His visit sparked a rock-throwing response from Palestinians that escalated to a full scale military response from Israel, and that also spread throughout Israel and the Palestinian areas. Yet, it took three weeks for truth of Sharon's visit to surface. Sharon was accompanied by nearly 3,000 fully armed Israeli soldiers. If that wasn't bad enough, Sharon's own words declaring the area will forever remain under Israeli sovereignty turned this so-called religious pilgrimage into an intentional provocation. But that was just the cause of the conflict, with Israel doing a masterful job of easily shifting the blame to the Palestinians.
Subsequent examples are more gruesome.
In the instance of Al-Dura, here was a unarmed 12 year old boy crying and frantically clutching the arms of his equally frightened father as bullets flew all around them. Frames from the video clip showing the boy's last moments before his death were printed in many newspapers the next day. Israel went right to work to counter the expected criticism. And, to add gloss to the accusation, they also argued that the Palestinians were pushing their children to the front lines to confront the heavily armed Israeli soldiers. However, in the days and weeks that followed, the videotape of the killings were made public.