The New York Times issued an editor's note to the public and its readership on Monday (October 23) for its reporting on the explosion that happened in the Al-Ahli al-Arabi Baptist Hospital in Gaza last week.
However, as the New York Post reported, the paper has not refuted Hamas's claims that Israel was responsible for the deaths in that incident.
The Times last week ran the headline on its front page, reading, "Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say."
The headline has since changed to "Hundreds Dead in Blast at Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say."
"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," the editor's note said.
"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 Times further acknowledged that the report "left readers with an incorrect perception" about what was known and how credible the account was.
"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," Times editors concluded.
Hamas reported that more or less 500 people were killed in the incident, but Western sources only estimated the death toll between 50 and 300.
Perhaps the most egregious disinformation came from @nytimes. Not only did they rush to quote Hamas in their headline and tweet, as @HillelNeuer points out, they made it their website homepage. pic.twitter.com/DltewYUm86
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) October 18, 2023
Debunking Hamas's Propaganda
The day after the explosion, Israeli authorities refuted claims by several reporters, including the Times, that an Israeli airstrike caused the explosion. Instead, they have claimed that a rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad malfunctioned and caused an explosion due to unused rocket fuel.
Intelligence bodies from the US, Canada, France, and - as of Monday - the UK have independently confirmed the blast was consistent with the Israeli finding that it was caused by a rocket or parts of it as it malfunctioned.
US President Joe Biden also told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the blast was done by "the other team," pertaining to Islamist terrorists such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.
The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the Associated Press also found evidence after the fact that the missile came from terrorist fighters and not from Israel, based on television footage they said appeared to show a misfired Palestinian rocket in the air above the hospital.
Other reporters and publications have also apologized for the misinformation reported.
In the aftermath of the faulty reporting, Washington Free Beacon media reporter Drew Holden posted a comprehensive list of news outlets that "carried water for a terrorist group to smear Israel" by rushing to parrot the claims of the Hamas-backed Palestinian health ministry before the facts came out.
"Perhaps the most egregious disinformation came from [The New York Times]," he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "Not only did they rush to quote Hamas in their headline and tweet ... they [even] made it their website homepage."
