Islamic Jihad militants mourn over the body of 4-month-old Palestinain Iman Hijo at her funeral on Tuesday. (AP)

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Israeli Foreign Ministry representatives abroad have been enlisted to help "combat the negative impact of the killing of four-month-old Iman Hijo in Khan Yunis on Sunday," according to an article in The Jerusalem Post. Most media reports fail to mention that "the Palestinians deliberately fire mortars from populated areas in order to use civilians as human shields, and that the infant's death was the result of IDF responsive fire to the shelling earlier in the day of Neve Dekalim," according to diplomatic sources cited in the Jerusalem Post article.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon expressed sorrow for the

"The Palestinians are deeply aware of the power of the media" - Danny Rubinstein, Ha'aretz

infant's death, telling members of his Likud faction on Monday, "Children and babies should not be involved in this terrible war that we want to end."

The Hamas charged that Israel tried to defer media attention from the Palestinian infant to its declaration of "the confiscation of a ship loaded with arms on its way to the Gaza Strip." Whether the two media events were connected or not, captured guns could not compete with a dead infant for world attention, leaving Israel on "the losing end in [its] PR war with the Palestinians," according to Ha'aretz correspondent, Peter Hirschberg.

Young victims of violence
"Baby Iman has become the youngest casualty of this Intifada," Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said, calling the Israeli attack "an unjustified escalation." According to Arutz 7, "the PA has been touting the killing as a "second Muhammad al-Dura," in reference to the 12-year-old boy killed in a shoot-out near Kfar Darom in the early days of the Intifada.

Many pictures of Iman Hijo have been published in the media. Many of them portray the angelic face of a young baby shrouded in white and green, but radical websites, including those of the Hamas and Alaqsa Intifada, posted more gruesome images of the mortally wounded infant.

A headline in Ha'aretz yesterday announced that Iman Hijo had become the "youngest victim," taking that dubious distinction from Shalhevet Pass, the ten-month-old baby targeted by Palestinian snipers in Hebron in March.

But according to Alex Safian, Associate Director of CAMERA, Shalhevet Pass never received the "sympathetic media coverage" she deserved at the time. In an article entitled "Reuters' selective lens," Safian charged that the news agency, which regularly inundates newspapers with a flood of "images of Palestinian victims accompanied by anti-Israel captions, slows to a dismissive trickle for Jewish victims like Shalhevet." According to Safian, "As Reuters apparently sees it, even when a Jewish infant is shot and killed by a Palestinian sniper, Palestinians are the victims."

The real battleground is the media
"The Palestinians are deeply aware of the power of the media," says Ha'aretz Palestinian affairs correspondent Danny Rubinstein. "They know they have no chance militarily, but that the real battleground is the media. And here they have an advantage because they are the underdog."

IDF spokesman Ron Kitri, quoted in Ha'aretz, said the battle for world opinion would not be won by an "attempt to find a single media event, whether it's the girl in Khan Yunis or Shalhevet Pass."

According to Herb Keinon, writing in The Jerusalem Post, Foreign Ministry officials believe that the accidental killing of Iman Hijo in Khan Yunis, "taken together with other incidents where Palestinian civilians have been killed over the last seven months, has an accumulative effect that could have diplomatic resonance, especially in Europe."

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