The AP’s sympathy for the Hezbollah devil could’ve been a Babylon Bee parody

The Associated Press just made it clear where it stands on the terrorists’ war on Israel: With the terrorists.

How else to read its bizarre puff piece Wednesday sympathizing with the poor, suffering Hezbollah goons injured in Israel’s pager attack last year?

The Babylon Bee couldn’t have come up with a better parody than the 2,100-word feature, “Survivors of Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah struggle to recover” — though that’s not how AP’s Bassem Mroue and Sarah El Deeb meant it.

The two recount their interviews with six people wounded in the attack, all “Hezbollah officials or fighters or members of their families.”

Israel, they explain, launched an operation aimed at “harming and disrupting” Hezbollah members. Such nerve, no?

Except that this came as Hezbollah was firing rockets aimed at obliterating innocent Israelis — in “solidarity” with Hamas, which had just waged the most barbaric attack against Jews since the Holocaust.

Jerusalem “boasts” of the attack, seethe AP’s authors, who then cite critics claiming it “may have violated international law, calling it indiscriminate.”

Indiscriminate? It was the most cleanly targeted thing possible: Only Hez heavies had the pagers, and Hezbollah admits those wounded or killed were almost all its terrorist personnel.

Ah, but the AP pair never actually use the word “terrorist” as they lament the suffering of Hez associates who “lost fingers” and had “shrapnel lodged under their skin.”

Mahdi Sheri, a 23-year-old Hezbollah fighter, “can no longer play football.” Horror of horrors!

“It’s impossible now” for him even to “find a role alongside Hezbollah fighters.”

What? Never able to attack Israel again? Unforgiveable!

Worse: Hezbollah “is left with the financial and psychological burden of thousands who need long-term medical treatment and recovery.”

Poor, sad terrorist group.

OK, the wire service’s sick bias isn’t news: E.g., after Israel eliminated Hez boss Hassan Nasrallah, the AP’s headline mourned him as “charismatic and shrewd.”

An old and storied agency, the AP may still employ a few objective professionals.

But it’s still become a propaganda tool for terrorists, plain and simple.