She was four.
She was a child.

Ruqaya Ahmad Odeh Jahalin.

Ruqaya was four. Defense for Children International–Palestine reported that Israeli forces shot her in the back while she was sitting in a shared taxi with her mother near Beit Iksa in the occupied West Bank on 7 January 2024. Contemporary reporting by The National also described Israeli security personnel’s gunfire hitting the vehicle in which she was travelling. S128, S129

Sean Bell, Sky News military analyst.

Sky News identifies Bell as a military analyst and former RAF Air Vice-Marshal. Al Bawaba’s contemporary report identifies him as the speaker and reproduces the remarks. S126, S127

“three or four-year-old young lady”

“found its way into the van”

These are separate excerpts, not a continuous sentence. Bell framed the shooting as apparently accidental while describing police firing after a car allegedly rammed a checkpoint. The criticism below concerns the language used about the child and the gunfire. S127

Open the clip shared at the time ↗

This social-media post is linked by the contemporary report. The original full broadcast and this repost have not been independently inspected for this edition. The excerpts and attribution above rely on the published report; the exact broadcast date is not established here. S130

The obscenity of language that obscures a child’s death.

Calling a four-year-old a “young lady” obscures the most basic fact about her: she was a small child. Her age appeared in Bell’s wording, yet the noun he chose denied it its ordinary meaning. That is an obscene way to describe a child’s violent death.

The description of the bullet compounds the problem. Bullets do not independently find their way into vehicles. Someone fires them. This phrasing moves the people who fired out of the sentence and turns their gunfire into something resembling an unfortunate natural occurrence.

Whether the child was deliberately targeted is a separate question requiring evidence. Reporting can acknowledge uncertainty about intent while clearly identifying who fired and who was killed. Describing a shooting as accidental should require an attributed account or established finding.

Bell is accountable for his words. Sky News is accountable for the journalism it broadcasts. A military analyst’s language deserves scrutiny, especially when it softens the killing of a child.

Ruqaya deserved reporting that stated her name, her age and the circumstances of her death plainly. Journalism should make the facts easier to see. This language made them easier to look away from.