On Tuesday, August 18, a family visiting the seaside at Shoreham-by-Sea on England’s southern coast got into trouble in the water. Hassan El-Khawas, 55, his partner Zeina Alayn, 37, and their 14-year-old daughter Sara drowned. Their six-year-old daughter, Saja, was pulled from the water alive and taken to the hospital in critical condition. For three days, she held on. Then Saja died too. Two children went to the coast with their parents, and none of them came home.
What happened to the El-Khawas family is absolutely tragic, and two truths can exist in the same brain at the same time. There is no political angle needed to make the deaths of an entire family horrifying. Examining what happened to their story after it entered the international news cycle doesn’t diminish their deaths or the grief of the people who loved them. It does raise questions about something that happened almost immediately after the first reports appeared: who this family became in the headlines.
The El-Khawas family lived in London and held British citizenship. They were also Palestinian, with Hassan having been born in the Rashidieh refugee camp in southern Lebanon. Early coverage emphasized the family’s Palestinian refugee background. Other reports called them Palestinian. Then “British-Palestinian” started appearing. So did “Palestinian-British.” The National reported that all four members of the family held British citizenship. Al Jazeera identified Saja as a “Palestinian-British girl.” The Times reported her death under a headline that simply identified her as a six-year-old girl who died after her family drowned.
Within three days, the same family had been introduced to readers as Palestinian refugees, Palestinians, British-Palestinians, Palestinian-British and British citizens of Palestinian origin. None of those descriptions came out of nowhere, but they don’t tell the reader quite the same story either. The people hadn’t changed. The information being emphasized had.
Headlines don’t happen accidentally. Trust me, they take effort. Someone writes them, someone edits them, and someone decides which fact goes at the top, which identity gets emphasized, and what the reader learns farther down, assuming the reader gets past the headline at all. In this case, watching the language change in real time opened a much larger question about what headlines have become in international journalism, how much they shape what we think we know, and what happens when the first version is the one that sticks.
Because this isn’t really an article about one drowning in England. It’s about what happens between an event and the version of it that reaches our brains first.
Remember old-school clickbait? “You won’t BELIEVE what happened next!” became a joke because everyone recognized the trick. Publishers had figured out that curiosity could make people click, but so could anger, fear, heartbreak and outrage. As the tricks became more sophisticated, publishers accumulated years of data showing exactly which headlines attracted attention and which ones disappeared into the feed.
Digital publishing had changed the job of the headline. It wasn’t simply sitting above an article anymore. It was the Google result, Facebook preview, X post, aggregator card and notification flashing across someone’s phone while they were making dinner. Publishers could test versions against each other and watch the numbers come in, learning in real time what made human beings stop scrolling.
Researchers eventually measured this on an enormous scale. A study published in Nature Human Behaviour analyzed around 105,000 headline variations that generated about 5.7 million clicks across more than 370 million impressions. Negative words increased clicks, while positive words decreased them. For an average-length headline, every additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3 percent.
The internet had given publishers a way to measure human emotion and optimize around it.
Identity works especially well in that environment because a single word can arrive, carrying years of associations. Palestinian, Jewish, refugee, migrant, Israeli, Muslim, activist, terrorist, mother and child can all tell readers something true about a person while pulling their attention in completely different directions. Put one identity in the headline and another farther down in the article, and the reader has already been told which part of that person to carry into the story.
The headline doesn’t even need the article anymore. It gets screenshotted, reposted, and dropped into group chats. It appears in search results and phone notifications. Thousands of people can argue about it without ever clicking it, and when the article changes later, the screenshot doesn’t.
That’s what made the Shoreham story catch my attention. The language changed while the story was still unfolding, and the information about the family’s Palestinian background was coming through Palestinian organizations themselves. The Palestinian Embassy in the UK supplied information about Hassan’s connection to the Rashidieh refugee camp, while the Palestinian Forum in Britain was also involved in identifying the family and communicating information about them.
Early coverage leaned heavily into that background. Al Jazeera’s first report was headlined “Palestinian refugee and two relatives drown off English coast.” Other reporting also emphasized the Palestinian refugee connection. Then more information was added to the coverage, including the fact that the family was a British citizen.
The language began shifting with it. The Times described them as British-Palestinians. After Saja died, The National called them a British-Palestinian family and reported that all four held British citizenship. Reuters-derived coverage described Saja as Palestinian-British, as did Al Jazeera. The Independent called Saja the fourth member of a “British-Palestinian family” to die.
The Times went another way. Its report on Saja’s death was headlined “Shoreham incident: six-year-old girl dies in hospital after family drown.” The Palestinian identity wasn’t in the headline at all. The same six-year-old girl, the same family and the same horrific event had been introduced to readers through very different language.
That’s what happens in breaking news. Governments, militaries, ministries, embassies, aid organizations, activists and witnesses are feeding information to reporters while newsrooms are racing each other to publish it. One description gets into the first story, other outlets repeat it, aggregators grab it and social media takes over. By the time more information arrives, the first version already has a head start.
We’ve watched that happen before.
On October 17, 2023, an explosion struck the parking area of al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. Palestinian authorities blamed an Israeli airstrike and reported hundreds killed. Major international news organizations carried the accusation almost immediately. The New York Times initially ran a headline attributing the deaths to an Israeli strike, based on Palestinian officials’ claims.
As evidence emerged, that account began to collapse. U.S. intelligence concluded Israel wasn’t responsible, and subsequent analyses pointed toward a rocket fired directly from Gaza as the likely cause. The Times later published an editors’ note acknowledging that its early coverage had relied too heavily on Hamas claims and hadn’t made clear enough that the attribution couldn’t be independently verified.
The accusation had already traveled around the world. Protests erupted, political leaders responded, and millions of people encountered some version of Israel bombed a hospital and killed hundreds before the evidence had been sorted out. The later correction wasn’t entering an empty information space. It was trying to dislodge a story that had already been planted.
Psychologists have been studying exactly that problem for decades. They call it the continued-influence effect. People can be told that information they previously encountered was wrong and still allow it to shape their understanding of the event afterward. A major review in Nature Reviews Psychology found that misinformation can continue influencing reasoning even after correction.
Think about how news reaches us now. A breaking headline appears on your phone at lunch. Maybe you read the article, maybe you don’t. You mention it to someone, somebody screenshots it, and within minutes it’s moving through Facebook, X, group chats and television coverage. Four hours later, the article changes, but everyone who encountered the first version isn’t automatically called back to see what changed.
The correction is now chasing the headline.
That gets us directly to the point without the “people really died / suffering was real / regardless of who did it” detour. We don’t need to defend the act of examining whether a claim was true every time we examine one.
