ANALYSIS – Rule number one in journalism. In the immediate aftermath of chaos, don't believe initial reports without verification. That applies to news that Hamas beheaded babies in its brutal terror attack on Israel.
I reported on that claim based on Israeli journalists on the ground, quoting Israeli military forces also on the ground.
However, that turned out to be less accurate than first reported, with further verification never provided.
The babies were brutally slaughtered, so it doesn't change the basic facts of Hamas's murderous rampage, but the gruesome detail of Hamas beheading some babies may not be true.
In this current case of an alleged Israeli atrocity, Hamas authorities reported that a huge blast at a crowded Gaza hospital had killed 500 people and immediately, without a shred of evidence, blamed an Israeli air strike.
The mainstream media, apparently feeling guilty for the earlier sympathetic coverage toward Israel, jumped on the fabricated Hamas story without any substantive proof whatsoever, rushing to establish the moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas they appear to need.
As Noah Rothman wrote in National Review, they were “complicit in an unmitigated debacle,” as the fake news spread like wildfire online and sparked numerous anti-Jewish riots and other violence worldwide.
But, as it turns out, almost the entire story was wrong. The blast did not impact the hospital directly. It mostly destroyed a parking lot and courtyard area near the hospital.
The number killed was grossly exaggerated and could be as low as a few dozen, more likely a couple of hundred, but still far from the 500 dead Hamas claimed. Of course, all innocent lives lost should be mourned.
Most importantly, though, Israel had absolutely nothing to do with the blast. Instead, as Joe Biden flippantly stated, it was done “by the other team,” as if this were an innocent soccer match.
Biden can't bring himself to refer to the Iran-backed terrorists by name.
Based on solid evidence and analysis, it has become crystal clear that an errant terrorist rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) from a cemetery nearby exploded over the hospital en route to Israel.
Both Israeli military sources and the Pentagon have provided evidence from CCTV cameras, overhead satellite imagery, and even intercepts of terrorist communications directly linking the hospital parking lot blast to a failed terrorist rocket.
As Rothman explained:
The New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, PBS, the BBC, and many others raced to repeat with utterly undue credulity the claim that Israeli forces wantonly attacked a hospital, producing upwards of 500 fatalities. The allegation alone shook the world. European and Middle Eastern streets erupted with anti-Israel demonstrations. Diplomatic facilities belonging to Israel and the United States alike were besieged by sometimes violent demonstrators. Jewish — not Israeli — sites were attacked.
Meetings between Joe Biden and his counterparts in Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority were canceled in protest. And now, not 24 hours later, the story that they ran with looks to have been a lie. Worse, it 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.
A survey of the evidence the Israeli government has presented to the public and submitted to the United States for its own independent review presents an uncomplicated version of events. Footage from multiple angles of the Gaza Strip shows at least one missile in an outgoing barrage directed toward Israel failing and descending back onto Gazan territory — hardly an uncommon occurrence given the unreliability of the artillery rockets deployed by terrorist outfits in the Strip.
Israel Defense Forces have since released intercepted communications between Hamas terrorists confirming that one of Islamic Jihad's errant rockets landed “on the right side of the al-Ma'amadani hospital.” Images of the site of the blast show no suggestions that high-power munitions were detonated there. Rather, they reveal a parking lot with various damaged vehicles but no cratering, no rubble, and no evidence of the hundreds of casualties the notoriously unreliable Gaza Health Ministry breathlessly retailed within just minutes of the blast.
The PIJ, an ally of Hamas that took part in the Oct. 7 cross-border attack, denies Israel's accusations that it is behind a strike on a hospital in Gaza that reportedly killed hundreds of people.
But that leads us to rule number two: never, ever believe the claims of a terrorist organization without proof.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
