The Israeli Consulate in Atlanta plans to send a letter of complaint to CNN after its host Christiane Amanpour said last week that members of the Dee family were “killed in a shootout”, JPost reported on Wednesday.
“The mother and two Israel-British sisters – they were killed in a shootout,” Amanpour said during her show, seemingly implying that the victims of terror were also shooting.
The Foreign Ministry confirmed that it is working on a complaint, after a source saw a draft of the letter.
Lucy Dee and her daughters Rina and Maia were murdered last month when terrorists opened fire at their car in the Jordan Valley, shooting them over 20 times.
Rabbi Leo Dee, husband and father of the victims, told media watchdog HonestReporting on Tuesday that he demands an apology from CNN and Amanpour, according to JPost.
Amanpour is no stranger to controversial statements regarding Israel.
In 2013, during an interview with then-Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, she insisted on referring to Judea and Samaria as the “occupied West Bank”, claiming that the term was “an international term”.
Bennett stressed in his response, “One cannot occupy his own home.”
A similar incident occurred last year when Bennett, this time as Prime Minister, gave an interview to Amanpour, during which she asserted that “the West Bank has been occupied since 1967”.
In 2020, Amanpour caused an uproar when she called the Trump presidency an “assault” on human civilization comparable to that carried out by Nazi Germany during the Kristallnacht pogroms in 1938.
The Israeli government demanded an apology from CNN over the comparison. Amanpour ultimately apologized for the comparison, saying, “Hitler and his evils stand alone, of course, in history. I regret any pain my statement may have caused. My point was to say how democracy can potentially slip away, and how we must always zealously guard our democratic values.”
Most recently, Amanpour implied on her program there is a comparison between the actions of Israel and those of the Syrian regime.