The New York Times faced intense criticism in the final months of 2023 for its coverage of the Israel-Gaza war following the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7.
As the horror unfolded in southern Israel on October 7, the Times began to draw ire and immediately portrayed the Palestinians as victims, with the headline “Gaza suffers 16-year blockade.”
But perhaps the Gray Lady's biggest mistake during the Israel-Hamas war was its botched coverage of the Gaza hospital explosion.
The Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip claimed that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in an airstrike, killing over 500 civilians. Subsequent reports and intelligence revealed that it was an explosion in the hospital parking lot that was the result of a misfired rocket from Hamas' ally Islamic Jihad, resulting in a death toll that was only a fraction of that reported by Hamas claimed. The initial reports by the Times and others prompted several Arab leaders to cancel meetings with President Biden and sparked riots outside U.S. and Israeli embassies across the Middle East.
While many news organizations uncritically embraced the Hamas narrative, The Times stood out with its strident headline that read, “Israeli Attack Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say,” and even included an unrelated photo of the rubble of one bombed building from another Incident.
The following week, the Times published an editor's note admitting that it had relied “too much” on Hamas's version of events.
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg concluded from Hamas' disinformation campaign: “It's impossible to know what to believe in this heinous war.”
Former Times reporter Alison Leigh Cowan accused her former employer of committing “modern-day blood libel” with his inaccurate reporting. Free Press editor Bari Weiss, a former Times opinion page editor, criticized the newspaper for “publishing Hamas PR” and the subsequent “soft non-apology.”
Even after this unflattering episode, the Paper of Record's coverage of the war continued to raise eyebrows. While reporting on the Hamas sympathizers who tore up posters depicting Israeli hostages in cities and college campuses across the country, the Times described the anti-Israel vandalism as “its own form of protest — a release valve and also a provocation on the part of those who fear They say it is the Israeli government's mistreatment of Palestinians in the years leading up to October 7 and since the bombing of Gaza began.
Posted by Joseph A. Wulfsohn