What the reporting of the Al-Ahli Hospital blast reveals about the challenge facing Israel.
22nd Nov 2023
At 7pm, on the 17th October, an inferno suddenly erupted over the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. By 7:30pm Hamas had announced that an Israeli missile had struck the hospital, killing more than 500 people, making it the worst loss of life in a single incident in Gazan history. Things accelerated quickly from there. Iran promptly announced that “more than a thousand” had been killed in the “massacre”. Bashar Al-Assad, who knows about these things, called it “one of the most heinous and bloodiest massacres against humanity in the modern era”.
By 8pm, local time, the New York Times were pushing alerts to mobile phones around the world with the headline, “Israeli missile Hits Gaza Hospital, killing 500, Palestinian Health Ministry says”. They even used an image of a totally different, bombed out hospital to illustrate the headline. The BBC followed suit with an almost identical headline, as did The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and CNN all took broadly similar lines. AP altered it only slightly, referring to the “Hamas-run Health Ministry”. By 11pm President Erdogan had called it an Israeli crime against humanity, Trudeau had called it “not legal” and Macron had called it a “strike” and an “attack”. Volker Turk, the UN Human Rights chief called the explosion, “a massive strike” that was “totally unacceptable”, and before midnight, the African Union and the Red Cross had joined the chorus condemning Israel.
At 4am on the 18th The Guardian, hardly likely to sit out the Israel-bashing, published an article stating “the scale of the blast appeared to be outside…the militant groups’ capabilities”, giving an impression of investigation when in fact the investigation had barely begun. Later that day, in another article and referring to Israel’s denial of responsibility for the blast, The Guardian wrote, “Israel’s credibility has been undermined by its refusal to accept responsibility for past civilian deaths”, as if Hamas are the more credible party in the conflict. The early morning of the 18th October saw BBC correspondent Jon Donnison say on air, “It’s hard to see what else this could be…other than an Israeli airstrike”. Later that evening, Emir Nader, a correspondent on Newsnight simply said, “the pictures speak for themselves”, as if further questioning was redundant. As Emily Harding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, later wrote, “fingers pointed hurriedly and emphatically at an Israeli airstrike”.
There were a couple of lone voices, in those first 12 hours, calling for a calm investigation, most notably from Honest Reporting which begged, fruitlessly, for news agencies to check their sources. Even James Cleverly, the then Foreign Secretary, urged people to wait for the facts before jumping to conclusions, saying on X, “Cool heads must prevail” and urging for “accuracy rather than pace”. But it was too late, the genie was out of the bottle and as the sun came up on the 18th, furious protests erupted in cities across the Middle East. In Jordan, Israel’s embassy was attacked and several Arab leaders cancelled a planned summit with President Biden. A window of opportunity for peace had been quickly slammed shut.
A Counter Narrative Emerges
At 8am on the 18th, the IDF called a press conference not only to deny the story coursing through the international press but to put forward an alternative explanation for the hospital fire - that it had been caused by a malfunctioning Palestinian rocket. Their theory hinged on a rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) that had split apart mid-flight, and fallen back to earth upon the hospital. Unlike Hamas, the IDF came armed with evidence. They pointed out that 10% of rockets fired by Hamas and PIJ regularly fell short of Israel and landed within Gaza. They even went as far as releasing telephone audio from Hamas operatives blaming PIJ for the disaster.
Many of the newspapers had missed that at 6:59pm, seventeen rockets were fired at Israel from two launch sites within Gaza. This was confirmed not only by several video sources, but by Hamas themselves on their Telegram channel at 7pm, declaring that a barrage had just been launched at the Israeli town of Ashdod. This was reiterated by Palestinian Islamic Jihad a little before 7:05pm, also on Telegram. This was all partnered with some Al-Jazeera footage that clearly showed one of the Gazan rockets misfiring and exploding midair, just seconds before an explosion on the ground below.
Open source investigators such as Bellingcat also drew upon two other videos, one from the southern Israeli border town of Netivot, to conclude that the PIJ barrage likely had something to do with the hospital explosion. Wired magazine was one of the first to point out that most of the Mainstream Media (MSM) had been guilty of “parroting official statements without verifying their veracity”.
Evidence from the Scene
And, as the run rose, more evidence emerged from the impact site itself. Israel typically uses 500Ib JDAMs, sizeable missiles that leave 30ft craters and level entire buildings. But the site of the Al-Ahli Hospital showed a car park with a crater that was only centimetres deep, with 11 burned out vehicles. The cars parked 20m or so from the small crater weren’t even damaged and most of the surrounding buildings still had their windows intact. The hospital itself had suffered no structural damage. Further, classified intelligence was shared with America, which backed Israel’s version of events.
Marc Garlasco, of PAX Protection for Civilians, pointed out that professional warheads don’t tend to result in a lingering fireball, which was evidence of left-over fuel burning up. “I don’t think we have seen an Israeli airstrike here”, he said, while he thought a PIJ rocket misfire was “plausible”. In Gaza itself, Hamas’s line was starting to unravel. They refused to hand over any fragments from the missile and denied expert investigators access to the site. Dr Mohammed Abu Selima, Director of the Al-Shifa Hospital, which had treated casualties from the Al-Ahli blast, contradicted the official statistics, saying the number of dead and injured seemed closer to 250. By mid morning of the 18th, Hamas sensed the writing was on the wall and started downgrading their death toll, to 471 - a figure Israel claimed was suspiciously specific so soon after the incident.
As the 18th progressed, the Hamas / MSM narrative was starting to give ground to the increasingly confident independent narrative - that Israel was actually innocent of the charges. To many it was now clear that the initial NYT headline, “Israeli missile Hits Gaza Hospital, killing 500”, actually contained nothing of truth. It hadn’t been an Israeli missile, it hadn’t hit the hospital but the adjacent car park and it hadn’t killed 500 people.
Outlets such as Reuters and even the Anglican Church - which owned the hospital - became suddenly cautious in apportioning blame and Robert Jenrick pointed out that Jews in Israel and Britain would suffer as a result of such bad reporting. Later that day, The Wall Street Journal changed it’s mind and now said that evidence was pointing to a PIJ rocket.
But the story of Israel’s wanton annihilation of a hospital wasn’t one that was going to die easily. The London Evening Standard was typical amongst print papers in dialling back the certainty only slightly, leaving the cause of the blast anonymous, but still quoting “500” dead and including quotes from Iran and Hezbollah, who blamed Israel, but nothing from the Israelis themselves. And the UN released a statement stating that, “UN experts today expressed outrage at the deadly strike at Al Ahli Arab Hospital…killed more than 470 civilians and trapped hundreds under the rubble.” But it was already clear from photos and videos of the site that there was no rubble under which to be trapped. The BBC also stuck stubbornly to the story and denied any wrongdoing. On the evening of the 18th they announced “we have set out both sides’ competing claims”, as if those competing sides were morally equivalent and equally trustworthy. They apparently couldn’t see Prime Minister Sunak's point, that information on the conflict coming from Hamas should be treated the same way as information on the Ukraine conflict that came from the Kremlin.
Growing Change of Opinion
On the 19th, press agencies began changing their angles quickly. ABC news concluded it was a misfired rocket after their own investigation. One of their contributors, Steve Ganyard, a former fighter pilot, pointed to the sound of the projectile picked up on one of the videos, saying it matched the sound of a slower, cheap rocket rather than a military grade warhead which would be silent. CNN used multiple camera sources to geolocate the rockets fired from within Gaza and confirmed that they were indeed travelling above Al-Ahli hospital on their way to Israel. And NBC confirmed that America’s own Intelligence investigation now estimates only 100-300 people had been killed, by a PIJ rocket.
On the 20th October Sky News presented the evidence of their own analysis, agreeing that it’s unlikely the projectile came from Israel. A day later AP News and CNN analysts both conclude the same thing. On the 23rd October the British and French Intelligence Services conclude their own independent investigations and declare that the blast had indeed come from a failed Palestinian rocket. The same day The Guardian conceded that it’s possible the Palestinians were responsible for the blast and the NYT issued a formal apology for its initial coverage. Yet still, as late as the 26th October the BBC clung doggedly to the idea that it all may have been Israel’s fault, suggesting desperately that it could have been an artillery shell, despite the fireball which don’t normally accompany artillery rounds.
And then, with that final gasp, the story disappeared. The ‘strike’ on the hospital and the deaths that resulted from it were no longer a concern of the UN’s or the BBC’s. By the 27th it had dropped from the front pages and I couldn’t find it mentioned anywhere on the BBC’s website from the 28th onwards. It simply ceased to matter once it was concluded that Israel wasn’t to blame. The indignation wasn’t redirected from Israel to PIJ, it simply disappeared. Because, apparently, bad things don’t matter in Gaza unless it’s Israel who’s doing them.
What Does It All Mean?
The point here, is that Hamas don’t need to invest in PR when they have the BBC and others doing the work for them - reputable agencies that place a burden of proof only upon one side, Israel. And something even more interesting arises when you compare the Al-Ahli blast to the reporting of the 7th October atrocities by Hamas. The world’s press jumped on the hospital inferno with relish, going to print within moments of the news breaking. Yet the Daily Mirror waited until the 10th October, once Israel’s counter-attack was well underway, before giving events in Israel/Gaza a front page headline. On the 8th October, the day after the worst massacre in Israel’s history, that paper gave its front page to a story about Holly and Phil.
It fell to the likes of The South China Morning Post to analyse the woeful reporting of the Western media, in an article that makes a crucial point - evidence had lost its power. Despite the new findings and reams of independent analysis, the Arab world - and the BBC - remained committed to the idea that Israel had been the cause of the blast. This came down to what people and outlets wanted to believe. Those voices who said anything different could be dismissed as being stooges of the ‘other side’. Facts are dead, and tribal opinion is king.
And there's something else happening here - the weaponising of ‘neutrality’. The BBC enjoys making a point of its alleged neutrality, hiding behind it whenever people are appalled by its reporting. It’s the defence it gives for not calling Hamas terrorists. Yet the BBC is more than happy to refer to Gaza as ‘occupied’, even though Israel hasn’t occupied Gaza since 2005. Supposedly that’s also ‘neutral’, despite Israel rightly objecting to the term. ‘Neutrality’ is also used as a defence when finding ‘two sides to every story’, the argument being that if a thousand masked men invade another country and go from house to house raping and murdering those they found there, then they must have had a pretty good reason for doing so. This is plainly nonsense. The BBC didn’t see the need for ‘two sides’ to the George Floyd murder, and at no point sought to flesh out his murderers’ backstories in a bid to seek to answer why their circumstances might explain their behaviour that day. The constant addition that statements “cannot be independently verified” only ever follow claims from Israel, never Hamas. The ‘neutrality’ of the BBC is a fig leaf to hide a hatred for Israel that has been growing steadily for the last twenty years.
Most of the MSM, including the NYT, seem to have learned from their mistake and there’s optimism to be had in the idea that they’re now doing things differently and more diligently. The BBC, however, gives the impression of an organisation that still hasn’t really appreciated it did anything wrong. On the 3rd November Jeremy Bowen published an article on the BBC website stating that the number of casualties in Gaza would soon surpass those of Ukraine. In so doing, he took the numbers of dead (9,000 at that time) given by Hamas at face value and then took the lowest estimates of Ukrainian dead from a recent UN report - a report that repeatedly stated that the real figure would be much higher, but 9,700 was the number of “verified by the OHCHR”. Bowen’s article therefore chose to ignore the figures offered by Israel and Ukraine, in favour of those preferred by Hamas and Putin to draw a false correlation between the two wars. Things at the BBC have gotten so bad that on the 20th November the former BBC director, Danny Cohen, declared the BBC was now “institutionally antisemitic”.
The MSM, and especially the BBC, has evolved over the last few years to become more like the social media that’s been pushing them out of the news space. They’ve sacrificed journalistic rigour and genuine neutrality on the altar of speed and partisanship. Inflammatory headlines and opinionated reporting win a readership that wants to have its opinions reinforced. The loss of our MSM in this manner is a major driver of the new disinformation era we now live in. How we emerge from it is unclear, but one thing’s for certain, Hamas have never benefited so much from a malfunctioning rocket.
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