Reuters owes us a couple or three corrections to this article on a contentious swap between Israel and Hezbollah. Here’s how the headline and first couple paragraphs read:

Hezbollah and Israel swap corpses on Lebanon border

LEBANON/ISRAEL BORDER (Reuters) – Hezbollah handed the bodies of two Israeli soldiers to the Red Cross on Wednesday to be exchanged for Lebanese prisoners held by Israel in a deal viewed as a triumph by the Lebanese Shi’ite guerrilla group.

Many Israelis see it as a painful necessity, two years after the soldiers’ capture sparked a 34-day war with Hezbollah that killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon and 159 Israelis.

There are at least two factual errors there and one more that’s pretty darned close to falsehood.

First, the headline. What happened today was not a trade of dead bodies. There were live people involved in this swap as well. Israel released five live terrorists, including a man who had murdered four people, one of whom was a four year-old girl.

And there’s some obfuscation here. Hezbollah handed over two bodies. Israel is handing over 200 bodies and four live human beings. Reuters didn’t quite get around to that until well into the second page.

Second, Hezbollah is not a “Lebanese” group. They are an Iranian group. Iran funds it and trains it. Hezbollah’s international headquarters is in Tehran, Iran. Calling it a “Lebanese Shi’ite guerrilla group” is like calling the Ku Klux Klan a “fragmented Aryan civil-rights protest group”. The description elides the plan truth about Hezbollah and makes them look far more benign than they really are.

Third, Reuters is really pushes the matter when it says that Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were “captured”. The truth is that the soldiers were on a routine patrol inside Israel when Hezbollah invaded and attacked their patrol. You could use the word “captured”, but if you were attempting to be honest in your journalism, you’d note that they were the victims of an armed invasion, that they were the ones attacked, and that their compatriots were killed. If the soldiers were civilians, you would have called what happened to them kidnapping and murder. It is not wrong to use those words today, either. That is exactly what happened to them.

Reuters went well over the line of hoensty to report this exchange as neutral and Hezbollah as just another group of militants. The truth is not a difficult thing to see, assuming you are looking for it and not searching for a reason to paint Islamist killers as a notch or two removed from the local VFW chapter.