Senior officials back Israel over hospital blast
'It would be wise for all of us to take a beat and pause and collect all the information before choosing to decide what we believe and what we don't'
(Times of Israel) – The New York Times, which repeatedly and prominently featured Hamas’s claim that the blast last week at Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital was caused by an Israeli airstrike, published an editors’ note on Monday acknowledging that its coverage should have been more journalistically rigorous.
While the New York Times story was updated as time went on, “editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified”, the editors’ note read.
The initial reports “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified”, it said. “The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.”
Earlier on Monday, the newspaper admitted the terror group had not provided, or even described, any evidence to back up its accusation that the explosion was caused by an Israeli strike.
An investigation by The Wall Street Journal has backed Israel’s version of events, as have assessments by CNN and the Associated Press.
The White House said that an intelligence assessment showed Israel was not responsible and US President Joe Biden said that the blast “appears as though it was done by the other team”.
The Israeli military presented an intercepted conversation between Hamas officials saying the explosion was caused by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad projectile that fell short inside Gaza, and provided images showing that the parking lot where the blast occurred didn’t have a crater in the ground and no structural damage had been dealt to nearby buildings – both of which would typically have been left by an airstrike.
The US intelligence community believes that 100-300 people were killed at the Al-Ahli hospital, while a European official put the toll at 50 or less.
Hamas health authorities swiftly put the death toll at 500, a number that was widely reported worldwide despite the fact that the terror group’s figure could not be independently verified.
In Britain, the BBC and other local outlets have been criticised by government lawmakers for rushing to report the Hamas version of events.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told the House of Commons last week, “We don’t treat what comes out of the Kremlin as the gospel truth, we should not do the same with Hamas.”
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said in Jerusalem on Sunday that there was no reason to assume Israel was behind the October 17 blast at the hospital in Gaza City, and that spreading false accusations about Israeli responsibility was a “blood libel”.
Pictures of the aftermath of the blast showed a parking lot with cars charred and badly damaged but surrounding buildings intact, though with signs of damage from shrapnel. Images of the hospital after the strike published by the Maxar satellite monitoring group show the hospital buildings mainly appeared to be intact.
IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus disputed the Hamas-run ministry’s figures, asking, “Where are all the bodies?”
AFP correspondents saw dozens of bodies at the scene, with medics and civilians recovering bodies wrapped in white cloth, blankets, or black plastic bags.
The initial blame on Israel for the hospital explosion led to a surge in anti-Israel demonstrations and antisemitic incidents worldwide. Riots and mass protests broke out in Jordan and other countries and Hezbollah called for a global day of jihad, while Jordan cancelled a scheduled summit with US President Joe Biden, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Israel arranged evacuation flights to repatriate citizens from Turkey while issuing a travel warning of the highest threat level to the country.
US State Department spokesperson Matt Miller last Thursday knocked media organisations for uncritically reporting the Hamas-run health ministry claim that the Israel Defence Forces was responsible for the incident.
“I don’t want to play media critic here, but I will say that I do think that this event was a reminder that everyone, and this includes government officials and everyone who watches this conflict, [that] it would be wise for all of us to take a beat and pause and collect all the information before choosing to decide what we believe and what we don’t,” Miller said during a press briefing.
“I saw a number of reports… that took Hamas’s word at face value – the word of a terrorist organisation,” Miller said.
He said while Israel has presented significant evidence to the public backing its claim that the Gaza hospital blast was caused by an errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, Hamas has failed to do the same.
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