The New York Times, which repeatedly and prominently featured Hamas’s claim that the blast last week at Gaza City’s al-Ahli Baptist Hospital was caused by an Israeli airstrike, published an editors’ note Monday acknowledging that its coverage should have been more journalistically rigorous.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza immediately blamed last Tuesday’s explosion on an Israeli airstrike amid a war that erupted when the Palestinian terror group killed over 1,400 people in Israel in a devastating onslaught. Hamas provided no evidence to back up the false claim, or for its claim that hundreds had been killed.
In the ensuing hours, Israel produced evidence showing the explosion was caused by a failed rocket launch from Gaza at Israel by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group, an assessment endorsed by the United States, which has said it has its own data that supports it. Islamic Jihad denies the accusation.
While the New York Times story was updated as time went on, “editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified,” the editors’ note read.
The initial reports “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified,” it said. “The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.”
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