President Joe Biden agreed with Israel that the blast that killed civilians at Gaza hospital ‘appears’ to have been caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket after numerous Western media outlets uncritically amplified reports from Hamas blaming Israel for the explosion without evidence.
Summary
President Joe Biden agreed with Israel that the blast that killed civilians at Gaza hospital ‘appears’ to have been caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket after numerous Western media outlets uncritically amplified reports from Hamas blaming Israel for the explosion without evidence.
- “I am deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday,” the president told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “And based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you,” he said, referring to Palestinian terrorists.
- President Biden made his comments after arriving in Israel Wednesday morning to demonstrate American support for its strongest ally in the Middle East.
- The US intelligence community released an assessment agreeing that Israel was “not responsible” for the hospital blast based on “an analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information.” Instead, it was most likely a rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
- The IDF also released audio of two Islamic Jihad terrorists where they conceded that they were responsible for the attack. “Is it from us?” one terrorist can be heard asking. “It looks like it,” said the other.
- Despite the evidence released by the Israeli and US governments, news outlets like the Associated Press and Reuters still claimed they could not verify what happened and treated the claims of two large democracies and a terrorist organization with equal weight.
- The AP and Reuters were far from alone. Many western outlets including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal rushed to report the Hamas propaganda as fact without verifying, only to stealthily edit their headlines later after it quickly became apparent that there was more to the story.
- Biden and Netanyahu reached an agreement to allow Egypt to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza, but it’s unclear when or if the aid would begin to arrive.
- The New York Times covered the aftermath of the blast in the West Bank, where Israeli security forces were on “high alert” after widespread protests broke out after the blast. Rioters clashed with police in Ramallah and East Jerusalem and some Palestinian leaders called for a general strike on Wednesday morning.
- The Washington Post covered the furious response to Biden’s humanitarian aid deal from the families of Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza. “Instead of acting to strengthen the trust that was shattered on that cursed Sabbath, government officials decided to taunt the families of the kidnapped and missing,” said the Forum of Families of Hostages and Captive in a statement. “If the terrible decision to help the Gazan killers is not reversed, the families’ struggle will soon be intensified.”
- CNN reported on the “cold shoulder” Biden received from Arab countries after the hospital blast. Biden’s planned summit with the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority was canceled. “The summit won’t be able to stop the war, which is what we want…So, we decided not to hold it,” said Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi.
- The New York Post covered the repercussions of the media’s swift embrace of Hamas propaganda. Hundreds of protesters marched on the US Embassy in Beirut in response to the hospital blast and reports blaming Israel for the explosion.
- National Review’s Noah Rothman predicted the “hospital-bombing lie is a terrible sign of things to come.” Rothman noted the lie that spread around the world was “a lie that anyone with an elementary background understanding of the decades-old conflict in the Palestinian territories knew was likely to be a lie at the time.” Rothman argues, “This was a deliberate effort by members of the press — the commanding heights of international journalism — to establish the moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas they appear to need. The psychology that produces acts of unscrupulous malpractice like these is for others to judge. What can be said without hesitation is that it won’t be the first of its kind.”
- Commentary’s John Podhoretz explained how the New York Times and other media outlets “do Hamas’s dirty work.” “One might perhaps think it prudent to keep one’s powder dry when a terrorist organization claims its enemy did something bad. You would think wrong,” wrote Podhoretz. “Within minutes of that, this was the headline and subhed atop the New York Times: ‘ISRAEL STRIKE KILLS HUNDREDS AT HOSPITAL, PALESTINIANS SAY. At least 500 dead; Israel urges caution as it investigates.’” Podhoretz concludes, “The point here is that the media in the United States and elsewhere are desperate—desperate—to blame things on Israel and credulous about doing so in a way that should be shameful to any sense of professionalism—or simple morality—they might possess.”
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
