This study looks at how two social groups are framed in news media discourse by using corpus linguistics (CL) methods to investigate collocates of PALESTINIAN and HAMAS in the News on the Web (NOW) corpus, along with their frequencies and mutual information (MI) scores. In conjunction with Framing theory and Agenda setting theory (AST), collocates are compared pre- and post-Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The study aimed to see whether or to what extent there was a difference or change between each time period for each term and when compared to one another. Though the search terms did not share any collocates during the two month period prior to Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack, they did share several negative collocates during the two-month period starting October 7, 2023. For the collocates not shared, compared to PALESTINIAN, HAMAS had generally more negative ones (in number and strength as measured by SenticNet and AFINN, two online sentiment analysis tools). Viewed through Framing theory and AST, the results offer a view of how media consumers might come to view each group/their actions based on how they were represented in the news media discourse by way of collocates. Additionally, the frequencies of the shared collocates [militant(s) and killed as well as each group name as a collocate of the other] along with the strength of the associations (as measured by MI scores) seems to show that the term PALESTINIAN was ‘tainted’ by the collocates of HAMAS.