An Israeli airstrike hit an apartment in Deir el-Balah on Wednesday and killed a family: Omar Abu Qassem, his wife Asma, and their six-year-old daughter Habeeba. Their three-year-old son survived, injured. That's the event. Here's how it was told. * Reuters' headline: "Israel Kills Four People in Gaza, Including a Child, Medics Say." Credit where due — "Israel Kills" is an active sentence with a named subject, which is more than plenty of desks manage on a Gaza story. And wire rules are wire rules: you attribute what you haven't seen yourself. * But look where the seatbelt got installed. The deaths — bodies carried into a hospital, names, ages, a surviving three-year-old — are the part tagged "Medics Say." The Israeli military's line, that the strike "targeted a Hamas militant," moves through the same story as a routine statement. One of those claims comes with bodies you can count. The other is an assertion about who a dead man was, made by the people who killed him — and it isn't the one the headline chose to doubt. * Al Jazeera led with the countable part: "Israeli air attack on Gaza apartment kills family of three." No hedge on the deaths. The military's claim is in there too — attributed, lower down, where claims live. * This matters because the hedge teaches you what to doubt. Put "medics say" after the bodies, and the doubt lands on the morgue. Print "targeted a Hamas militant" without ceremony, and it lands nowhere at all — it quietly becomes the reason. * Since October's ceasefire, Gaza's health officials have counted more than 1,100 Palestinians killed. Nearly every one of those deaths arrived in English with a source tag on the victims and a straight quote for the explanation. That's not one headline's problem. That's the house style of a war.