From The New York Times: Editors’ Note: Gaza Hospital Coverage
From The New York Times:
…
The Times’s initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials, and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast. However, the early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified. The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.
The Times continued to update its coverage as more information became available, reporting the disputed claims of responsibility and noting that the death toll might be lower than initially reported. Within two hours, the headline and other text at the top of the website reflected the scope of the explosion and the dispute over responsibility.
Given the sensitive nature of the news during a widening conflict, and the prominent promotion it received, Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified. Newsroom leaders continue to examine procedures around the biggest breaking news events — including for the use of the largest headlines in the digital report — to determine what additional safeguards may be warranted.
Sounds like they’re valuing their journalistic integrity again. Good for them.Report
Not soon enough to prevent the secondary casualties.
https://capitolfax.com/2023/10/19/comptroller-fires-employee-after-she-admitted-posting-horribly-anti-semitic-comments-online/Report
Holy cow. Vanity Fair got its hands on the NYT Slack messages talking about the hospital story, requests from some editors to hedge, and the responses from the deciders.
Dang.
The NYT used to be good.Report
I was going to say something about the 50th anniversary since the NYT stopped being good, but I was thinking of the WaPo. When was the NYT good?Report
In 2014, Maureen Dowd wrote the following about going to Colorado and eating 16 servings of a marijuana edible:
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Speaking of which, also from the NYT:
A widely cited missile video does not shed light on what happened, a Times analysis concludes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/world/middleeast/gaza-hospital-israel-hamas-video.html
Hmm. Good to wait a bit before jumping to conclusions.Report
Using the NYT as a source?
Do you, instead, have a real source?Report
They showed their work!Report
Yeah, as I said, I literally was baffled as to what people thought that showed. I’m glad we’re now admitting the video doesn’t show it…or, indeed, anything.
But there’s still a lot of people who have decided it was Islamic Jihad without any real evidence.
There is still, supposedly, the phone call, but I think anyone who actually listened that can easily figure out it’s two people who have no personal information what happened and are guessing based on news reports saying it was them. And those _those_ news reports, as far as I can tell, were entirely based off the video! It’s just a whole circle of no evidence.
I don’t mean ‘Bad evidence’, I mean we literally have no evidence that points to anyone.Report
They made the best decision they could with the information they had, and when they got new information, they came up with a new theory! That’s just how science works!Report
It’s sorta work pointing out while this is being discussed: Israel cut off power to everywhere, including hospitals, and has stopped all fuel resupplies, which means…there are, indeed, people dying in hospitals. Almost certainly more than 500 at this point. Just not via bombs.
I guess that’s fine.Report
Fuel and power are seriously used by the military. Fuel for transportation, explosives, and fires. Power for communication and all the 21st century electronic things that the Military uses.
Ergo they’re duel use and Israel can’t be expected to resupply Hamas.
In theory we could try to set up a system where they go to the civilians only… but Hamas runs the hospitals and has it’s command centers in them.
Israel can’t supply Hamas with fuel and power without also supplying Hamas with fuel and power.
This sort of thing is one of the big reasons why it’s a war crime to hide your army in your civilian population. This outcome is easy to foresee and it’s one of the reasons I say it’s going to be a massive humanitarian disaster.
Of course Hamas could surrender and free the hostages, but they want a massive humanitarian disaster.Report
Hamas ‘runs the hospitals’ in the sense that hospitals in Palestine are government owned and they are the ‘government’.
They do not have command centers inside them. There is an allegation they have used a bunker area that Israel built under _one_ of them, but bunkers do not actually do anything and there is little reason to believe anything is being done there. That is not even vaguely how Hamas’ military actions operate, they don’t have ‘command centers’.
…and why it’s a _worse_ war crime to attack civilian infrastructure at such a large scale _even if_ being used by the military.
You can’t just say ‘Thing that will kill thousands of civilians is fine because the military uses it’.
This is utter nonsense. Hamas’ military still has communications and power. That can be done via hand-cranked radios. And they barely need communications to start with, Hamas operates via small cells that personally interact. They are not a traditional military, they are built out of terrorist cells.
Hell, I have no idea why you think their military uses ‘fuel’. I mean, they do, but they are unlikely to run out of it at any point, as they use civilian transport. ‘Fuel’ is an important concept in military vehicles that travel huge distances to move troops and supplies, and even more important with tanks. It’s not an important concept with fricking civilian cars operating over a microscopic area, especially if Hamas does run out of fuel, they can just _seize_ cars from people.
Hey, question: How could this be communicated to the rest of Hamas with no power, if you think Hamas communications is reliant on power and traditional telecommunications? Because the reason telecommunications went down is actually that enough wiring was bombed, and also power lines, you can’t just flip a switch and undo it.Report
Well then Hamas deliberately entangling it’s military with the civilians won’t cause any problems.
Israel clearly has the ability to send it’s bullets to the military targets who look just like the civilians and that’s what they’ll do. They won’t just default to “looks like a solider so I’d better shoot”.
I’ve been listening to Pro-Palestinian supporters who clearly view Hamas as the good guys. When they’re asked about Hamas’ war crimes they list all the bad things Israel has done. That’s Illogical emotional reasoning and is blessing serious war crimes.
NPR (etc) has interviewed a few IDF soldiers. When they’re asked how they will protect Palestinian civilians they list all the bad things Hamas has done.
I’m not sure Israel can tell the difference between Hamas and the civilians it’s hiding behind. I am sure they care about that a lot less and value killing Hamas a lot more.
Israel needs to protect it’s civilians. If it can do that without war crimes then it will, if it can’t then it’s still going to protect it’s civilians.Report
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It really does seem odd that everyone is quoting ‘The Gaza Health Ministry’, which…has a website! It’s not currently loading because their internet is down, but I don’t think it was down then. But I feel…it’s a Health Ministry, it almost certainly should have some way to officially make statements. And the fact we’ve been spending a week and half trying to figure out if they ‘lied’ about something it is unclear they ever said is…a bit insane.
So, now we’re at the point that it seems possible that _no one_ lied about any of this. The Health Ministry didn’t inflate numbers, just got misquoted somewhere, Hamas was possibly just legitimately mistaken that it was Israeli rocket because they knew _they_ didn’t do it, and Israel might have rightly pointed at Islamic Jihad.
And everyone spent days accusing the other side of lying.
Incidentally…while we were doing that, Israel airstrikes have damaged the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital enough that it cannot be used anymore. Don’t worry, it was actually empty, because the power had been out for days and the generator ran out. (So the people who could not be moved died earlier! Whew! War crime averted.) And they didn’t blow it up, just…sorta generally hit it with some lower yield missiles.
Unlike the hospital we spent days debating, no one actually seems to question this…it happened over a pretty long span of time with small yield rockets that were clearly from Israel. Türkiye (Heh, I forgot they renamed themselves to annoy Americans, thanks cut and paste from article.) has officially condemned this, and Israel didn’t say they didn’t do it.
So, I guess we can confidently say Israel was not trying to kill any civilians, and probably didn’t! YAY!!! All they did was destroy a hospital that was not a valid military objective and was not alleged to have any military forces, which is *check notes*…still a war crime. Dammit.Report
“now we’re at the point that it seems possible that _no one_ lied about any of this. ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdYyKKpxzcAReport
And the fact we’ve been spending a week and half trying to figure out if they ‘lied’ about something it is unclear they ever said is…a bit insane.
It’s certainly strange that they’ve been quoted as saying something it is unclear they ever said. By, like, news organizations.
So, now we’re at the point that it seems possible that _no one_ lied about any of this.
Just the news organizations.
All they did was destroy a hospital that was not a valid military objective and was not alleged to have any military forces, which is *check notes*…still a war crime. Dammit.
War Crimes! I sure hope we go after the folks who engage in those instead of engaging in some weird “both sides”ism!Report
It’s like suddenly wire services have ceased to exist. We literally have companies whose job is a) They know who you are, officially, b) you send them press releases, and c) their subscribers, aka, the news, receive those press releases.
But..here, we had a bunch of wire services join in, like the Associated Press is explicitly listed, somehow repeat this information that they claim _was specifically from an organization_. They said ‘An known, officially-existing organization said this’.
Which means there should have been an official press release of some sort. Or, at minimum, a official spokesperson calling them and making a statement.
But, instead, it really does look like they stole it from Al Jazeera, and furthermore that Al Jazeera somehow badly screwed up when translating itself to English. (It seems unlikely they deliberately lied, surely if they were going to lie they would have done it in both languages. I feel it’s more likely that they have English translators.)
I was going to assert it technically isn’t really lying, but…you know, that distinction doesn’t even matter with that level of wrongness. It’s carelessness bordering on criminal negligence.
I would point out the UN is the place for that, but it seems rather unlikely, with both Russia and the US sitting at the veto table. Russia is the reason the UN didn’t condemn the Hamas attack, and the US is the reason it hasn’t generally condemned attacks against civilians and called for a ceasefire.
At some point we are going to have to recognize that not only will the world not _prosecute_ people for war crimes, but it won’t even allow _condemnation_ of people for war crimes, because everyone, even the supposed good guys, are willing to defend war crimes that their own side does.
I.e., no nation actually believes in the concept of war crimes besides ‘something to complain about the other side doing’, along with winners to use to justify their own actions, ‘The other side was doing war crimes’.Report
Why should there be calls for a “ceasefire” as opposed for calls for Hamas to release the hostages in return for a ceasefire?Report
Everyone I have seen says that the hostages should be released.Report
But no one expects that to happen.
Calling for a “ceasefire” without mentioning the hostages is calling for a ceasefire without releasing the hostages.Report
I mean, the ceasefire really needs to be first or you risk Israel accidentally killing the hostages. (Although they seem to have taken no care to not do that to start with?) But I assume you mean an agreement of a ceasefire in return for a promise of hostage release.
The ceasefire the UN tried to call for was intended to be a temporary pause in the fighting in order for humanitarian workers to deliver food, to recover cut off communications with Red Crescent and the UN and various media organizations, figure out some method to supply hospitals with power and/or evacuate them safely, and allow civilians to actually evacuate south as Israel demanded.
It was not an attempt to stop the war, it was an attempt to pause it for a short time to actually get civilians out of harm’s way. And basically, prepare for the war. Normally, civilians have time to move out of the way of a war and everyone can get things into place like ‘Here is how we will do hospitals’.
It’s actually pretty weird in human history to hold wars with absolutely no warning…and I suspect someone is about to point at Hamas, but, no, surprise _attacks_ are common, I’m talking about the war, what isn’t common is the fighting to start without warning and _then continue unrelentingly_.
Mostly because, and I know this sounds biased but it’s the truth: Most military don’t randomly keep firing rockets constantly. They, uh, look for military targets and shoot at them. There are actually lulls in fighting when they don’t have things to shoot at. Not here, though because…Israel is just sorta randomly aiming. (You can’t fire over a thousand rockets a day and actually be aiming at real military targets.)
And, of course, the UN has no actual power, and could not have made that pause happen anyway, so what the US vetoed was actually the _request_ for that.Report
In theory:
You have a database somewhere on everything Hamas has done or reported to have done over the last 35 years. Every apartment every solider has taken. Every stockpile location of anything.
You’re going to end up with data that’s of varying levels of confidence. Data that’s old should also be data that’s suspected to be stale. There will also be rumors and personal beefs; Someone calls up the IDF and reports her husband’s mistress’s home is an ammo dump.
Hamas is the government of Gaza and it’s been viewed as the biggest threat to Israel for a long time. It’s going to be a big list.
So you don’t need to fire randomly and commit war crimes. You can just go down the list and get the same outcome.
The real question is to what degree Israel has stopped caring about whether civilians get in the way, and to what degree it’s willing to fire at data that shouldn’t be trusted.
My expectation is Israel is close to insane at the moment. Israel emotionally views this as an existential war. We’re in “holocaust survivors attacking the Na.zis” territory. They’re functioning on habit and rage.
Their military has been given an impossible task and has been taken off leash.Report
It’s a war crime if it was targeted as a hospital.
Multiple small rockets over a long period of time is a very weird way to do that for Israel, they have the habit of using bigger stuff if they want it gone.
If it wasn’t targeted as a hospital then we’re just seeing that having an all out war in a densely packed civilian area is going to cause problems. Ditto Hamas using it’s civilians as shields.
IMHO Gaza will be very lucky if it gets out of this with “only” low six digits of dead.
If the UN were serious about trying to avoid this they’d be calling for Hamas to surrender.Report
Well, no, they don’t want the PR of blowing up a hospital. And they didn’t, the hospital is not blown up, you can see pictures of it still standing…with some walls missing where rockets got _inside_ it and went off, but, not actually enough to bring the place down. (It’s pretty modern construction, it was built from 2011-2017.) Just…it’s unusable and not even safe to be in anymore and it will have to be demolished, but it’s still, technically, standing, hence no bad PR pictures.
Which is why I thought the other hospital bombing story was weirdly suspect to start with, as Israel would not overtly bomb a hospital full of people, and when I learned it was actually the parking lot (which happened to be full of people) it made a lot more sense to me as some sort of miscalculation on their part, even if it turns out it wasn’t.
Because Israel has a habit of doing exactly that, of putting bombs _near_ protected civilian objects, making them unusable both because people can’t go near them, and also just…slowly damaging them. We saw that in the church collapse, where they…missed slightly and damaged a church enough it collapsed, but already were aiming _way_ too close.
They don’t ‘target’ specifically protected civilian objects like churches or hospitals (as opposed to mere housing, which is protected under international law but not as much.), they are just extremely careless with the amount of ordinance they are willing to lobe around very VERY close to those protected civilians objects, and, oopsie, a building collapses or rendered unusable. And at some point it stops being carelessness and starts being ‘carelessness’.
And…sometimes they do just shoot some low yield stuff at a hospital they know is empty. Carefully not making it fall down.Report
Almost like there’s a Hamas target right there?
We can’t tell the difference between Israel behaving badly and Hamas behaving normally.Report
Very true. Both mean “More money for Hamas.” (or were you not referencing Bibi deliberately directing foreign money towards Hamas in order to “preserve the state of Israel”).
Tell me again you support fools. Speak slower, I need to translate.Report
No, this is how both Israel and Hamas normally behave, and they are both bad and war crimes, regardless of what the other is doing.
That said: Once again I find people preemptively coming up with excuses for Israeli actions that they themselves have not claimed.
There’s not any evidence that any militant group was operating out of or under the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital. There’s not even a _claim_ they were.
You shoot at a hospital in a war, you explain why. Like, immediately.
Oh, and it appears I was wrong…the hospital is apparently still in use, I guess? It’s apparently damaged enough it’s not safe, and doesn’t have power and hasn’t had for a few days, but…it’s still in use.Report
Does Israel explain every rocket?
I’m trying to picture lots of paperwork filled out in order to fire any weapon and I’m dubious that works.Report
The claim by you is the hospital hasn’t been shot at, it’s just had things “next to it” which have.
The claim by everyone is Hamas loves to locate important stuff next to places like hospitals.
A simple “we were shooting at Hamas” would do for an explanation. A lack of explanation suggests either you’ve missed it or they didn’t notice they’d done it.Report
No, I said specifically they shot it with low-yield missiles.
Hamas is operating out of one of the densest places on earth, everything is near something. It has 21,000 people per square mile. Parts of Gaza City have over 5 people per square meter.
You know who _does_ have space to put things elsewhere and doesn’t? The IDF.
Their military HQ is in Tel Aviv. Remember all those times you hear about rockets being fired towards Tel Aviv, how that is some horrific attack on civilians? Well..no it’s not. They’re firing towards a military HQ. It’s as legitimate as aiming rockets towards Washington DC. You don’t want opposing military forces firing at a city, don’t put military targets in it.
The IDF have installations everywhere, because they operate as a police force…they put them _inside_ malls and next to hospitals. They run tunnels under cities too.
There’s video of the attack of the attack on the music festival, and in that video, right near the start, you can see an IDF military vehicle and IDF people shooting back…they get killed pretty quickly, there aren’t enough of them. This is part of a lot of dumbass conspiracies and justifications, all of which are nonsense, but…that vehicle was already there, at the camp.
And under the rules we are letting Israel operate, it…would have been fine for Hamas to fire a rocket at that military vehicle. Right? Cause apparently you can shoot at _anything_, with _any_ level of causlities, as long as it’s a military targets. And you don’t have to have good aim, particularly.
And there would be a bunch of dead civilians when, out of the ten rockets fired for some reason (By analogy with what Israel does), one of them misses, but we’d be talking about how Israel ‘used human shields’.(1) Or, rather, we wouldn’t, because somehow whenever Israel attacks Hamas, it’s always some justified military target and the civilians are ‘human shields’, whereas when Hamas attacks Israel, we always talk about the civilians first, and not the military literally embedded around them.
Meanwhile, if Hamas puts their forces literally anywhere in Gaza, they’re going to be near something, because again, incredibly dense.
1) Well, I guess, in a universe where we really cared about human shields, we’d first be talking about their actual literal uses of Palestinian children as human shields in combat first, literally having them disarm bombs and stay in occupied buildings while the IDF operates out of them to stop people from firing back, which they have been repeatedly criticized and sometimes even manage to charge their own soldiers with. But it somehow keeps happening, gosh darn it. Weird no other military, not even Hamas, has this problem.Report
A picture is worth 1000 words. Which you’ve spent telling lies to each other instead of looking at the picture.
Every roof in that parking lot is dented, from ABOVE. And there’s a burnt palm tree in the American Footage, and significant structural damage 3 buildings away.
All evidence that it wasn’t a sewer-pipe rocket, but a deliberate “above the ground” explosion designed to minimize damage in order to Make Better Press. (Sewer Pipe Rockets have fallen over and over again, you can look at what they do in many pictures online. This is not a Sewer Pipe Rocket.)
Nevermind that Israel automatically blamed it on Hamas, and posted “footage” that wasn’t even from this year.Report