The Editors have written about Gaza hospital coverage

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Israel’s Attack on the Palestinians at the Gaza-Circle of Israel and its Nuclear Explosion

The New York Times published an article about an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City, followed by coverage that said an Israeli airstrike may have killed hundreds of people. The report included a large headline at the top of The Times’s website.

The Israeli Government blamed a rocket launch by the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad, which has in turn denied responsibility. There is evidence that shows the rocket came from Palestinian fighter positions.

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 scope of the explosion and the dispute over responsibility were reflected in the headline and other text at the top of the website.

Times editors should have taken more care with the first presentation, as it was sensitive and the news had a prominent promotion. Newsroom leaders continue to examine procedures around the biggest breaking news events — including for the use of the largest headlines in the digital report — to determine what additional safeguards may be warranted.

Because I admire “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” so much, I agreed to moderate a talk with Thrall this Thursday in Brooklyn. I was surprised to learn that many of his events in the United States and Britain have been canceled due to security concerns or because they thought it would be offensive to the Palestinians after the killings in Israel.

He said he was very happy to be asked that question. “Because that was absolutely the ambition of the book, to depict real people” rather than villains and saints.

Thrall is not alone; in recent weeks several literary and cultural events by pro-Palestinian speakers or groups have been either scrapped or relocated. On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist was to speak at 92NY, a major literary venue in Manhattan. That afternoon, he was abruptly cancelled because he had signed an open letter. The talk was held at a downtown bookstore. The live screenings of the Boston Palestine Film Festival werenixed. A Hilton hotel in Houston canceled a conference of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, citing “security concerns.”

I do not agree with the fact that the statement was only about Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians. The Jewish organization 92NY decided to call off his Friday evening appearance because they were playing by the rules of the left. There’s a reason Zionists feel silenced and intimidated on college campuses: Supporters of Israel are in fact creating a censorious atmosphere. A professor at the University of California, Davis, is facing investigation by the university for a social media post calling for the targeting of “Zionist journalists,” which said, “They have houses with addresses, kids in school,” and included emojis of a knife, an ax and three drops of blood.

Nevertheless, a commitment to free speech, like a commitment to human rights, shouldn’t depend on others reciprocating; such commitments are worth trying to maintain even in the face of unfairness. “Art is one of the things that can keep our minds and hearts open, that can help us see beyond the hatred of war, that can make us understand that we cannot be divided into the human versus the inhuman because we are, all of us, human and inhuman at the same time,” Nguyen wrote on Instagram.

92NY would have been an ideal place to ask him why, if the statement he signed didn’t live up to his own words. When leaders need to model dialogue, it is the most fraught and bitter moments.

The Ezra Klein Show on the Jewish Left: What Happens When Israelis Shock and Israel’s Armed Forces Come Together

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

Grief moves slowly and war moves quickly. After Hamas assailants killed at least 1,400 Israelis and took hundreds more hostage, Israel dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza in the first week of a conflict that is still ongoing. More than 5000 Palestinians have been reported dead and many more injured. There is no single way to cover this and all that needs to be felt.

My approach is going to be to try to cover it from many different perspectives, but I wanted to start with the one I’m closest to, which has felt particularly tricky in recent weeks: that of the Jewish left. So I invited Spencer Ackerman and Peter Beinart on to the show.

The author of two books, Ackerman is an award-winning columnist for The Nation and has written for several other publications. Peter Beinart is the editor at large of Jewish Currents and a professor of journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. The way that Sept 11 should inform both Israel’s response and the need to empower different kinds of actors and tactics, is particularly important right now.

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 matter a lot to readers, viewers and listeners. Accuracy and fairness still matter more, especially when stakes are so high.

The Israeli Atrocity in Gaza: Why Israel Abhors Human Rights and Why Israel Terrorists Terrorize the Palestinians

It was the group Physicians for Human Rights that called for an independent investigation on the day of the blast, to protect the lives of civilians. It notably did not project blame.

A series of major news outlets and other public figures organizations seemed to rely on Hamas’ claims as fact without acknowledging how much had been verified before publication.

The Israeli military conducted its own investigation and subsequently confirmed that an Israeli soldier had likely fired the lethal shot but did not disclose the shooter’s name. The family of Abu Akleh didn’t find the government spokesman’s expression of sorrow for her death enough. An FBI investigation that started last year has yet to be resolved.

Recent days have seen sharp scrutiny of the Times’ selection of journalists. The paper was chastised for hiring a videographer in Gaza to document the conflict. On numerous occasions over the past 11 years, Hijjy has praised Adolf Hitler or invoked the Nazi leader in social media postings. The Times took actions to ensure that he understood the concerns and could adhere to the standards after reviewing problematic postings last year.

It’s not easy for reporters to get into Gaza from Israel. Local journalists with family at risk from Israeli strikes are relied on by most news outlets to cover it remotely.

Readers should be aware of how information about an allegedIsraeli atrocity in Gaza was obtained. It’s bad enough that Hamas tyrannizes Palestinians and terrorizes Israelis. We don’t need the rest of us to know that.

Yet Hamas is much more than that. It is deemed by the U.S. and the European Union to be a terrorist organization. It unleashed the most deadly attack in the history of Israel, with more than 1,400 people dead, and over 200 people taken hostage.

The Case of Yocheved Lifshitz: Israel’s Ground Mission to Reclaim the Life of a Girl Hostage

The BBC later issued a statement citing the full breadth of its coverage but saying that the degree of speculation in his report was, in retrospect, wrong.

The stakes are higher than they should be. The sources can prove unreliable. Facts are often not concrete. And yet readers reward publications that push out information instantaneously.

Yocheved Lifshitz, the 85-year-old woman who was released after being held hostage by Palestinian militants in Gaza for 17 days, on Tuesday described being beaten while her captors took her away on a motorcycle.

Hamas has released four hostages, including Judith and Natalie Raanan, American-Israeli citizens who were freed last week. Ms. Lifsitzky is the first person to talk publicly about her captivity.

On the day she was released from the hospital in Tel Aviv, Ms Lifshitz said she had gone through hell.

She was released and handed over to Israel by the International Committee for the Red Cross on Monday after being held by Hamas. Both of their husbands are still being held hostage in Gaza.

The difficulties facing Israel as they weigh whether to launch a ground invasion of Gaza in order to rid it of Hamas are shown in her account.

Hamas has built a labyrinth of underground passages in Gaza for its fighters, military analysts said, complicating both Israel’s anticipated ground operation and any attempt to rescue the hostages.

Israeli Security Services and Gaza Before the August 11, 2001 Assassination of a Black Hole by Israel’s Armed Forces

“Many people stormed our homes, they beat people, some of them they abducted, like me,” Ms. Lifshitz said. “It made no difference, they abducted the elderly and the young.”

She claimed that her kidnappers beat her badly and made it hard for her to breathe, while taking away her watch. They drove off through the fields.

They took her through the network of tunnels until they reached a large hall where about 25 people were, she said. After about two to three hours, they separated five people from her kibbutz into their own room, where they were overseen by guards and a medic, she said.

Ms. Lifshitz said that she and others were relatively well taken care of, given medicine and the same food as their captors. Fearing that she might have disease, her abductors worked to purify the area and doctors would visit occasionally to check on her. “They treated us gently and fulfilled all of our needs,” she said.

Ms. Lifshitz at times criticized the Israeli military, saying that it and the Shin Bet domestic security service had ignored warning signs of the threat to towns near Gaza. After the attack the Israeli military acknowledged they had failed to live up to their mission.

There were riots and fires in southern Israel in the weeks before the assault.

The Story of Hani al-Agha: Attacking the Palestinian Authority and Hamas in the Gaza Strip – A Memorandum

Senior Hamas leaders in Gaza, officials in the Ramallah region and retired terrorists in Nablus were interviewed by me. We developed a friendship. The Palestinian Authority had objected to something that I wrote in The Wall Street Journal and he called me in a panic. The goon squad, he said, had paid his family an admonitory visit in their apartment, and he wanted me to take the story down. I told him that was out of the question. It was never safe for us to work together again.

I’ll leave the media criticism to others. The current conflict will never be understood by Western audiences until they internalize a single central fact. In Israel, when political and military officials lie, journalists still hold them to account, tell the stories they want to tell, and do not live in fear of midnight knocks on the door.

The Palestinian territories, by contrast, are republics of fear — fear of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and of Hamas in Gaza. Palestinians are not as honest as people in other countries. But, as in any tyrannical or fanatical regime, those who stray from the approved line put themselves at serious risk.

Hani al-Agha was a Palestinian journalist who was tortured and jailed by Hamas. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate condemns al-Agha’s arrest and torture, saying it was an attempt to intimidate journalists in Gaza Strip. The story was almost no coverage in the wider media.

The news media still needs fixers and freelancers to tell the full story in war zones. People consuming media should know the threats, pressures, and cultures that these journalists face because we appreciate the dangerous situations that they find themselves.