news agency which parrots all the bizarre claims, which again makes this photo seem to be of an accident that was relabeled as a deliberate attack.
