Two Palestinian teenagers — Omar al-Nassan, 19, and Khalil Abu Alia, 16, by the BBC's account — were shot dead in al-Mughayyir, near Ramallah, on Wednesday night, as settlers came for the village's sheep and the army came with the settlers. That's the event. Here's the BBC's headline Thursday morning: "Palestinian teens killed during settler attack on West Bank village, officials say." * Read it as a sentence about who did what. The teens are the subject. The verb is passive — "killed." The attack is scenery: they died during it, the way you might catch a cold during a holiday. And the whole thing is wrapped in "officials say," which tells you the newsroom regards the central fact as one side's claim. * So, who fired? Ask the Israeli military. In its own statement — quoted by the BBC, four paragraphs down — its forces "fired on and struck" what it called "key instigators" of a "violent disturbance." That's the army saying: our soldiers shot people. The village council says the same thing from the other end: soldiers "opened fire on the residents." The two sides disagree, fiercely, about why. Stones versus stolen sheep. But nobody — not the army, not the village, not the health ministry — disputes who pulled the triggers. The BBC hedged the one thing everyone agrees on. * Reuters, same night, same army statement: "Two Palestinian teens killed in West Bank raid by Israeli settlers and army." There's the "by." Al Jazeera: "Two Palestinians killed as settlers, Israeli forces raid West Bank village." Both put the soldiers in the headline. Neither is doing anything brave. They read the military's own statement and wrote it down. * The BBC's standfirst pushes the same button: the council "says they were trying to stop settlers stealing sheep, but the Israeli military says they threw stones at its troops." That "but" sets up a factual dispute. There isn't one. "They threw stones" is not a denial of the shooting; it's the justification for it. The headline treated a justification as if it were doubt. * We've been here. Three weeks ago, when the BBC wrote "Eleven killed in Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon, authorities say" after the Israeli military had confirmed the strikes in detail, we called it reflex, not caution. Here's the reflex again, with a smaller body count and the same grammar: the dead promoted to subject, the shooter demoted to setting, "say" applied to a fact the shooter had already conceded. Once is an edit. Twice in a month is a house style. * Which is maddening, because the story under the headline is one of the best on the day. It has the UN's count — 81 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank this year, 23 of them in settler attacks, three Israelis killed over the same period. It says the army has faced "mounting criticism for actively participating in settler attacks." It links the BBC's own filming from al-Mughayyir, a village it has documented under weekly attack. It even notes that Thursday's arrest of a 19-year-old settler over an attack on another village, Qusra, was the first in weeks. Every fact you'd need to write a plain headline is in the article the BBC wrote. Only the headline didn't read it. * So whose fear is the hedge protecting? Not accuracy — accuracy was available from the army's own statement. It protects the newsroom from a complaint. "Killed during… officials say" is a headline nobody can file a grievance about, because it never quite says anything happened. Two boys are dead, both sides agree soldiers shot them, and the most carefully edited broadcaster on Earth found a way to report it that would survive any complaints panel and inform no one.