There are questions surrounding the blast at Al Ahli Arab Hospital
The New York Times and the Hamas-Israeli Abundance of the Explosion: Why Does the New Yorker Come at a High-Energy Nuclear Collider?
Israel has said the explosion, which resulted in a significant number of casualties, was caused by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group allied with Hamas. The group said the accusation that one of the rockets malfunctioned was false and baseless. Hamas has not provided any documentation of Israeli involvement. The New York Times has not independently verified either side’s claims.
The American assessment also relies heavily on intercepts provided by Israeli intelligence agencies. U.S. officials said the Israelis have provided multiple recordings that American intelligence agencies say they have authenticated. The recordings have members of Hamas saying that the explosion was caused by a rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. U.S. officials did not provide recordings or transcriptions of these intercepts.
The Times continued to update its coverage as more information became available and noted that the death toll may be lower than previously reported. Within two hours the headline and other text at the top of the website made reference to the scope of the explosion and the dispute over responsibility.
Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit with what information could be verified, in light of the sensitivity of the news during a conflict. 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.
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. The stakes are so high, that accuracy and fairness are more important.
The Israeli Blast on Gaza: Attack on Hamas, Medianyt Attack, and Israel’s First Military-Solution
Physicians for Human Rights went out on the day of the blast to call for an independent investigation to be done into the incident. It notably did not project blame.
Over the last week, The Washington FreeBeacon’s Drew Holden documented a series of prominent news organizations 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.
Human rights groups accuse the Israeli government of hitting civilians in the past. The credibility of the Israeli military has been challenged in the past, for instance, it initially denied that one of its soldiers fired the shot that killed the Al-Jazeera journalist.
The Times’ selection of journalists has come under sharp scrutiny in recent days as well. An Israeli diplomat harshly criticized the paper for employing a videographer to document the conflict in Gaza. 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 their standards after they reviewed problematic postings last year.
Unlike in some other war zones, such as in Ukraine, it’s nearly impossible for outside reporters to get into Gaza, even from Israel. Local journalists who know their families are at risk as a result of Israeli strikes are being used by most news outlets.
Hamas is the primary source of information about events in Gaza. The Hamas spokesman denied in an interview with NPR that the group slaughtered hundreds of people at a music concert in Israel 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 determined by the US and the European Union to be a terrorist organization. It unleashed the most deadly Israeli attack of all time, with more than 1,400 people dead and more than 200 people taken hostage.
Comments on the terrorist attack of Tuesday night night in a war zone: a human rights lawyer says the video footage is too small to be true
The full breadth of coverage was cited in the statement but it said the degree of speculation in his report was wrong.
The stakes can’t be higher. The sources can prove unreliable. Concrete facts are often scant. Readers reward publications that push out information very quickly.
According to an assistant professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, open source intelligence won’t ever fully resolve the question.
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.
Just before 7 p.m. local time, militants began firing a barrage of rockets from a site west of the hospital, according to independent footage of the event.
Many experts agree that the visual evidence does not support a standard Israeli airstrike. Those strikes typically leave large craters, damage structures and spread shrapnel over a large area. Hamas said they had yet to find physical evidence at the site, which would normally be there.
There’s a sound in the video closest to the blast. That sound is marked by the Doppler effect, which can be heard in the rise and fall in pitch as something moves toward an observer and then away from them.
Earshot is a non governmental organization which conducts sonic investigations. Earshot decided that it was most likely coming from the east rather than the west.
“We’re saying that this is reducing the probability of this coming from the west,” says Earshot director Lawrence Abu Hamdan. “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.
He says that he gets why people are worried about it. There have been many deaths since that incident, right?
He hopes the U.N. can eventually conduct a war crimes investigation to establish who was behind the explosion. For now, other issues are in urgent need of public attention, he says. There’s a lot to worry about as hospitals are out of fuel and U.N. facilities are being hit.
The declassified assessment provides no information on the location of the rocket that is believed to have caused the blast.
The agencies are still investigating, the senior official said. The official said intelligence agencies would release the information if it pointed in a different direction.
The United States and the Gaza hospital blamed on a rocket that slammed into the parking lot of the hospital, according to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak
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.
Last week the US said the death toll was likely to be between 100 and 300, but now say it’s likely to be at the low end. On Tuesday, U.S. officials only had low confidence in the assessment. The health ministry in Gaza said that the death toll was 471, revised down from 500.
U.S. officials said on Tuesday that an accurate count of the people who died at the hospital was impossible to obtain because of a lack of independent sources.
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.
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. That includes how many people died or were injured when a Palestinian rocket slammed into the parking lot of a hospital. But they said there was little damage to the hospital itself, and no collapse of the structure.
A video shows a Palestinian rocket that went down in hospital grounds after a catastrophic failure, according to the US intelligence officials. The top intelligence official said they had high faith in their conclusions but could not deny that new information could change their assessment.
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.
Israel fired out of Gaza, and exploded after the attack at the Al-Ahli Arab hospital on July 7, 2011, according to The Times
Israel has fired more than 8,000 munitions into Gaza, in what has become a brutal assault, and had even hit the Al-Ahli Arab hospital with an illumination artillery shell three days earlier, according to video evidence and the hospital’s official Facebook page.
The missile in the video was never near the hospital, as concluded by The Times. It was launched from Israel, not Gaza, and appears to have exploded two miles away from the hospital.
