A Boring Dystopia

You're blaming them for malice in what should be fairly attributed to the stupidity and laziness of the general population, though

No. The first rule of storytelling, whether it be fiction or journalism, is "know your audience". The NYT knows their audience and chooses to deliberately mislead people.

If you seriously think they should be writing their headlines with the idea of summarizing the Lebanon/Israel situation in one sentence

That's not what I'm saying, no. What I'm decrying is their deliberate decision to influence perceptions by including a biased perspective in the headline rather than just a concise summation of what objectively happened.

you're either an absolutely incredible writier, not their target audience or a straw man made up to illustrate my disagreement with your point.

Pretty ironic that you would accuse me of constructing a strawman in the same sentence wherein you just constructed one yourself, however hypothetical you might have dressed it up.

Including a reference to the statements made by israel in the headline of an article about what israel has said is not unreasonable

Yeah, you're fundamentally missing what the article is about. It's about what the IDF has DONE. Or at least it would have been if the NYT weren't failing their profession by acting as stenographers for a genocidal and notoriously dishonest regime.

regardless of your personal opinion about how that might reflect their bias

My opinion, while clear to anyone paying attention, has nothing to do with the fact that including the official IDF version of events in the headline shows clear bias. That's just objectively true, and would also be if the version of the story was that of Hamas or even the ones whose side I'm ACTUALLY on: the innocent civilians caught between a terrorist group and a genocidal apartheid regime.

It stands that the NYT, of all those headlines, is the only one that doesn't openly bias themselves towards israel by directly quoting the IDF

That's the opposite of the truth. To directly quote them in the headline is as naked a bias that they could possibly show, short of the times where they go a step further and don't even treat it as a quote but just unassailable truth. Like in that awful "Screams Without Words" propaganda piece they still haven't retracted.

and even reflects reasonable skepticism

Putting quotation marks around a quote isn't expressing skepticism. It's the bare minimum of ass covering required to not risk getting sued for repeating the words of others as their own.

If you don't understand that

Clearly I'm not the one failing to understand anything, and neither are the NYT. If they were completely new to how journalism works and didn't have an editor, like you, I might have considered it an honest mistake.

They AREN'T new, though, and they DO have a (presumably highly skilled and experienced since it's one of the most prestigious jobs in journalism anywhere) editor, though, so there's no way that they aren't aware of what such a headline is and does.

To quote the otherwise completely irrelevant Maude Lebowski: don't be fatuous, Jeffrey.