The Murders of Women, In Palestine: The Coverage of Palestinian News Agency, Wafa

Murder of women in Arab Countries like Palestine is a critical issue. In Palestinian society, it is one of the oldest and common phenomena and one of society's ignored crimes due to specific perspectives around women. The social norms justify murders of women claiming it is a means of getting rid of shame without detailed investigation. If a woman lost her life under the umbrella of honor, the incidents of the murders of women disappear without investigations since it is custom, norm, and tradition. Murder of women in the Palestinian society threatens the community structure, as the community is affected by a state of disintegration. Hence, the media play a significant role in reducing these crimes by publishing them to highlight the problem in the society. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the Palestinian media coverage murder of women in Palestine. To achieve the aim of the study, the study focuses on WAFA media agency as a case study. Wafa media agency is deemed as one of the generally renowned Palestinian state official agencies. The study utilizes the Agenda-setting theory, Gatekeeping theory, framing theory, Social representation theory, and Feminism theory to construct a framework. In this research, content analysis was conducted on 50 news articles from the website of WAFA agency from 1st of January 2016 to 31st of December 2020. In total, WAFA published 247 news stories during his period,197 stories were excluded due to information shortage of the criminals and victims. As a result, it was noted that WAFA agency dealt with the news reported in general ignoring details of the incidents. The agency's policy is to focus on political issues instead of social issues. The agency avoided adopting the crimes as an Honor killing, but rather took the statements from the families of the victims, or the statements of the perpetrator, or from official police reports. Such a representation does not shed light on such an important problem of the Palestinian society, and it is far from criticizing such a social problem and guiding society for a better society. This shows that the WAFA agency does not highlight an important social problem and does not play any role in taking these crimes seriously for the welfare of the society or/and reducing these. Crimes. Keywords: Women, women murder, media, honor killing, Palestinian media, WAFA agency.