Associated Press recently shocked many when it published an article and photo essay lamenting the fate of Hezbollah terrorists targeted with exploding beepers in September 2024 in an operation aptly named Grim Reaper. The report, referring to Hezbollah as a “militant group”, represents a profound moral failure in journalism—one that transforms terrorists into victims and obscures the legitimate nature of a precisely targeted military operation. This coverage, which HonestReporting aptly described as “repulsive propaganda,” reveals a disturbing pattern of media bias that sanitizes terror while ignoring its victims.
The AP’s feature, titled “Portraits of survivors of Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah,” employs the aesthetic and narrative techniques of victim advocacy rather than objective reporting. As HonestReporting observed, the carefully staged portraits present Hezbollah operatives “against a pitch-black background, lit just enough to highlight scars, stumps, and furrowed brows. Their eyes are cast downward or off into the middle distance. They are composed. Thoughtful. Vulnerable.”
This artistic treatment is not accidental. The visual language deliberately mimics portraiture typically used for cancer survivors, injured veterans, and victims of domestic violence, creating an immediate emotional response that bypasses critical thinking about who these subjects are. The AP has transformed international terrorists into sympathetic figures deserving of public compassion.
On 17 and 18 September 2024, thousands of handheld pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies intended for use by Hezbollah exploded simultaneously in two separate events across Lebanon and Syria. According to an unnamed Hezbollah official, the attack took 1,500 Hezbollah fighters out of action due to injuries.
The UN condemned the attacks as potential war crimes, claiming that while “some victims” may not have been civilians, the nature of the simultaneous explosions violated international law.
It should be emphasized that Hezbollah’s military wing used the electronic devices. The vast majority of persons holding the pagers were members of Hezbollah who were involved in the military operational activities of the organization. Former British commander Richard Kemp called the operation “the most precise anti-terrorist attack” ever conducted.
The moral inversion is perhaps most starkly illustrated in the profile of Mahdi Sheri, a 23-year-old Hezbollah fighter. The AP reports with apparent sympathy that “He can no longer play football. Hezbollah is helping him find a new job.” Fox News noted the absurdity of this focus, with social media users responding, “This is me; playing my tiny violin.” Conservative activist Robby Starbuck captured the broader outrage: “Nothing shocks me anymore with media, but this really did. They’re literally presenting Hezbollah terrorists as victims. Absolutely jaw-dropping.”
What the AP feature conspicuously omits is as revealing as what it includes. As CAMERA notes, the piece was “not just coordinated with Hezbollah, which handpicked the subjects, but effectively served as propaganda for the antisemitic terror group.” Hezbollah’s Association of the Wounded provided AP with contacts for the interview subjects, essentially curating the narrative.
More egregiously, the AP fails to mention what these men were doing before they were injured: actively working to kill Israelis. As HonestReporting emphasizes, “These were not bystanders caught in crossfire. These were operatives of an Iranian-backed terror group, engaged in covert operations using encrypted pagers, the same technology Hezbollah has used for decades to coordinate rocket fire and ambushes targeting civilians.”
The feature’s language choices further reveal its bias. Despite Hezbollah being designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and many other countries, the AP consistently refers to them as a “militant group” or “a major Shiite political party with a wide network of social institutions”—euphemisms that obscure their true nature.
While the AP lavished sympathetic coverage on Hezbollah operatives, it has shown no comparable interest in Israeli victims of Hezbollah terrorism. CAMERA notes that “Israeli Jews injured in Hezbollah’s endless rocket barrages have been undeserving of this level of attention.”
The contrast is particularly stark when considering Hezbollah’s July 2024 rocket attack on a soccer field in Majdal Shams, which killed 12 Israeli Druze children. CAMERA observes: “The twelve children and teens killed by Hezbollah while playing on a soccer pitch… likewise will never play again. Although that attack occurred about two months before the pager attack, the Associated Press never revisited the victims—the dead, the injured, the families—with such a spectacular, multimedia feature.”
This selective empathy reveals the AP’s moral compass. As HonestReporting lists, Hezbollah has been responsible for numerous mass casualty attacks, including the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French paratroopers, the bombings in Buenos Aires, the Khobar Towers attack, and countless rocket attacks on Israeli civilians that displaced over 60,000 residents and killed dozens.
Contrary to the AP’s implicit suggestion that the pager attack was indiscriminate or illegal, legal scholars have extensively analyzed the operation and found it to be remarkably precise and legally justified under international humanitarian law.
The Institute for National Security Studies argues that the attack was “one of the most ‘targeted’ that a state can possibly launch against a terrorist or guerrilla force operating amongst a civilian population. With greater precision than is usually possible, it was clearly aimed at actual enemy combatants, with far less risk of ‘collateral damage’ and indeed inflicting much less actual damage than most such operations.”
The Israel Democracy Institute’s analysis by Professors Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany provides detailed legal justification across three frameworks. On the right to use force (jus ad bellum), they note that between October 8, 2023, and September 17, 2024, “Hezbollah fired more than 8,000 rockets towards Israel,” constituting an armed attack under international law that justified Israel’s self-defense response.
Regarding targeting principles, the legal experts explain that the pagers “served military operational purposes which required a high degree of confidentiality” and were distributed “selectively, mostly to valuable military operatives.” The operation met the principle of distinction by targeting military objectives (the communication devices) and military personnel, with the experts concluding: “the attack on the whole appears proportional in view of the exceptional military advantage it produced, namely, the destruction of Hezbollah’s entire communication apparatus and neutralization of key military operatives.”
The precision of the attack is evidenced by the casualty figures: thousands wounded but only dozens killed, indicating a deliberate limitation of explosive power to minimize collateral damage. As the INSS analysis notes, “the power of the explosion was very limited, thereby limiting the danger to surrounding people.”
This coverage is not an isolated incident but part of a broader pattern of AP bias regarding Hezbollah. CAMERA notes that AP’s Bassem Mroue, co-author of the pager attack feature, previously wrote sympathetically about Jawad Nassrallah (Hassan Nasrallah’s son and a designated terrorist) under the headline “Militant or poet?” The AP also provided a glowing obituary for Hassan Nasrallah himself, describing him as “charismatic and shrewd.”
As CAMERA concludes: “Then, as now, they preferred pushing a Hezbollah narrative.”
Professor Adam Mossoff captured the historical parallel: “Imagine in 1944, the Associated Press published a news article about how Nazi SS soldiers ‘struggle to recover’ from wounds they suffered from battles with the Allies in Europe. It’s a moral abomination that this is not a fantasy for the @AP in 2025.”
This comparison is apt. The AP’s coverage represents a fundamental failure of moral clarity—the inability to distinguish between legitimate targets of military action and innocent victims worthy of sympathy. By humanizing terrorists while ignoring their victims, the AP has abandoned the basic journalistic principle of context and proportion.
The Associated Press’s sympathetic portrayal of Hezbollah operatives wounded in the pager attack represents journalism at its most morally bankrupt. As HonestReporting concludes: “This isn’t journalism. It’s image laundering—the glorification of terror, repackaged as human interest… The Associated Press didn’t just publish a photo essay. It published a shrine.”
When media organizations present terrorists as victims while ignoring the actual victims of terrorism, they become complicit in terror’s propaganda effort. The precision and legal justification for the pager operation only makes the AP’s moral inversion more egregious. In transforming one of the most surgically precise anti-terror operations in history into a tragedy for the terrorists, the Associated Press has revealed not just bias, but a fundamental corruption of journalistic purpose.