News outlets backtracked on the blast because they relied on Hamas
The Fate of the U.S. Rocket Launcher: The Times Comes to Report On Its Origins and Where It Came From
U.S. intelligence agencies released no new imagery or other new evidence to make their case. Instead, they said their strengthened assessment came from Israeli intercepts of Palestinian armed groups and publicly available video. The warhead fell on the parking lot after acatastrophic motor failure, according to the U.S. officials. According to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, there’s no evidence that Israel could have launched the missile.
Islamic Jihad denied being responsible for the rocket launch, while Israel blamed them and denied being at fault. Several international officials say their evidence shows that the rocket came from Palestinian fighter positions.
As more information came to light, the Times continued to update its coverage, reporting the claims of responsibility and noting that the death toll may be lower than initially reported. Within two hours, the headline and other text at the top of the website reflected the scope of the explosion.
The news during a conflict and the prominent promotion that it received should have given Times editors reason to be more careful in presenting the information. It’s possible that more safeguards may be needed, because of procedures surrounding the big news events like the use of the largest headline in the digital report.
The audiences’ perception of media’s fairness is a big factor in how much trust they have in the media. Speed may matter a lot to readers, viewers and listeners. When stakes are high, accuracy and fairness are more important.
Hamas, Palestinians, and the Gaza Conflict: Israel, Israel, the West, the Middle East, and a Conflict in Gaza
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 notably did not 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.
The Israeli military concluded that a soldier from the Israeli army had likely fired the shot, but they kept the shooter’s name a secret. The statement of sorrow for her death made by the government spokesman was not enough to satisfy Abu Akleh’s family. (An FBI investigation, opened last year, has not been resolved.)
The Times’ journalists have come under a lot of scrutiny recently. An Israeli diplomat chastised the paper for employing Soliman Hijjy as a freelance 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. 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 other war zones such as in Ukraine, it’s nearly impossible for outsiders to get into Gaza. Most news outlets are either covering it remotely or relying on local journalists whose families are 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.)
Hamas is more than that. It is deemed by the U.S. and the European Union to be a terrorist organization. More than 1,400 people were killed and over 200 people were taken hostage in the most deadly attack in Israeli history.
The “Nuclear Bomb” at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital: A Case Study of a Hamas-Gannon Explosion
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 cannot be higher. The sources can prove unreliable. Concrete facts are often scant. And yet readers reward publications that push out information instantaneously.
An assistant professor of political science believes that the question will never get fully resolved using open source intelligence.
Many Palestinians were sheltered in the courtyard of Al Ahli Arab Hospital because they thought it would be a safe place.
According to independent footage of the event, militant began firing rockets from west of the hospital just before 7 p.m.
Many experts, including Gannon, agree that the visual evidence doesn’t support a standard Israeli airstrike. Large craters, damaged structures and the spread of shrapnel are some of the effects of those strikes. Hamas has said they have yet to find physical evidence at the site, which investigators say would normally be there.
But in the video closest to the blast, there’s the sound of something whizzing by. The sound is marked by a phenomenon called the Doppler Effect, which makes it sound like something moves towards an observer and then away from them.
An nongovernmental organization called Earshot, which conducts “sonic investigations,” analyzed that sound. Earshot found that whatever fell very likely came from the east, not the west.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, director of Earshot, says this reduces the likelihood of this coming from the west. “It’s rocket science after all, so we can’t rule it out.”
The publicly available evidence isn’t likely to give a definitive answer, according to others. 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.
He says that he gets why people are concerned about it. “It was a horrible thing, but man — there’s been a lot of people killed since that incident, right?”
He hopes that the U.N will conduct a war crimes investigation to determine who was behind the explosion. He says other issues need to be addressed in the public eye. Hospitals are out of fuel, the UN is being hit, and there’s a lot to worry about.
The latest assessment is based on what hasn’t been discovered. A senior intelligence official said there were no images of any Palestinians displaying an Israeli weapon from the bomb site.
But the senior official said the agencies were continuing to investigate. If the United States gets additional information that would point in a different direction, the official said, intelligence agencies will release it.
A Palestinian rocket that broke up mid-flight and no Israeli weapon was involved in the blast at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza
According to the Prime Minister of Britain, the deaths at the hospital may have been caused by a Palestinian rocket fired at Israel.
The death toll is thought to be at the low end of estimates by U.S. officials, but they did not give a figure last week. On Tuesday, officials said they had low confidence in the assessment. The Hamas-run health ministry lowered their death toll from 500 to 471.
An accurate count of the people who died at the hospital couldn’t be obtained because there were not enough independent sources, officials said on Tuesday.
Images of a fireball at the hospital site, and pictures taken after the fact showing burned cars in the compound’s parking lot, are consistent with a malfunctioning missile, according to U.S. officials.
The officials have said that the site is consistent with the premise that a Gaza-made rocket broke up in flight, rather than an Israeli munition hitting the hospital.
The officials said that there were many unanswered questions about the incident. There were many deaths and injuries when a Palestinian rocket exploded in the parking lot of the hospital. They said that there was no collapse of the structure.
American intelligence officials said Tuesday they now had “high confidence” that the blast at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza last week was the result of a Palestinian rocket that broke up mid-flight, and that no Israeli weapon was involved in the explosion.
