Yawn’s right. It is common practice to drop flares in a high threat environment, which usually means low altitude for man portable heat seekers (which is all Hamas has). An F16 only comes down low to do damage, their useless for observation in an urban environment.. too fast. So its almost certain that he had just “deployed a weapon system”.
That being said, I think their choice of wording betrays two issues. First of all, they chose to refer to the weapons fire which wasn’t shown and ignored the defensive nature of the flair. So a more accurate and just as truethful statement would be “An Isreali fighter deploys defensive measures…” but that fails to label Isreal as the aggressor so that’s not going to work. The second is they fail to mention what kind of weapon was deployed. That leads me to believe that the writer just went through stock photos and probably want even on site. Wasn’t one of the quotes from the Yellow Journalism era “You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war”. Their just being true to their heritage
