“Journalists and researchers are still piecing together a full picture of what caused a massive explosion at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on Tuesday. The blast killed hundreds of people, many of whom were reportedly sheltering from bombardment elsewhere…
“Many initial news stories reported it as an Israeli airstrike, citing the Palestinian health ministry. Israel denied the accusation and said it was caused by a misfired rocket launched by a Palestinian militant group. On Wednesday, the U.S. backed up Israel's claim, based on its own analysis…
“As more evidence has emerged, including photos of the blast site and videos from the time of the explosion, the majority of independent analysts say the damage is not consistent with a standard Israeli airstrike.” NPR
“The US intelligence community assesses that there likely were between 100 to 300 people killed in the blast at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, and there was ‘only light structural damage at the hospital,’ according to an unclassified intelligence assessment obtained by CNN that adds more detail to the initial assessment released Wednesday finding Israel was not responsible for the strike.” CNN
Many on all sides are critical of the initial reports on the explosion:
“One might perhaps think it prudent to keep one’s powder dry when a terrorist organization claims its enemy did something bad. You would think wrong. Within minutes of [the explosion], this was the headline and subhed atop the New York Times: ‘ISRAEL STRIKE KILLS HUNDREDS AT HOSPITAL, PALESTINIANS SAY. At least 500 dead; Israel urges caution as it investigates.’…
“Please note it did not read ‘Missile Strike Kills Hundreds at Hospital; Investigation Ongoing.’ The formulation of the headline sentence was designed to make Israel the motive actor, even if the final clause acknowledges it as a Palestinian claim… The media in the United States and elsewhere are desperate—desperate—to blame things on Israel and credulous about doing so in a way that should be shameful to any sense of professionalism—or simple morality—they might possess.”
John Podhoretz, Commentary
“Although the Times eventually walked its initial reporting back, it was exceptionally stubborn about doing so. At 5:04 p.m. on Tuesday, it sent out another news alert: ‘Israel and Palestinians blame each other for Gaza hospital blast’. At 6:01 p.m., yet another —‘The Evening: A blast killed hundreds at a Gaza hospital’ — that treated the causality figure and the location of the blast as a hard fact…
“In a business section article, the Times later addressed the controversy in disingenuous fashion. The headline, framed in the passive voice, tells you pretty much all you need to know: ‘After Hospital Blast, Headlines Shift With Changing Claims.’ There is no admission of error whatsoever… The Times frames itself as an innocent, passive actor… That’s complete bullshit, because the Times is extremely and often somewhat proudly self-conscious of [its] role. ‘We set the agenda for the country’ is literally the prevailing attitude in the building.”
Nate Silver, Silver Bulletin
“Earlier this week, Reuters reported that U.S. lawmakers were ‘seeking answers’ from Meta, X, Google, and TikTok about the spread of false information on those platforms. ‘Deceptive content has ricocheted across social media sites since the conflict began, sometimes receiving millions of views,’ wrote Sen. Michael Bennet (D–Colo.) in a letter to the companies…
“This framing totally ignores the fact that some of the most pernicious misstatements about the situation in Gaza were peddled by mainstream journalistic institutions like The New York Times. On social media, people were able to challenge prevailing narratives that the expert class had blindly accepted.”
Liz Wolfe, Reason
Other opinions below.
“NYT’s original coverage of the so-called blast, which was the result of a misfired jihadist rocket that landed in a parking lot near the hospital, featured a photo of a destroyed building that had nothing to do with the hospital in question… By Thursday, the feature image on the Times’ breaking news article pinning blame on Israel was replaced with a nondescript photo of a Middle Eastern man being transported into an intact medical facility on a gurney…
“‘It takes time to independently verify the claims from all sides,’ NYT insisted, less than 24 hours after it failed to verify terrorists’ claims before publishing them as facts. War propaganda is tough to sift through, but it takes deliberate stupidity to think that the word of the same guys who just raped and murdered 1,400 people and counting is worth splaying across breaking news banners and above-the-fold stories.”
Jordan Boyd, The Federalist
“Sometimes, ‘Hamas claims x’ really is news all on its own; sometimes, it isn’t. But surely claims from Hamas deserve to be treated with the same level of skepticism as claims from, say, Donald Trump…
“If the Times gets so easily wrongfooted by this kind of amateur-level disinformation—similar claims of official atrocities while at war have been a staple of martial propaganda for centuries—how is it going to deal with the avalanche of radically more sophisticated and voluminous disinformation that is headed its way?…
“I am a Times subscriber, and, like many other readers, I do not count on the Times for a neutral or unbiased account of hot-button issues, but I do count on being able to assume that events I read about underneath that big blackletter ‘T’ are things that actually happened. That is not the same as things Hamas claims have happened.”
Kevin D. Williamson, The Dispatch
“Tuesday’s events have brought escalation of the conflict closer, narrowing the space for caution and compromise and increasing support across the region for other state and non-state actors to pile in, should Israel launch its expected ground invasion…
“No matter what evidence emerges to the contrary, popular opinion across much of the world, especially the Muslim world, will remain convinced that Israel killed more than 500 people in a deliberate and heinous attack on a hospital.”
Marc Champion, Bloomberg
“[The] presumption of Israeli responsibility was not unfounded. Israel had struck the hospital just days earlier, according to video footage obtained by the New York Times. The Israeli military had ordered the evacuation of 22 hospitals in northern Gaza last week, according to the World Health Organization. And Israel had dropped more than 6,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip since Hamas’s attack on October 7… Israel had attempted to frame Islamic Jihad for its own air strikes against civilians in the past…
“[Yet] Initial reports of Israeli responsibility derailed President Biden’s planned summit with the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, which might have helped to spur a faster humanitarian response to conditions in Gaza…
“The case for a ceasefire in Gaza does not rest on Israel’s culpability for any single air strike. The undisputed facts are more than enough to indicate that Israel’s campaign against Hamas has featured a callous disregard for civilian suffering. We don’t need to rely on Hamas to know that Israel has cut off food, fuel, electricity, and water to much of Gaza’s population. Israel’s own government has told us that.”
Eric Levitz, New York Magazine