An active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force was critically injured Sunday after setting himself ablaze outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., while declaring that he “will no longer be complicit in genocide,” a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. The man, whose name wasn’t immediately released, walked up to the embassy shortly before 1 p.m. and began livestreaming on the video streaming platform Twitch, the person said. Law enforcement officials believe the man started a livestream, set his phone down and then doused himself in accelerant and ignited the flames. At one point, he said he “will no longer be complicit in genocide,” the person said. The video was later removed from the platform, but law enforcement officials have obtained and reviewed a copy. The person was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the ongoing investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity. Police did not immediately provide any additional details about the incident. Read: Israel vows to target Lebanon's Hezbollah even if cease-fire reached with Hamas in Gaza The incident happened as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking the cabinet approval for a military operation in the southern Gazan city of Rafah while a temporary cease-fire deal is being negotiated. Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, however, has drawn criticisms, including genocide claims against the Palestinians. Israel has adamantly denied the genocide allegations and says it is carrying out operations in accordance with international law in the Israel-Hamas war. In December, a person self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta and used gasoline as an accelerant, according to Atlanta’s fire authorities. A Palestinian flag was found at the scene, and the act was believed to be one of “extreme political protest.” Read: Israeli officials to meet on a proposed pause in Gaza while the Cabinet is set to OK a Rafah plan In a statement, the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington said its officers had responded to the scene outside the Israeli Embassy to assist U.S. Secret Service officers and that its bomb squad had also been called to examine a suspicious vehicle. Police said no hazardous materials were found in the vehicle. Also read: Netanyahu seeks open-ended control over security and civilian affairs in Gaza in new postwar plan

News organizations demanded an explanation Saturday for an Israeli airstrike that targeted and destroyed a Gaza City building housing the offices of The Associated Press, broadcaster Al-Jazeera and other media outlets. AP journalists and other tenants were safely evacuated from the 12-story al-Jalaa tower after the Israeli military warned of an imminent strike. Three heavy missiles hit the building within the hour, disrupting coverage of the ongoing conflict between’ Gaza’s Hamas rulers and Israel. At least 145 people in Gaza and eight in Israel have been killed since the fighting erupted on Monday night. “The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today,” AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt said. He said the American news agency was seeking information from the Israeli government and engaging with the U.S. State Department to learn more. Read:AP’s top editor calls for probe into Israeli airstrike Mostefa Souag, acting director-general of Al-Jazeera Media Network, called the strike a “war crime” and a “clear act” to stop journalists from reporting on the conflict. Kuwait state television also had office space in the now-collapsed Gaza City building. “The targeting of news organizations is completely unacceptable, even during an armed conflict. It represents a gross violation of human rights and internationally agreed norms,” Barbara Trionfi, the executive director of the International Press Institute, said. In a standard Israeli response, the military said that Hamas was operating inside the building, and it accused the militant group of using journalists as human shields. But it provided no evidence to back up the claims. Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus claimed that Hamas used the building for a military intelligence office and weapons development. He alleged “a highly advanced technological tool” that the militant group used in the fighting was “within or on the building.” But Conricus said he could not provide evidence to back up the claims without “compromising” intelligence efforts. He added, however: “I think it’s a legitimate request to see more information, and I will try to provide it.” Pruitt, the AP’s CEO, said the news agency had been in the building for 15 years and “we have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building.” “We have called on the Israeli government to put forward the evidence,” he said. “This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.” Some press freedom advocates said the strike raised suspicions that Israel was trying to hinder coverage of the conflict. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists demanded Israel “provide a detailed and documented justification” for the strike. “This latest attack on a building long known by Israel to house international media raises the specter that the Israel Defense Forces is deliberately targeting media facilities in order to disrupt coverage of the human suffering in Gaza,” the group’s executive director, Joel Simon, said in a statement. Read: AP 'horrified' by Israeli attack on its office The Washington-based National Press Club called the strike “part of a pattern this week of Israeli forces destroying buildings in Gaza that house media organizations” and also questioned whether the assaults seek to “impair independent and accurate coverage of the conflict.” “We call upon Israeli authorities to halt strikes on facilities known to house press,” the National Press Club said. “Reliable media organizations are the best sources of accurate information about events in Gaza, and they must not be prevented from doing their vital job.” The bombing followed media consternation over an Israeli military statement that prompted some news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, to erroneously report early Friday that Israel had launched a ground invasion of Gaza. Israeli military commentators said the media had been used in a ruse to lure Hamas militants into a deadly trap. Conricus denied that the military engaged in a deliberate deception when it tweeted falsely Friday that ground forces were engaging in Gaza, calling it “an honest mistake.” The AP, based on its analysis of the army’s statement, phone calls to military officials and on the ground reporting in Gaza, concluded there was no ground incursion and did not report there was one. The strike on a building known to have the offices of international media outlets came as a shock to reporters who had felt relatively protected there. “Now, one can understand the feeling of the people whose homes have been destroyed by such kind of air attacks,” Al-Jazeera producer Safwat al-Kahlout, who was at the bureau in Gaza when the evacuation warning came, told the broadcaster Saturday. “It’s really difficult to wake up one day and then you realize that your office is not there with all the career experiences, memories that you’ve had.” AP’s top floor offices and roof terrace on the now-destroyed building had provided a prime location for covering fighting in Gaza. The news agency’s camera offered 24-hour live shots this week as Hamas rockets arched toward Israel and Israeli airstrikes hammered the city. Just a day before the bombing, AP correspondent Fares Akram wrote in a personal story that the AP office was the only place in Gaza were he felt “somewhat safe.” Read:AP statement on Israeli attack on building housing AP office “The Israeli military has the coordinates of the high-rise, so it’s less likely a bomb will bring it crashing down,” Akram wrote. The next day, Akram tweeted about running from the building and watching its destruction from afar. The New York Times joined other news organizations in expressing alarm about the targeting of al-Jalaa tower. “The ability of the press to report on the ground is a profoundly important issue that has an impact on everyone.” the newspaper’s vice president of communications, Danielle Rhoades Ha, said. “A free and independent press is essential to helping to inform people, bridge differences and end the conflict.”

A study of the public’s attitude toward the press reveals that distrust goes deeper than partisanship and down to how journalists define their very mission. In short: Americans want more than a watchdog. The study, released Wednesday by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, suggests ways that news organizations can reach people they may be turning off now. “In some ways, this study suggests that our job is broader and bigger than we’ve defined it,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute. The study defines five core principles or beliefs that drive most journalists: keep watch on public officials and the powerful; amplify voices that often go unheard; society works better with information out in the open; the more facts people have the closer they will get to the truth; and it’s necessary to spotlight a community’s problems to solve them. Yet the survey, which asked non-journalists a series of questions designed to measure support for each of those ideas, found unqualified majority support for only one of them. Two-thirds of those surveyed fully supported the fact-finding mission. Half of the public embraced the principle that it’s important for the media to give a voice to the less powerful, according to the survey, and slightly less than half fully supported the roles of oversight and promoting transparency. Less than a third of the respondents agreed completely with the idea that it’s important to aggressively point out problems. Only 11% of the public, most of them liberals, offered full support to all five ideas. “I do believe they should be a watchdog on the government, but I don’t think they should lean either way,” said Annabell Hawkins, 41, a stay-at-home mother from Lawton, Oklahoma. “When I grew up watching the news it seemed pretty neutral. You’d get either side. But now it doesn’t seem like that.” Hawkins said she believed the news media spent far too much time criticizing former President Donald Trump and rarely gave him credit for anything good he did while in office. “I just want the facts about what happened so I can make up my own mind,” said Patrick Gideons, a 64-year-old former petroleum industry supervisor who lives south of Houston. He lacks faith in the news media because he believes it offers too much opinion. Gideons, though, said he gets most of his news through social media, which is skilled in directing followers toward beliefs they are comfortable with. He said he knows only one person who subscribes to a newspaper anymore — his 91-year-old father. Polls show how the public’s attitude toward the press has soured over the past 50 years and, in this century, how it has become much more partisan. In 2000, a Gallup poll found 53% of Democrats said they trusted the media, compared with 47% of Republicans. In the last full year of the Trump presidency, Gallup found trust went up to 73% among Democrats and plunged to 10% among Republicans. The survey’s findings point to some ways news organizations can combat the negativity. Half a century ago, when newspapers were flourishing and before the internet and cable television led to an explosion in opinionated news, the public’s view of the role of journalists was more compatible to how journalists viewed the job themselves, Rosenstiel said. “We were the tough guys, we were the cops,” he said. The study indicates now that consumers are interested in news that highlights potential solutions to problems and want to hear about things that are working, he said. “We tend to think that stories that celebrate the good things in society are soft stories, kind of wimpy,” he said. “But they may be more important than we think in providing a full and accurate picture of the world.” People who put greater emphasis on loyalty and authority tend to be more skeptical of the core values that journalists try to uphold, as opposed to those who give greater weight to fairness, the study found. Changes in the way a story is framed can make it more widely appealing to different audiences. In one example, researchers took a story about a canceled recreation center project in a low-income neighborhood and emphasized the element, less prominent in the original story, that the parks director had diverted funds designated for the project by the city’s mayor. The change led to the story being seen as more trusted and appealing by a broader set of the public, especially those made who place value in authority. The nationwide survey was conducted with 2,727 adults in the fall of 2019, with a second set of interviews done last August with 1,155 people who had completed the first survey. The study found that majorities of Americans believe that the media doesn’t care about them and tries to cover up its mistakes. Despite the negativity, Rosenstiel said he believes there’s room for both sides to come to a better understanding of each other. Believe it or not, most journalists are pretty sincere, said Rosenstiel, a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. “Regular people should note that when journalists say they are just doing their job, they actually mean that,” he said, “because they define their job a certain way. They’re not lying. They really don’t think of themselves as secret agents of the Democratic Party. They have these set of principles that they think they’re upholding.”

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