USA Today's Arieh O'Sullivan claimed that “the killings reflected a potentially dangerous new escalation in a conflict that for the past half-century has largely treated U.S. officials as bystanders. Terrorist Palestinian groups have generally avoided attacks on U.S. officials.”

The New York Times’ John F. Burns reported that “the bombing was the first fatal attack on an official American target since the current Palestinian uprising began three years ago .... In decades of conflict, attacks on American officials in Israel and the Palestinian territories have been almost unknown, notwithstanding Palestinian militants’anger at American support for Israel.”

Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and Washington Times’ coverage was similar.