November 25, 2023

A close look at how the New York Times (NYT) has been reporting on Israel’s current conflict with Hamas reveals a troubling pattern of omissions, missing balance and context, and an emphasis that inevitably enhances reader sympathy for Gazan misery, underreports Israeli suffering, and implies that Israel, rather than Hamas, is to blame.

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Below are some striking examples.

On Nov. 11, 2023, the NYT published a 37-minute story (on its podcast “The Daily”) that featured three Gazan doctors talking about how overwhelmed they are by all of the injuries and death and inadequate supplies of this war. The segment includes very dramatic and emotive testimony, including from a physician reporting about a child dying in the course of the interview. One of the doctors urgently calls for a ceasefire, but no interviewee is seriously challenged about the role that Hamas has played in producing the humanitarian crisis at hand. When the reporter briefly inquires about Hamas’s responsibility, the doctors either deny any knowledge or criticize the question, and there is zero follow up after that. After the interviews, the reporter also fails to provide any of the crucial context about Hamas’ role in causing the calamity described by the Gazan doctors. Nor does the journalist mention that doctors in Gaza (like everyone else there) are controlled by and/or terrified of Hamas and therefore are not a reliable source.

There was no similar, emotive NYT coverage showing the perspective of Israeli doctors overwhelmed by the mass casualty events of October 7. As the Jerusalem Post reported on October 8: “Dr. Tal Bergman hasn’t slept much since the tragedy yesterday that unfolded on the border of Gaza. With the need to care for hundreds of casualties from the Hamas terror attack, the hospital staff at the Barzilai Medical Center has been working around the clock.” On October 10, the Times of Israel reported that “medical, nursing and health profession students who have not been called up for IDF reserve duty may be called to serve in the medical system for a limited time” because of the expected surge in demand.

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A second example of anti-Israel bias appears on 11-10-23, when the NYT reported:

The precarity of the hospitals was made clear early on Friday when projectiles struck inside the Al Shifa complex, Gaza’s largest hospital…The chief of Al Shifa Hospital said it was struck four times on Friday, killing seven people, with several others wounded. The sources of the strikes and the extent of the damage were not immediately known.

But the NYT assertion misleadingly omits information that crucially would place the blame on Hamas for those strikes. Avichay Adraee, an IDF spokesman, stated in an Arabic post to his X account that the rocket that hit Al Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip was caused by “a failed launch by the terrorist organizations that tried to fire at Israel…According to IDF systems, rocket-propelled grenades hit the hospital,” he wrote. Such details are critical to a fair moral judgment of the events in question and were reported by various media outlets, including the Jerusalem Post and the Economic Times. Why is the NYT – through such omissions – trying to avoid blaming Hamas for rockets hitting Gazan hospitals?

Worse still, in the same article, the NYT doubled down on its flawed coverage of October 17 that seemed to blame Israel for the hospital blast that day (effectively retracting its October 23rd mea culpa for that negligent reporting):

In one of the deadliest incidents of the war, a projectile exploded between buildings at the Ahli Arab Hospital on Oct. 17, possibly killing hundreds of people sheltering there. Hamas blamed Israel, while the Israelis and Western governments said it was a malfunctioning rocket fired by Palestinians at Israel. A video analysis by The New York Times found that evidence cited by Israel was misinterpreted, leaving it unclear what caused the blast.

The NYT video analysis, published on October 24, uses the term “militants” to refer to Hamas combatants (the word “terrorist” appears nowhere in the article) and still concedes that its analysis

“does not answer what actually did cause the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital blast, or who is responsible. The contention by Israeli and American intelligence agencies that a failed Palestinian rocket launch is to blame remains plausible. But the Times analysis does cast doubt on one of the most publicized pieces of evidence that Israeli officials have used to make their case and complicates the straightforward narrative they have put forth.”

So this “new” analysis, which contradicts findings by U.S. and Western intelligence agencies, seems intended to muddy the waters about blame for the Ahli Arab Hospital attack, on the basis of only the NYT’s new interpretation of the same video. More importantly, by trying to relitigate such minutiae, the NYT obscures a far more fundamental point: Israel has actually shown unprecedented restraint resulting in barely 1.4 people killed per strike, using the figures cited in the same article (which notes that “Israel has fired more than 8,000 munitions into Gaza” and mentions the deaths of “5,700 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry”). An analysis by Daniel Pomerantz, an expert in international law, forcefully explains just how restrained Israel’s military response has been.

The paper’s coverage has also minimized the number of Gazan deaths caused by errant terrorist rockets, a cause that the same “new” analysis eventually acknowledges (halfway into the body of the article): “Palestinian rockets have malfunctioned in the past and one estimate says 15 percent of rockets launched by Gazan militant groups fail.”