The Israel Defense Force, the Times, and the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital blast: How to Report breaking news in the light of Hamas claims
The early versions of the coverage relied on claims by Hamas too much and did not make clear that those claims could not be verified immediately. The paper will reexamine its procedures for reporting breaking news in light of the incident.
The Israel Defense Force share the video footage three times on X, formerly referred to as TWo. In the posts, the Israeli military identified the moving aerial object as a “rocket aimed at Israel” that “misfired and exploded” at nearly the same time as the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital blast. The Israeli military identified the munition in interviews with CNN and India Today as the one that caused an explosion in a rocket on October 18.
The Times continued to update its coverage as more information became available, reporting the disputed claims of responsibility and noting that the death toll might be lower than initially reported. The headline and other text at the top of the website reflected on the scope of the explosion and the dispute over responsibility.
Times editors should have been more explicit about the information they could and could not verify, because of the sensitivity of the news during a widening conflict. There are procedures that need to be reviewed around the use of the biggest headlines in a digital report to determine if additional safeguards are needed.
The audiences’ perceptions of media outlets’ fairness determine how much trust they have – not just in the veracity of specific coverage but the independence of their journalists. Speed may be important to readers and viewers. When stakes are so high, accuracy and fairness are even more important.
The Gaza Blast: Backtrack on Gaza Attack after Relating Hamas as Key Source, a Study by Physicians for Human Rights
By contrast, the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights put out a call on the day of the blast for the protection of civilian life and for the incident to be the subject of an independent investigation. It didn’t project blame.
Last week, The Washington Free Beacon’s Drew Holden documented a series of prominent news outlets and public figures organizations that appeared to rely on Hamas’ claims as authoritative with little or scant acknowledgement of how little had been verified before publication.
For its part, the Israeli government has been accused by human rights groups of hitting civilian targets in the past. The Israeli military initially denied that a soldier had shot and killed a journalist last year, but it is now back to square one.
The Times journalists have come under scrutiny recently. An Israeli diplomat chastised the paper for employing a videographer in Gaza to document the conflict. Over the last 11 years, Hijjy has praised Hitler or used the Nazi leader in social media postings. A spokesperson for the Times says the paper reviewed those “problematic” postings last year, when the issue was first raised, and took actions “to ensure he understood our concerns and could adhere to our standards.”
Unlike in some other war zones, such as in Ukraine, it’s nearly impossible for outside reporters to get into Gaza, even from Israel. Most news outlets are either covering it remotely or relying on local journalists whose families are themselves at risk from Israeli strikes.
And Hamas is the source of much of the information — and misinformation — about events in Gaza. Last week, for example, a Hamas spokesman denied in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep that militants from the group had slaughtered hundreds of civilians at a music concert in the Israeli desert, despite accounts by survivors, Israeli officials and journalists for major news outlets. (Inskeep pointedly noted that the attackers did kill civilians.)
Yet Hamas is much more than that. It is deemed by the U.S. and the European Union to be a terrorist organization. There were more than 1,400 dead in the attack, and more than 200 people taken hostage.
The explosion of the Hamas hospital, Palestine: a matter of time and space but not a million more Palestinians, says the British Broadcasting Corporation
The degree of speculation in his report was, in retrospect, wrong, according to the statement issued by the British Broadcasting Corporation.
The stakes are too high. The sources can prove unreliable. Concrete facts are often scant. Readers reward publications for pushing information out as soon as possible.
“I don’t think the question will ever be fully solved using open source intelligence, that’s what I believe,” says an assistant professor of political science.
Hundreds of Palestinians were sheltering in the courtyard of Al Ahli Arab Hospital on Tuesday, believing the Christian-run facility would be a safe haven.
According to independent footage of the event, the rockets began to fire at 7 p.m. local time.
The Hamas-run health ministry has also declined to release further details about those 471 victims, and all traces of the munition have seemingly vanished from the site of the blast, adding to the difficulty in assessing its provenance. Raising further questions about the impact site, it turned out to be the hospital parking lot, not the hospital itself.
But in the video closest to the blast, there’s the sound of something whizzing by. The sound is marked by the Doppler effect, which can be heard when something moves in a direction that is away from an observer.
Earshot conducts “sonic investigations,” which analyze sound, and analyzed that sound. Earshot found that whatever fell very likely came from the east, not the west.
Earshot director Lawrence Abu Hamdan indicated that this was reducing the probability of this coming from the west. “It’s rocket science after all, so we can’t rule it out.”
Others say that the publicly available evidence, as it stands, is unlikely to give a a definitive answer. Because the incident happened at night in an active war zone, the available video just might not be enough, says Marc Garlasco, a former United Nations war crimes investigator.
“I get why people worry about this,” he says. There’s been a lot of people killed since that incident, right?
He hopes the U.N. can eventually conduct a war crimes investigation to establish who was behind the explosion. He says that some issues need public attention. There’s a lot to worry about, the U.N. facilities are being hit and hospitals are out of fuel.
The assessment is based on what hasn’t been discovered. There were no pictures of Palestinians with Israeli weapons from the bomb site, according to a senior intelligence official.
The senior official said that the agencies were still looking into it. The official said intelligence agencies would release any new information if it pointed in a different direction.
Amateur deaths in Gaza of a rocket-launched hospital: U.S. intelligence and diplomatic probes of the Sinai Sinai hospital
On Monday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain said his country’s intelligence services assessed that a Palestinian rocket fired from Gaza and aimed at Israel was likely the cause of the deaths at the hospital.
U.S. officials estimated last week that between 100 and 300 people were killed, but said the death toll was likely at the low end of that range. On Tuesday, U.S. officials said they had low confidence in the assessment. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said the death toll was 471, a figure revised down from their earlier assessment of 500.
An accurate count of the people who died at the hospital were not possible because of a lack of independent sources.
The pictures taken after cars burned in the compound parking lot were consistent with a malfunctioning missile, according to U.S. officials.
U.S. officials said only light damage was sustained at the site, which is consistent with the premise of a Gaza-made rocket that broke up in flight, rather than an Israeli munition striking the hospital.
The officials said, however, that numerous mysteries still remained about the incident. The number of people killed or injured by a Palestinian rocket landing in the hospital parking lot is listed by the US. But they said there was little damage to the hospital itself, and no collapse of the structure.
The explosion at the hospital in Gaza last week was caused by a rocket that broke up mid-flight and there was no Israeli weapon involved.
The Times’s View of Israel’s Violation of the Fourth Amendment: “Israel’s Anomalous Attack on the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital“
Asked about The Times’s findings, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said The Times and American intelligence agencies had different interpretations of the video.
In what has become a brutal assault, Israel has fired more than 8,000 munitions into Gaza, and hit the Al-Ahli Arab hospital with an illumination shell three days before.
The missile in the video wasn’t near the hospital according to The Times. It was launched from Israel, not Gaza, and appears to have exploded above the Israeli-Gaza border, at least two miles away from the hospital.