On October 7, the terrorist organization Hamas launched a surprise offensive on Israel in which it ended up killing 1,200 Israeli civilians, not to mention kidnapping, raping, torturing, and decapitating civilians. It was the single-worst mass killing of Jews, a pogrom, since the Holocaust. It was also the bloodiest attack in Israel's history.
Remember that Israel is a country with about nine million people. When adjusted for population, what Israel went through would have been like 25,000-30,000 deaths in the United States. How did the United States respond after 9/11? The U.S. military went into Afghanistan with the goal to rain hellfire on the Taliban. With such barbarism from Hamas, Israel has responded by attacking militarily. How could you not expect a response when Hamas committed war crimes against Israeli civilians?
President Joe Biden unequivocally stated that he supports Israel in its fight against Hamas. Last week, Biden made a trip to the Middle East to visit various leaders in the region, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Hours before his visit on October 17, there was an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City that reportedly killed about 500 people. Shortly after the explosion, the New York Times (NYT), CNN, the Washington Post (WaPo), and the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) were all running early reports claiming that Israel was responsible. Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib unsurprisingly jumped on that bandwagon. Here is the problem with the whole thing: Israel was not at fault for the explosion.
First of all, the timing of the explosion was suspect. It was hours before Biden arrived in the Middle East. Why would Israel destroy goodwill and political capital like that? It does not make sense for Israel to undermine its cause by alienating the United States and the support it is offering. Wouldn't such a derailment benefit Gaza? Second, Gaza (and more specifically, Hamas) has a history of blowing up its own citizens with rockets, as well as storing weapons in or near hospitals. Third, the damage caused was more consistent with how Gazan rockets damage Israeli targets than the other way around, as well as the fact that there was no physical evidence of Israeli munitions on the ground of the site.
That is why it is helpful to have corroborating evidence. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) promptly submitted evidence that the rocket was fired from Gaza (also see here). It was not only the IDF that concluded that Israel was not to blame. French military intelligence concluded that it was not an Israeli strike, in no small part because the impact crater was too small to be an Israeli missile. Plus, they ruled out that it was fragments coming from Israel's Iron Dome or that it was fragments from an intercepted rocket.
Even the Left-leaning NPR acknowledged that "the majority of independent analysts say the damage is not consistent with a standard Israeli airstrike." U.S. intel also confirms that Israel was not to blame. None of this gets into the fact that damage to the structures were limited or whether the death toll has been exaggerated. Whether it was intentional or a failed rocket launch, what evidence shows is that Israel is not at fault. Evidence is showing that it was a sister organization allied with Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), that launched the rocket.
This gets at the importance of having evidence and objective analysis, especially with something as hot-button as geopolitics in the Middle East. If one person says it is sunny outside and the other person says it is raining, you do not take one side at its word over the other. You take a look outside and see what the weather is. This is called investigative reporting, which is the jobs that reporters at NYT, CNN, et al. are supposed to be doing. If Israel had actually bombed that hospital, we would be having a different conversation. However, evidence shows otherwise. After multiple countries' military intelligence reviewing the evidence, it is becoming apparent that the PIJ launched a rocket, one that was most probably misfired and went off-course by striking a hospital.
Why is it that these news sources take the word of a terrorist organization so easily? Reporting the Palestinian claim that Israel was to blame without collecting evidence is as egregious as it is pathetic. It is a journalist's job to investigate the facts of a story and report what they find, not point fingers before the dust has settled. I understand that mistakes and corrections are made from time to time in reporting because journalists are as human as everyone else. However, this level of ineptitude is inexcusable. This sort of irresponsibility has ripple effects. King Abdullah II of Jordan cancelled a peace summit with President Biden. A synagogue in Berlin was firebombed. There are protests in multiple countries over a false account of events. Anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Semitism continues to rise as a result. None of this does anything to subdue tensions.
These media outlets reported a falsehood solely based on the say-so of a terrorist organization. These media outlets fought tooth and nail against the overwhelming evidence that Hamas had decapitated Israeli babies during its October 7 pogrom. Yet these mainstream media outlets so keen to take the word of genocidal, anti-Semitic mass murderers that carried out a pogrom against Israeli civilians only days earlier. Why are they reporting Hamas claims as facts? What we have seen becomes clearer by the day. These media outlets that supposedly are fighting "disinformation" are not truly concerned with truth or Palestinian lives as much as they are with virtue-signaling that they hate Israel.
Is it any wonder that Gallup found last week that American trust in mass media is at a fifty-year low? Journalists should be doing their utmost to objectively report on what is happening in the world. Instead, we the people have to keep an eye on media outlets and fact-check. If we have any hope of escaping this post-truth world, we need to have standards as responsible news consumers and sharers not only in the context of the Israel-Hamas War, but indeed in all areas of politics. Not only do I hope that the war in the Middle East ends soon and as with few casualties as possible, but I also hope that truth prevails over misinformation.
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