Rush to Judgment and Bias on Gaza Hospital Story
The facts emerged
gradually, but many journalists and activists seemed eager to shift to a
blame-Israel narrative.
OCT 19, 2023
TUESDAY’S EXPLOSION at the Al Ahli
Arab Hospital in Gaza City, which killed a still-undetermined number of people
and injured many more, was a horrific tragedy for those who sought refuge at
the hospital building from a war raging around them. In the ensuing rush to
report and comment on the deadly incident, many journalists, activists, and
politicians shamefully ran with an insta-narrative blaming Israel for the
attack, and often persisted in this narrative even as it looked more and more
discredited. This fiasco reflects the complicated nature of fog-of-war reporting
in the age of social media and rapid reactions—and it raises uncomfortable
questions about journalistic ethics, bias, and political integrity.
The blast at the hospital happened around 7 p.m. local time, or 12 p.m. EST. Tweets reporting carnage caused by Israel quickly began to appear. Just after 2 p.m. EST, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a Palestinian-American, reposted one such report with her own comment
Leading media organizations amplified
the claim. The original New York Times headline read, “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds at Gaza
Hospital, Palestinians Say.” The second version was, “At Least 500 Dead in
Strike on Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say,” with a subhead that reported the
Israelis’ counterclaim of a misfired Palestinian rocket. The next version
changed “Strike on” to “Blast at.” And the final version currently on the site:
“Hundreds die in an explosion at a Gaza hospital, Palestinian officials say,
setting off exchanges of blame.”
After many hours of back-and-forth
claims, analysis of grainy videos by instant experts on rocket science, and
viral amplification for some of the worst people on Twitter X,
such as ragebait-monetizing “MAGA communist” troll Jackson Hinckle, the facts now appear to strongly support the
Israeli version of the events. Partly, it was literal daylight that helped establish an accurate picture: The
hospital wasn’t “leveled,” as some people had asserted; in fact, it appears not
to have even sustained any structural damage. The effects of the blast were
limited almost entirely to the parking lot, and they were not consistent with
what would be expected from an aerial strike: no large crater but scattered
debris, including shattered glass, and extensive fire damage. Since many people
sheltering at the hospital had apparently congregated in the parking lot and
the hospital yard, the body count may still have been quite high, though the
current Hamas estimate of 471 dead may still be inflated. The Israeli
Defense Force has provided credible though not yet independently
verified intercepts of Hamas officials blaming a
failed rocket launch by another terror group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Criticism of the media coverage—not just from the usual suspects on the right, but from centrists like political scientists Norman Ornstein and Ian Bremmer and progressives like pundit and intelligence expert Malcolm Nance, has been scathing.
One could argue that the headlines in
the Times and other outlets cited as examples of a rush to
judgment—and, worse, rush to embrace the Hamas narrative—did not misreport the
story since they invariably attributed the claim of an Israeli strike and
massive casualties at the hospital to “Palestinian officials,” “Palestinians,”
or the “Gaza Health Ministry.” For instance, the initial Reuters headline read,
“Hundreds killed in Israeli strike on Gaza hospital, Palestinian officials
say,” while the subhead attributed the claim to “health authorities.”
But there are two problems with this
framing. First, the structure of the headlines themselves strongly implies that
the claim they make is a statement of fact, albeit attributed to a specific
source. Second, the attribution almost invariably obscures the fact that the
source is actually Hamas, which controls the Gaza strip. The “Palestinian
officials” are Hamas officials. The Gaza Health Ministry is run by Hamas, and
its claims should be treated with all appropriate skepticism.
And there have been other egregious
misjudgments. The initial New York Times story about the
“Israeli strike” was accompanied by a photo of a severely damaged
building which one could reasonably presume to be the hospital after the
strike; in fact, it’s not only an entirely different building but one located,
as the text on the photo reveals, in a different city (Khan Younis, about
fifteen miles away).
HOW SHOULD THE EARLY NEWS REPORTS have
been handled? At the very least, they should have included and given weight to
the IDF’s counterclaims—for instance, with a headline like, “Deadly blast at
Gaza hospital: Israel blames a failed Palestinian rocket launch, Hamas claims
an Israeli airstrike.” Casualty estimates should also have been taken with
a shaker full of salt.
As it is, major news outlets have
helped boost Hamas propaganda and validate every far-right
trope that equates the “mainstream media” with “fake news” and disinformation.
Yes, they have, for the most part, quickly backtracked and self-corrected. But
they haven’t apologized or taken responsibility for the misleading early
reports.
And some continue to mislead. A CBS
Evening News report on Wednesday quoted a doctor at the
hospital as saying that the IDF had warned the hospital director to evacuate
the facility “less than 48 hours” before the blast, with the implication that
it may have been a warning about the intended strike. (It turns out that the
IDF had been issuing such warnings to numerous facilities in the area.) While
the CBS report acknowledged President Joe Biden’s statement that Israel is not
responsible for the strike, it did not mention the strong factual evidence
supporting this statement; instead, it focused on protesters across the Middle
East who continue to blame Israel. On the same day, the Washington Post ran
an analytical piece that seemed to treat the
IDF and Hamas versions of the blast as equally credible without mentioning any
assessments by independent sources. (By contrast, when the BBC News contacted analysts with weapons expertise,
three of the six experts who gave an opinion thought that the evidence
conclusively disproved an aerial strike while the other three felt it was
inconclusive; none said the evidence clearly supported Hamas’s claims.)
Meanwhile, Rep. Tlaib continues
to blame Israel and President Biden. Her fellow
progressive “Squad” member Ilhan Omar finally got around to tweeting an update some 29 hours after
she accused the IDF of “reportedly blowing up”
the hospital; she has not gotten around to apologizing for misleading anyone.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont), who on Tuesday called the hospital bombing “an unspeakable
war crime”—presumably by Israel—has also apparently not yet clarified or
retracted his remarks. And beyond American politics, Agnès Callamard, the
Amnesty International general secretary, who on Tuesday posted her outrage about the hospital
bombing, calling it “the cost of the US and EU unreserved support for Israel,”
has followed up with a generic Amnesty post denouncing the loss of
life at the hospital and calling for the protection of civilians.
WE ALL TEND TO GRAVITATE toward
information that validates our priors, especially when it comes to stories as
emotionally charged as this one. That’s a good reason to wait for the full
facts before coming to a conclusion. Those of us who sympathize with Israel do
not want to find ourselves in the position of Kremlin-talking-points recyclers
who invariably explain away any horrific Russian strike on a Ukrainian
hospital, school, or residential building by claiming that the Ukrainians did
it themselves or that the Ukrainian military was using the building as an
armory or command center. (Obviously, one big difference is that Hamas has a
long history of using civilian facilities for cover while the Ukrainian army
does not.)
On the part of many
progressives—whether journalists or politicians—who reacted to the tragedy at
the hospital, there was no sign of any effort to sift biases from facts. For
many, Israel’s alleged murder of hundreds of helpless civilians was clearly an
opportunity, ten days after the horrific Hamas massacres in Israeli
communities, to shift back to a narrative in which the Israelis are the
oppressors and the Palestinians are the victims.
Of course millions of Palestinians
living in Gaza are horribly and tragically victimized. One may debate the
appropriateness of Israel’s tactics and the extent of its obligation to
minimize civilian deaths when responding to deadly attacks by an enemy that
hides among civilians. But in this case, the emerging facts about the tragedy
at Al Ahli Arab Hospital strongly indicate that the Palestinians killed and
injured at the facility were not victims of the Israeli military but of
Palestinian militants who claim to champion their cause—not only in the larger
sense of precipitating the conflict, but in the highly specific sense of firing
a rocket near the hospital and causing the explosion.
Those who were willing to call this
act an unspeakable war crime when they thought the IDF had done it should be
able to utter the same words of condemnation now that we have strong evidence
that it was committed by a Hamas ally. And those who fed the false narrative
should own their missteps and learn their lessons.