On Friday, Israeli soldiers shot dead 6 Palestinians in Gaza, who were behind the border fence. In the New York Times, Jodi Rudoren said the Israeli troops “opened fire to quell crowds that hurled rocks and rolled burning tires close to the fence separating Gaza from Israel. . .”

Lower in the story, she added:

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner of the Israeli military said there were more than 1000 men ‘attempting multiple times and at multiple locations to storm the border fence throughout the day,’ hurling projectiles including a grenade.

Joel Greenberg, a veteran journalist, covered the same story for the Financial Times. Here are two paragraphs from Greenberg’s report:

Officials in Gaza said six Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded. Witnesses said the shots were fired by snipers at Israeli guard posts along the fence, where Israel enforces a 100-meter-wide no-go zone inside Gaza. The [Israeli military] spokeswoman could not explain why troops had not instead used non-lethal crowd control weapons, such as tear gas and rubber bullets, routinely used by Israeli forces against violent protests in the West Bank.

There are two possible explanations for Rudoren’s extraordinary bias here.