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Introduction

When White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt gleefully announced yesterday, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the Charter for Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” had been signed and thus Mr. Trump was now “Chairman” of an official “international organization,” she set off a course of events that have sent her boss hurtling toward (more) federal crimes—and all the world toward a geopolitical crisis.

As of now, the Board of Peace and all things touching upon it should be treated as an active crime scene.

To hear American corporate media tell it—or, rather, not tell it—the opposite is true: because there’s nothing yet known about the supposed Board of Peace, nothing much can be said about it. There’s only one exception to that general rule, apparently, which is that corporate media has repeatedly referred to this new international organization, much as Proof has done in the first sentence of the report you’re now reading, as “his.”

Meaning, Donald Trump owns the Board of Peace—both the idea of it and the reality.

And that’s correct, not just rhetorically but by the terms of the entity’s own Charter.

It’s also evidence of a criminal conspiracy that’s set to widen with each passing day, and why corporate media in the United States must now start doing considerably more than merely spreading interesting trivia about the Board of Peace (like the fact that, despite being first conceived as part of Trump’s so-called “peace plan” for Gaza, its Charter never mentions Gaza, though that’s true; or the fact that Trump intends for his Board to supplant the United Nations as the chief executor of all global political schemes, thereby making it a “New World Order” on Earth, though this is also true—and comes despite Trump, MAGAs, and MAGAism having insisted since 2015 that such an unified world government is exactly what they fear, as they have said it could effectively enslave humanity).

Proof is not going to go that far—but what we can say for certain that the Board of Peace, beyond being an apparent criminal enterprise (see infra), is likely one of the most dangerous entities on the planet now.

It is, in fact, the New Axis of Evil—one larger and more nefarious than the one GOP president George W. Bush identified, in the 2000s, as comprising Iraq, North Korea, and Iran, two out of three of which are nations America has gone to war with since.

The New Axis of Evil

Whatever Trump may say about “international law” not being something he needs or cares about—he’s guided exclusively, he now says, by “my own mind,” dropping “the Bible” from the longer list of guideposts he provided back when he still needed the votes of American evangelicals—the truth is that international law does still exist, and it gives us all the framework we need now to determine who the most dangerous people on the planet are (and yes, as you might suppose, all of them are presently men).

It’s with this in mind that we can say that the Board of Peace largely comprises, it its head-of-state leadership cadre, war criminals and/or historically corrupt autocrats—men who would be put on trial in The Hague, and either executed or caged for life, if international law and the International Criminal Court held sway everywhere on Earth rather than only those places most convenient for Earth’s most powerful nations.

Of those heads-of-state who won’t be movers and shakers in the new “Board” but still “Members” of it, most would be charged, tried, convicted, and imprisoned within their own countries if those countries were able to hold their leaders to the same rule of law as every other citizen (a standard that the United States now can’t meet, either.)

As the readership of Proof of Collusion (2018), Proof of Conspiracy (2019), and Proof of Corruption (2020) will know—the three books, from Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, that together make up the New York Times-bestselling Proof Series—as Donald Trump ran for President of the United States for the first time he was making clear to certain nations hostile to the United States that if they would illegally assist him in becoming president, he’d deliver a good chunk of American foreign policy to them on a platter.

From this entreaty the leaders of these nations, all of them murderous autocrats who hate democracy, knew at least two things: (1) Trump also hated democracy and had no intention of being anything but a fellow autocrat if elected to the U.S. presidency, and (2) he was willing to betray his own homeland for personal gain by illegally bartering off its domestic and foreign policy if doing so would give him access to the key levers of power of Earth’s most powerful nation. This was of course something that even these men, the most corrupt and dangerous ones alive, had never seen before from any American, as Bribery isn’t just a felony but an impeachable offense enumerated in the United States Constitution—applying equally to one who takes a bribe or seeks one—so the idea that they’d be witnessing an American politician committing a criminal and impeachable offense in order to access the very position of power from which he could be impeached was…

…well, it was a first, at least for the United States.

Which is why this author wrote a three-book, 2,500-page bestselling epic about it, confident that the United States Supreme Court would never issue a ruling saying that a President of the United States can’t be charged with a crime in almost any circumstance, and confident that the United States Congress wouldn’t let a man off the hook for impeachable offenses constituting a betrayal of his country simply due to his party affiliation.

I went 0-for-2 on those predictions, unfortunately, with the upshot being that the only way for the two non-executive branches of the U.S. federal government—the judicial and legislative—to legalize after-the-fact what Trump did to gain the presidency in 2016 was exactly the path for America and Americans those two branches chose.

That must have made Trump seem like a seer to those foreign madmen who, in 2016, regarded him as worth laying a long-shot bet on—but only with extreme caution over his odds of success (remembering here that even Trump thought he would lose).

All of which is to say that Donald Trump’s new “Board of Peace” is now led by the very band of vile international criminals the Proof Series put on its several covers:

1. Benjamin Netanyahu, war criminal from Israel

2. Vladimir Putin, war criminal from Russia

3. Mohammed bin-Salman, war criminal from Saudi Arabia

4. Mohammed bin Zayed, war criminal from the United Arab Emirates

5. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, war criminal from Egypt

6. Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, corrupt dynastic ruler of Bahrain

These were the key members of the Red Sea Conspiracy, which worked in tandem to install Trump as president in 2016.

And their agreement, now, to join the international group that their onetime 2016 long-shot bet intends to use to form a New World Order is the culmination of years of their illegally interfering in American politics with the hopes of achieving just this result. The men above are pariahs in the United Nations—for all the power they still wield there—so alongside Trump (increasingly a global pariah himself) on the Board of Peace, they’ll work to destroy the United Nations until all that’s left internationally is a band on monsters running global affairs from gilded palaces they built on blood-soaked soil. Here’s the current membership status of the Board, in a single map:

The Proof books went beyond just these monsters, however, to discuss Trump’s many other corrupt arrangements with other murderous autocrats, all now also on the Board:

1. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, war criminal and Trump business partner from Türkiye

2. Aleksandr Lukashenko, war criminal from Belarus (vassal of Vladimir Putin)

3. Ilham Aliyev, corrupt autocrat and Trump business partner from Azerbaijan

4. Viktor Orbán, corrupt autocrat, antisemite, and Trump ally from Hungary

5. Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, corrupt Qatari ruler and Trump business partner

The Proof Series focused at various points on all of these extremely dangerous men, then covered, too, Javier Milei—the far-right leader of Argentina, and a new ally of Trump through his former co-president Elon Musk—in a full-length book on Musk.

As the CBC reports, while these twelve men may serve as the backbone of Trump’s new scam, they have since been joined by other bad actors, specifically the leaders of Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Morocco, Mongolia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. Many of these leaders are autocrats or otherwise corrupt, but what’s more notable is that, within this second group of twelve men, we find four systemically corrupt former Soviet Republics that Trump has sought to do corrupt Trump Organization business with in the past, as well as one country with significant pro-Russian sentiment within it (Bulgaria), another that had to join on the likelihood that corrupt autocrat and Trump and Musk friend Narendra Modi (of India) would—that would be India’s sworn nuclear-state enemy, Pakistan—and two Asian nations that could well be destroyed by Trump’s tariffs, putting them at his mercy (Vietnam and Indonesia).

Only Kosovo, Morocco, Mongolia, and (especially) the kingdom of Jordan remain somewhat surprising entrants—though before long we’ll like learn more about what each is hoping to get from all this. Mongolia could of course be a stalking horse for China, as the latter is still determining how to respond to the idea of a Board of Peace run by the mercurial autocrat Trump; China is Mongolia’s main trading partner and it also has close economic ties to its northern neighbor Russia, which will likely be the second-most powerful entity in the organization of Trump himself.

Jordan has been a stalwart U.S. ally in the Middle East, but is also in a region that’s dominated by kings and dictators—so it knows one when it sees one. It may see where the United States is headed, and it surely wants to be on the right side of what’s ahead.

Morocco has been treated very well by Trump, to the point that fewer than half of all Moroccans have any sort of “negative” view of him (see polling data here). Moreover, as The Arab Weekly notes (emphasis supplied),

[In April 2025], United States President Donald Trump reaffirmed Washington’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and reiterated support for the Moroccan autonomy initiative, describing it as the only basis for a just and lasting solution to the dispute.

The message underscores the historic decision made in 2020 when Trump, during a phone call with King Mohammed VI, announced a presidential proclamation, immediately effective and bearing clear legal and political weight, recognizing, for the first time in U.S. history, Morocco’s full sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara region.

So, there’s that.

As for Kosovo, in September 2020 Trump oversaw the signing of the Kosovo and Serbia Economic Normalization Agreements, so good feeling from that nation toward Trump is somewhat to be expected.

But again, all this only skims the surface of why certain relatively minor foreign actors are playing along with Donald Trump on “his” Board of Peace. The important thing to recall is that the true powers on the Board, to the extent there will or can be any such besides Trump, will be the twelve men closest to him—in some cases literally closest—with respect to business partnerships, political plots, and a contempt for democracy.

But the Board can have only one Chairman, and it’s Trump. And that’s the problem.

The Board of Peace Is a Criminal Enterprise, Part I

The text of the Charter of the so-called “Board of Peace” has just been released, now that Trump has signed it (see the image atop this report).

Not only is the new entity for all intents and purposes a kingdom ruled by its Chairman—who’s designated explicitly in the Charter as “Donald J. Trump”—but Trump has crafted the by-laws of the group in such a way as to make himself a sort of “forever king” of the Board of Peace unless he (i) voluntarily resigns from that role, which of course he would never do, or (ii) he’s “incapacitated,” a determination to be made only by the unanimous vote of an “Executive Board” he alone appoints. So obviously that situation will never occur, either, and even if it did (e.g., in the case of Trump being inarguably deceased), all that would happen is that a third clause, (iii), would kick in, which is that a “designated successor” only Trump can appoint would take his place as Chairman.

In other words, no one but Trump has any control over the Board of Peace, period.

And he has more or less sole power to decide who is (or remains) a member of the Board, assuming no member state should choose to “self-deport” from the group.

Here are the relevant parts of the Charter, which really must be read to be believed:

• Article 2.1: “Membership in the Board of Peace is limited to States invited to participate by the Chairman…”

• Article 2.2(c): “Each Member State shall serve a term of no more than three years from this Charter’s entry into force, subject to renewal by the Chairman.”

• Article 2.3: “Membership shall terminate upon…. (iii) a removal decision by the Chairman, subject to a veto by a two-thirds majority of Member States.” {NB: The invitations Trump is sending out for the Board are being engineered to ensure that no such two-thirds veto could likely ever be attained, as two-thirds of this particular group wouldn’t soon find themselves in a position of being willing to anger Trump.}

• Article 3.1(c): “The Board of Peace shall convene voting meetings [annually and] at such additional times and locations as the Chairman deems appropriate.”

• Article 3.1(e): “Decisions shall be made by a majority of the Member States present and voting, subject to the approval of the Chairman.” {NB: Yes, you read that right—Trump can veto anything he wants at any time, and also gets to tie-break any votes he allows to go forward, though of course that power is effectively redundant given that this Article also technically makes the entire “veto” process of the Board a nullity.}

• Article 3.1(g): “Member States may elect to be represented by an alternate high-ranking official at all meetings, subject to approval by the Chairman.” {NB: That’s right, you’re not hallucinating—Trump does indeed get to personally decide who even gets to be in the room at every meeting, so no matter who you may be, whether king or dictator or autocrat, Donald Trump fundamentally gets to choose your agent, not you.}

• Article 3.1(h): “The Chairman may issue invitations to relevant regional economic integration organizations to participate in the proceedings of the Board of Peace under such terms and conditions as he deems appropriate.” {NB: No one else has this power, either, which is critical given that the sort of organizations Trump is able to invite into roles of power inside the Board are the also, not so coincidentally, the sort of organizations he is empowered to take money from; see infra.}

• Article 3.2(a): “Donald J. Trump shall serve as inaugural Chairman of the Board of Peace, and he shall separately serve as inaugural representative of the United States of America.”

• Article 3.2(b): “The Chairman shall have exclusive authority to create, modify, or dissolve subsidiary entities as necessary or appropriate to fulfill the Board of Peace’s mission.”

• Article 3.3: “The Chairman shall at all times designate a successor for the role of Chairman. Replacement of the Chairman may occur only following voluntary resignation or as a result of incapacity, as determined by a unanimous vote of the Executive Board, at which time the Chairman’s designated successor shall immediately assume the position of the Chairman and all associated duties and authorities of the Chairman.”

• Article 3.4: “The Chairman may establish subcommittees as necessary or appropriate and shall set the mandate, structure, and governance rules for each such subcommittee.”

• Article 4.1(a): “The Executive Board shall be selected by the Chairman…”

• Article 4.1(b): “Members of the Executive Board shall serve two-year terms, subject to removal by the Chairman and renewable at his discretion.”

• Article 4.1(c): “The Executive Board shall be led by a Chief Executive nominated by the Chairman…”

• Article 4.1(e): “Decisions of the Executive Board shall go into effect immediately…. subject to veto by the Chairman at any time thereafter.” {NB: In other words, there is no Executive Board, practically speaking; Trump is the Executive Board.}

• Article 5.1: “Funding for the expenses of the Board of Peace shall be through voluntary funding from Member States, other States, organizations, or other sources.” {NB: This is one of the few thoroughly corrupt clauses in the Charter that does not mention Trump, but only because it doesn’t have to. What it says, instead, is that you can launder any bribes to Trump by paying into a group he wholly controls, the Executive Board, and that he is free to shake down for money anyone on Earth, from nations to organizations to “other sources” not named. Trump made sure no limit was put on his Bribery, Extortion, and Money Laundering racket’s money flow, which he solely controls.}

If you’re thinking now that this reads like the Charter of a some grimy new family company Donald Trump might seek to run, you’re getting it just fine—provided you also understand that the “family” in question here is effectively a global mafia, and by “runs” what we mean is that Trump is this organized crime family’s undisputed don.

It would be simpler, however, to say that Trump has created an international fiefdom and made himself its Lord. The powers described above are dictatorial, with the lone exception being a veto process he can rig in either of two ways: (i) by being in the position to decide who to bring into the organization in the first place (and who to throw out of it, more importantly, as he can ax anyone who countermands him), or (ii) via the clause that says he can veto any decision the Board makes, which technically includes any and every part of the veto process itself—for instance, the decision to hold a veto vote or even the veto vote itself. So it’s virtually impossible, and maybe even impossible, for the veto clause to be invoked if Trump doesn’t want it to be.

Put even more bluntly, this is a legally “unconscionable” one-way option contract that no world leader would be stupid enough to sign—let alone pay Trump $1 billion (and eventually more) for the privilege of signing—unless they’d clearly been given a signal that signatories to the group will quickly get rich off all the nations that don’t sign.

That is, the Board of Peace being an organized crime operation is a feature, not a bug.

But let’s get down to the brass tacks of why it’s illegal in the United States in particular.

The Board of Peace Is a Criminal Enterprise, Part II

The problem here is that, under federal criminal law, the Chairman of the Board of Peace can’t be any American citizen other than the President of the United States.

Or, at the outside, an explicit designee of the President of the United States.

Why?

Because the job constitutes negotiating American foreign policy with foreign nationals, which no American civilian can legally do without a specific prior authorization from the current presidential administration. Anyone who engages in such negotiations outside such prior authorization is in criminal violation of the Logan Act.

{NB: I’m putting aside here, for a moment, that the Board of Peace is also illegal for a U.S. president to be the Chairman of, as the terms of the Charter implicitly authorize the Board to be used as a vehicle for Bribery, Extortion, and Money Laundering—all of which are impeachable offenses as well as crimes that definitionally lie outside a president’s core presidential duties even under the 2024 Supreme Court decision Trump v. United States. While in theory a president could be Chairman without committing crimes or impeachable offenses, the Chairman will oversee tens of billions of dollars coming into America from all over the world and going into accounts only he has any control over—not Congress, not the taxpayers, not the federal courts, not anyone but him. The legal sinkholes there are endless.}

While the Board of Peace’s Charter allows the Chairman to designate a successor, that doesn’t solve the above problem because Trump is obligated to choose a successor now.

Article 3.3 says (emphasis supplied), “The Chairman shall at all times designate a successor for the role of Chairman.”

So Trump has a named Board of Peace successor right now, and U.S. corporate media hasn’t even asked who it is. Which one can immediately realize is a problem if you simply take a moment to play out the implications of such a key designation (again, remembering here that no one can be Chairman who isn’t President of the United States or his/her designee):

1. If Trump refuses to designate a successor, (a) he is in violation of the Charter in its very first day, and (b) it suggests he has no intention of ever being anything but the Chairman for the rest of his natural life, which means (see supra) that Trump anticipates that he’ll be President of the United States for the rest of his natural life (i.e., an illegal dictator).

2. If there is, instead, a free and fair 2028 presidential election and Trump approves of the winner, he could designate that person to follow him as Chairman starting on January 20, 2029, whether or not that requires him to un-designate his current selection (keeping in mind that whoever Trump designates as his Board of Peace successor now is essentially who he’s endorsing now to be President of the United States in 2029, a decision he’s not prepared to make and an endorsement that’d be exponentially more inappropriate and monarchical than the recommendation Joe Biden made that Kamala Harris be the Democratic Party nominee in 2024, which suggestion MAGA Republicans online shrieked for months about being “anti-democratic”). Note: This is the only future pathway that is not criminal.

3. Because Donald Trump knows no future Democratic presidential candidate or nominee or president would agree to continue the Board of Peace—let alone be Trump’s designee (as no Democrat would ever concede Trump has the power to designate anyone in this way)—for Democrats have no interest in being involved in a Board of Peace, there’s no chance Trump will select a Democrat now or ever, meaning that even if a 2028 presidential election were to be held and a Democrat were to win it, Trump would not designate a Democrat as Chairman, as that would end the Board of Peace… even as him not designating the incoming Democratic president as Chairman would make it illegal for anyone else to serve in that role, thus destroying his Board anyway.

So the only way for a “Board of Peace” that Trump intends to see rival the United Nations to be a permanent global institution that survives would be for him to do one of the following things:

1. Never leave the presidency until his natural death (at which point he could care less what happens to the world or the Board of Peace); or

2. designate as successor whoever he has decided the 2028 Republican presidential nominee is going to be and then (a) ensure they’re the GOP nominee whether MAGA voters like it or not (i.e. rig the primaries) and (b) insist that his designee won the 2028 presidential election whether they did or not (meaning that Trump at least must plan for an illegal self-coup in advance); or

3. be willing to change his designated successor if someone wins the Republican primaries he doesn’t want to see win it, though this would still require him to declare that person the winner of a general election whether they won it or not; or

4. attempt to remain Chairman in his post-presidency and thereby violate the Logan Act (and likely get charged with various financial crimes, as noted above); or

5. transfer the Chairmanship of the Board of Peace to a foreign national—like Putin—after his presidency ends, which would open him to charges of not just Bribery but also Acting As An Unregistered Foreign Agent, for given the truly awesome powers he has granted himself through the Charter of the Board of Peace, gifting that title to a non-American would be dramatically wounding his nation and give a massive geopolitical benefit (without any return for America at all) to a corrupt foreign power. {NB: Indeed—and just to bring this home—any hostile and/or corrupt foreign national Donald Trump might give the Chairmanship to would immediately be empowered to kick America out of the entire organization forthwith, per the Charter.}

In short, while of course the Board of Peace is a scam and a grift that has nothing to do with bringing peace to any part in the world—including Gaza, the supposed reason for its existence—it appears to be of historical significance for a different reason: Donald Trump has just revealed to the American people that he’s either a foreign agent, plans to continue to act as President of the United States even if he somehow leaves the office, will refuse to honor the results of the 2028 presidential election if he doesn’t approve of them, or plans to cancel the 2028 presidential election altogether.

All of these possibilities are terrifying—yet there don’t seem to be any others in view.

And incredibly, there’s a sense in which the most terrifying of these possibilities is the one in which Trump leaves the presidency voluntarily.

Why?

Because Trump has made clear that his reason for his creating the Board of Peace was to create a rival to the United Nations that—and this is key; this is the whole ballgame—can do whatever it wants very quickly, with little debate and with no one to stop it.

In other words, the Board is the New World Order, the “one world government,” that Trump supporters long said they opposed, presumably with exactly the same crossed fingers as they had when they told the rest of America, for years, that they oppose Big Government and all forms of tyranny. (It turns out that as long as they’re the ones brutalizing others, anything goes, and—as many of us always said—they never had any principles.)

If Trump leaves the presidency but is allowed, contrary to the Logan Act, to continue running the Board of Peace, he’ll be more powerful than the President of the United States in many respects, at least in terms of setting the geopolitical agenda for the planet, if not in terms of controlling a discrete military. The best we can say of the Board of Peace, in fact, is that it’s a long-term plot to undermine the American government by establishing a base of international power outside the United States that only Trump and his named successors (almost certainly members of his family or trusted lackeys) can control.

It’s a way, that is, to create a “forever presidency” without a self-coup.

(That said, this author and many others fear Trump will indeed enact a 2028 self-coup.)

Conclusion

If America had a functional corporate media right now—which it doesn’t—all of these questions would already have been asked, even before the signing of the Charter, and would already have received sensible answers. If not, we would’ve had a raft of reports declaring the Board of Peace a danger to world peace, and to the U.S. in particular, in just the way this Proof report has now positioned it.

Instead, what’s more likely to happen is that few of the questions that desperately need to be asked will be asked… and none of them will be answered.

That in itself should be taken as evidence that Trump plans to end our democracy soon—or at best will only allow a designated Republican to succeed him.

What other conclusion can be drawn here? The various paths for the so-called Board of Peace are clear, as are all the other actions Trump has recently taken that he knows Democrats will dismantle the second they’re in power: his rule of Venezuela, his useless overpriced East Wing “ballroom,” his planned annexation of some portion of Greenland, his punishing yet arbitrary international tariffs, the “Trump Card,” the “Gold Card,” his “TrumpRx” healthcare scheme… in fact, if you take even a moment to think about it you’ll see that, a “Big Beautiful Bill” that was largely aimed at giving him a domestic army to execute a 2028 self-coup excepted, nothing Trump has done as president in his second term will outlast the term unless (i) he cancels the 2028 election, (ii) he rigs the 2028 election, (iii) he refuses to honor the results of the 2028 election and uses his new army (and the United States Armed Forces as well) to resist any peaceful transition to a Democratic POTUS, or (iv) he declares himself dictator-for-life without any pretense of elections eventually returning to American soil.

This isn’t comparable to the usual contested work of a presidency—executive orders that can later be withdrawn by political successors, or bills that could be repealed by critics in Congress—as what Trump is doing is engaging in big property crimes and property acquisitions, from his ballroom to his Triumphal Arch and Statute Garden, from new courses of rule in Venezuela and Greenland and possibly Panama, that he knows will disappear in his lifetime and while he’s watching if he doesn’t hold onto power illegally. And does anyone really believe he’ll allow such a public shaming to happen?

In a best-case scenario, this new “Board of Peace” is a plot to criminally but without over violence destroy legitimate U.S. federal government power in the world—giving it all to the Trump Family and/or their designees, instead—and at worst it’s an active crime scene that’s telegraphing to all of us, years in advance, that our democracy has been targeted for extinction at a date certain in the future.

This state of affairs is madness—a degree of madness beyond even what we’re living through right now.

Coda

As this report went to press, Trump posted the below message on Truth Social. Note that (a) he pretends the “Board” has made a decision that we now know only he can or could’ve made—and solus, requiring no input from anyone—(b) he’s already slipping (i.e., letting his thin mask of propriety down) by calling it the “Board of Leaders” and not the “Board of Peace,” as of course its aim is power accrual, not peace.

Remember that the Board is only hours old, and already he’s abusing it contemptibly, as expected.

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Media and MAGA Calls for Trump to Catch a Nobel Peace Prize Rather Than a War Crimes Indictment Are Obscene

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Introduction

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The Fake Trump-Colombia “Tariff War” in One Paragraph

Donald Trump has told American voters that he aims to slash the federal budget via Elon Musk’s DOGE. Of course the opposite—as is typical for Trump—is true, which is why he exploded the budget during his first term and was begging his party to raise the debt ceiling before his second term even began. The biggest budget-destroyer in President Trump’s policy agenda is his mass-deportation scheme, which polls show Americans dislike intensely and which Republicans first told voters would cost $3 billion when it will actually (they now admit) cost $86 billion. One reason the plan costs so much is that Trump has taken every chance he can to spend more money on it if doing so gives him a better story for nightly news coverage. So, for instance, it costs three times as much money to deport someone via a military flight than a civilian charter flight, which is why Democratic presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama—who in fact both deported more people than Trump did in his supposed tough-on-immigration first term—used civilian rather than military flights. They wanted to save taxpayers money. But Donald Trump doesn’t care about taxpayers and never has; he cares only about his own image, and that’s been his story since he was a teenager. The problem with Trump using wildly expensive USAF flights for deportation purposes isn’t just that it’s outrageously expensive, however. It’s also that other countries have entirely understandable domestic laws about allowing foreign military aircraft in their airspace. So Colombia and other countries in South America have been balking at Trump’s military flights because they’re a pretty flagrant and grotesque sign of disrespect—the opposite of what diplomacy and even geopolitics writ large are supposed to be about. The kicker? President Trump knows this, and was almost certainly hoping a military flight would be turned away due solely to the fact of it being a military flight. He was trolling Colombia as a means to get some misleading but engaging news coverage here in America (something along the lines of, “Donald Trump gets tough on South American leader who’s balking at the president’s tough-on-immigration policies!”) and it worked; Colombia bit. So Trump issued some threats, and Colombia backed down, and the whole thing was entirely artificial and—guess what!—all that matters in any of this is that American taxpayers are paying 300% more for Trump’s immigration plan than they should. Why? Because for all that his political party will keep lying to voters and say they do, neither it nor he give a single damn about fiscal responsibility.

So why isn’t major media explaining any of this to American voters? Why must Proof do it, instead?

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Introduction

Leading 2024 Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump has a history of advocating for the invasion of majority-nonwhite countries by the United States, the latter a nation whose sole legitimate heritage—as he’s made quite clear—must be seen, in his view, …

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1. Introduction

It’s true what they say: truth is the first casualty in war. And since truths are usually expressed in language, it is words that wartime partisans take aim at before anything else. And that’s just what’s happened in the 2023 Israel-Hamas War—not only in the Middle East, but also (indeed maybe even more spectacularly) in Western corporate…

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Introduction

The events in Israel on October 7, 2023 were a historic tragedy. Fortunately, according to Israeli government sources, at least half of the 3,000 Hamas terrorists who entered Israel on that day to commit historic war crimes—primarily if not exclusively against Israeli civilians—were killed by Israeli soldiers or police officers within 24 hours of the group’s initial invasion of the Jewish state. Another 200 or more were captured.

The remaining 1,300 Hamas terrorists escaped back into Gaza with approximately 250 civilian and military hostages—joining, in Gaza, the remaining (by unconfirmed IDF estimates) 47,000 Hamas combatants and combatant-adjuncts there. Those 47,000 or so presumptively valid Hamas targets represent 2.2% of the 2.048 population of Gaza.

{Note: Reuters reports that there were in fact only 38,300 Hamas fighters alive post-October 7, representing just 1.8% of the population of Gaza.}

While Israel has since October 7 committed itself to rooting out all those in Hamas who may have helped plan the October 7 attack, and indeed to avenge (and ensure no future recurrence of) the monstrous attack on that date by availing itself of its right to self-defense and to end Hamas’s governance of the Gaza Strip, there can be no doubt that nothing will erase the pain of the most deadly day for Jews since the Holocaust.

In contemporaneous reporting on October 7, establishing the death toll in Israel was of foremost concern, not simply because doing so is a basic component of breaking news coverage or because understanding the scope of the carnage in Israel was seen as central to contextualizing October 7 as a day that will rightly live in infamy forever.

The initial death toll for October 7 also fueled rhetoric (rather than reportage) attached to that horrible day, with Israeli prime minister and longtime Trump family friend Benjamin Netanyahu very quickly using the reported death toll and the approximate population of Israel to estimate for his U.S. allies how many September 11 terrorist attacks the events of October 7 equated to (it was “twenty”, he said, standing beside President Joe Biden at an international news conference).

All of which helps to explain why it is so significant that that initial death toll—1,400 “slaughtered civilians”, as so many of the initial reports framed it, and more recent reports in many media outlets still have it—was wrong. And not just wrong, but (a) considerably so, and (b) in a way that is so problematic that the leading newspaper in the United States, the New York Times, has issued something like a mea culpa over it.

A Growing Scandal Over Disparate Reporting of White and Nonwhite Casualties

This admission below by the New York Times is unsettling—indeed even more so than its attempts to remedy its coverage of the al-Ahli Hospital explosion in northern Gaza on October 17 (especially as the latter self-realignment was made in error, with subsequent evidence indicating that the blast at the hospital had indeed, as the Times initially reported, clearly citing the Palestinian Ministry of Health for the claim, been caused by a munition fired from inside Israel):

Israel’s original estimated toll from the attacks was subject to less scrutiny than the death toll compiled by the Hamas-controlled authorities in the Gaza Strip, where thousands have died in weeks of heavy Israeli bombardment and a ground invasion.

Some news outlets—including The New York Times—occasionally used those Israeli figures without attributing them to Israeli officials or noting that they were an initial estimate and subject to change.

{Emphasis supplied.}

What’s so stunning about this admission is that, unlike the death toll in Gaza, which has led to outcry for a ceasefire in the 2023 Gaza War, the Israeli death toll—the one now known to been inflated—has been used for weeks not to seek an end to violence in the Middle East but to legitimize apparent war crimes against the civilian populace of Gaza.

We now know, from their own admission, that the New York Times and other Western outlets participated in this morally suspect legitimization by (1) failing to apply their usual journalistic scrutiny or fact-checking to the death toll repeatedly cited by the Netanyahu administration; (2) simultaneously applying an outsized level of scrutiny to the Palestinian death toll (and getting that reporting wrong); (3) never emphasizing that the Israeli death toll had received no independent corroboration and was merely a claim made by a wartime partisan without (unlike the PMH, per the Washington Post) a long history of accurate casualty counts; and (4) never telling readers that the “1,400” figure cited by hundreds of Western media outlets was just an “estimate” subject to subsequent dramatic amendments.

Now the first such amendment has been made—and more importantly, shown itself to be as problematic as the early estimate it replaced. While Netanyahu has reduced the October 7 death toll inside Israel by more than 14%, from 1,400 to 1,200, he has also cleared his administration to concede to international media that this number “could continue to fluctuate”, an apparent acknowledgment that it’s likely to continue to go downward. And as this Proof report details, the new data from Netanyahu also has the effect of calling into question the process Israel has thus far used to generate its death toll, and whether this politicized process has had the foreseeable side-effect of mischaracterizing what occurred on October 7.

And yet, why should this matter? 1,400 deaths is a historic tragedy, but so too is 1,200. So too would be 1,000 deaths, or 800, or 500. Indeed, beyond the incalculable human toll of so many people losing their lives (and loved ones), any of these figures could still readily be used as rhetorical fodder to justify a years-long war in the Gaza Strip.

But reportage and rhetoric—or for that matter, simply honoring the innocent dead—aren’t the only reasons to want an accurate October 7 death toll. International law uses the doctrine of “proportionate response” to determine whether war crimes have been committed, so understanding the precise scope of the tragedy Hamas visited on Israel on October 7 could eventually have profound legal implications. Just so, even beyond the rhetoric they enable and implicitly authorize, death tolls have a necessary political component: as already noted, we saw this after the October 17 tragedy at al-Ahli Hospital, which experienced a massive explosion originally thought to be the result of a failed Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket launch. It now appears to have been caused by either an Israeli Tamir interceptor or an Israeli 155mm howitzer shell fired from near Nahal Oz in Israel; after the explosion, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) was keen to discredit the casualty figures released by the historically reliable Palestinian Ministry of Health (PMH) as a way of both minimizing the seriousness of the tragedy at al-Ahli Hospital and underscoring to Western media (as it turned out, falsely) that none of the casualty figures emanating from the Gaza Strip could be trusted.

After al-Ahli, as this Proof report establishes, Western partisans sympathetic to the Israeli cause echoed IDF disinformation by misstating post-explosion PMH press releases to artificially inflate and/or distort the numbers they included beyond reason, thereby eliding from the historical record all the evidence of the PMH’s caution in circumscribing the scope of what happened at al-Ahli. For instance, whereas the IDF and Netanyahu’s first estimate of October 7 deaths was, we now know, at least 14.2% too high, the Ministry’s first estimate of the death toll at al-Ahli—“dozens”—turned out to be 88% below the death toll the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) later reported out, which was “100 to 300”).

The result of all the above were rather ghoulish attacks on casualty figures put out by a leading nonwhite institution in Gaza, even as the largely white administration of Benjamin Netanyahu was trusted implicitly by not just partisans but, it appears, all of Western corporate media.

The course of subsequent public debate in the United States over these death tolls only served to underscore that (a) only the death tolls published by the Palestinians were broadly seen as worth debating, and (b) these death tolls were then separately subjected to a second, garish threshold inquiry Americans never seem to apply to white populations: namely, the idea that if nonwhite deaths resulting from an event fail to cross a certain threshold, they can more or less be ignored (in the way, say, that many in the GOP papered over Black deaths in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005).

The al-Ahli tragedy was a particularly fraught example of his maxim, as based on the now-confirmed death toll resulting from what looks to have been an Israeli munition striking the hospital on October 17, that event was actually many more September 11’s—to use the truly grim math urged upon us by Netanyahu—than October 7 had been.

But even taking all of the foregoing into account, why does it matter in particular that the Israelis got their death toll wrong? Can we really learn anything, or glean any new insight, in tracing Israeli officials’ struggle to deal with a national tragedy by getting a critical count correct (putting aside that Western media eagerly, if falsely, attacked the PMH for admirably meeting an identical challenge under more trying moment-by-moment circumstances)? Should it change anything about how the West perceives what happened on October 7, or how Israel responds to it, if in fact far fewer than 1,400 unarmed Israeli civilians were slaughtered on October 7? Obviously it won’t—but the question remains, should it? There’s some reason to think the answer is “yes.”

Why Death Tolls Matter

As a journalist and former journalism professor, I know that death tolls can and do matter for many reasons. As someone who reported extensively on Hurricane Katrina, I know that the staggering civilian death toll in Louisiana back in 2005 (1,836 U.S. civilians dead) helped Americans understand the scope of the local, state and national political failures that led to New Orleans being so unprepared for an event that in retrospect—and ex ante, too—was inevitable. The Hurricane Katrina death toll was also invaluable in helping the federal government determine the scale of the emergency funds needed to aid Louisiana in the short-, medium-, and long-term. It helped, too, to relaunch a conversation about whether America values nonwhite lives the same way it does white ones. (It doesn’t. Or, better said, it didn’t in 2005 in New Orleans, and it still does not in 2023 in the Middle East.)

But there is an even more compelling reason for journalists to care about death tolls, and oddly enough that reason has been inadvertently hinted at by some of the most irresponsible demagogues within the Netanyahu administration: death tolls are in most instances not just a post hoc declaration but also an extremely telling account of the processes that go into documenting a tragedy in real time. While the lie that the PMH immediately declared a death toll of “500” after the al-Ahli blast was little more than a libel and slander—a mistranslation caused the PMH’s fifth (not first or second or third or fourth) “victim” count, a “casualty” count that under the long traditions of wartime includes wounded persons, to be reported in the West as a “death toll”, when in fact the death toll independently confirmed by non-Hamas Gazan doctors following the al-Ahli explosion (“250”) was squarely in the range deemed probable by the USIC—the conversation these lies occasioned about how the PMH operates should have been a useful one. Had it been conducted honestly, it would have charted (as Proof did here) how the PMH not only has historically been regarded as a reliable reporter of civilian casualties, but how the PMH carefully amended its casualty count following October 17 with six distinct press releases that got more accurate as new data rolled in.

In other words, while news consumers may be obsessed with the seeming finality of a death toll, journalists are more likely to be invested in the processes that the creation of a death toll reveals. Meanwhile, politicians and partisans will cynically use death tolls in whatever ways benefit them most: if a death toll is useful in producing a particular political outcome, it’s paraded about international media; if it’s embarrassing to some particular group of partisans, those partisans will invariably deride it as both false and despicably manipulated. It’s for this reason that those in the West who now claim to be obsessed with Gaza casualty counts invariably seem not to even know the definition of “casualty,” which has always included wounded persons (as well as other categories of war victims, besides). After October 7, for instance, the Israelis correctly accounted missing and kidnapped and wounded persons as casualties.

{Note: Missing and/or kidnapped persons of course occupy a special place in casualty counts, as tallies of such persons necessarily change over time—with those who were missing and are later found alive and those hostages who are returned to freedom eventually leaving the count.}

So what does the process of establishing a casualty count, or for that matter a more narrow figure like a death toll, tell us about what was going on in Israel on October 7?

And what does it tell us about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza now?

A lot, actually.

For instance, if the purportedly false casualty data emanating from the PMH was said by the IDF to reveal the PMH as a detestably calculating, inhumane group of militants rather than the civilian, public-service-oriented administrative component of Hamas it has been seen as by the broader international community for many years, what does (or could) it mean to the current Israeli war effort if the death toll from October 7 soon comes to be seen as not just inflated by the Netanyahu government but wildly inflated?

Proof doesn’t present this as an easy question with easy answers. Indeed, there may be no useful answer at all—as Hamas was a terrorist organization richly deserving of total destruction before October 7 and it remains precisely that today, whatever the scope of its war crimes on October 7 itself. Just so, while the death toll in Israel on October 7 would be horrific even at a fraction of what was reported by Netanyahu, it also would pose problems for any future International Criminal Court (ICC) accounting of proportionality—given that Israel now appears to have killed over 20,000 Palestinians, most of them women, children, and the elderly—even if that 1,400 figure had turned out to be correct. And as the death toll in Gaza rises each day (as it has been and will continue to do), the “proportionality” argument gets only harder for Netanyahu and the IDF to make—with real consequences for Netanyahu’s political standing inside Israel, the likelihood of other Arab groups or nations entering the war, humanitarian aid for the region, Israel’s standing in the international community, the prospects for continued regional peace negotiations under the Abraham Accords, and much more.

The October 7 Death Toll

As already noted, the “1,400” death-toll figure for October 7 has been used by Israeli partisans to justify the IDF’s response to that horrible day. But it is necessary to take an even deeper dive into exactly how this rhetorical use has been framed. Specifically, those seeking to show their support for the current conduct of the war in Gaza have said all of the following (and all of the following has likewise been found in almost every news report about the war, or at least this was the case up until 24 hours ago):

1. 1,400 Israeli civilians were killed on October 7.

2. All of those killed were slaughtered, meaning killed outside of a combat scenario and in a wanton fashion.

3. All of these killings were conducted by Hamas.

4. The manner of nearly all these killings was especially brutal.

5. The intention of Hamas on October 7 was to kill even more civilians than it did.

All these statements appear to be untrue, but all have been blithely—and therefore, we must say candidly, cynically and even ghoulishly—deployed for political purposes by those who say they take the matter of innocent lives being lost extremely seriously.

What Proof aims to do here, as delicately and respectfully as possible, is consider each component of the October 7 death toll as it stands now, and in doing so assess how or whether the component in question shades our understanding of the scope of the war crimes committed on October 7 and the rectitude of the ongoing Israeli response to it.

(1) 1,400 civilians did not die on October 7.

Even when the non-Hamas death toll from October 7 inside Israel was still believed to be 1,400 rather than the current 1,200, both figures were profoundly misleading and often misstated in press reports.

Under the terms of the undeclared state of war that has existed between Hamas and Israel for decades—with discrete events, this century, that could be deemed “wars” in all of 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, and now 2023—deaths of soldiers and law enforcement on both sides of the conflict have not been deemed “civilian” casualties for the simple reason that soldiers and police officers are categorically not mere civilians in wartime.

According to the most recent New York Times reporting on this subject, at least 278 of the Israeli deaths on October 7 were Israeli soldiers, while another 44 deaths were police officers.

In consequence of this, the Israeli death toll from October 7 includes 878 civilians, not 1,400, meaning 27% of the now-1,200 Israeli death toll comprises non-civilians.

(2) The tragic events of October 7 saw gunfights as well as massacres.

One of the things this non-civilian death toll percentage (nearly 30%) reminds us is that while the Hamas attack was very much a “surprise attack”—particularly at the Nova Music Festival a couple miles from the Israel-Gaza border, which is discussed in much more detail below—it was fairly quickly detected because its initial offensive included 2,200+ rockets, para-gliders, motorcycles, and heavy weapons. And since all Jewish Israelis over 18 must serve in their nation’s military (with only rare exemptions for certain ultra-Orthodox Jews), in Israel we find a level of readiness for paramilitary operations far beyond what we would expect in the United States. While only 2% of Israelis owned guns as of early 2023, that number has been steadily rising—possibly even more than doubling, per the BBC—over just the last nine months, an indication that the Israel-Hamas conflict had been gathering new steam even before October 7.

To be clear, we must presume, based on the limited evidence we have so far, that the great majority of civilians killed on October 7 were indeed massacred while unarmed.

But as we learn from accounts like this one by Reuters, which tracks the minute-by-minute brutality of Hamas’s killing of civilians at the Be’eri kibbutz, kibbutzim do have civilian security forces, armories, and a network of residents who don’t possess weapons but have sufficient wartime experience to assist local security forces in a gunfight. In Be’eri, that security force numbered fifteen persons, plus a few more willing and able to assist them in an emergency. If similar forces existed at the other twelve kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on October 7—and we have every reason to believe this is so—it means well over 180 Israeli civilians engaged Hamas terrorists with small arms fire along the Israel-Gaza border during the October 7 invasion.

Needless to say, it does a disservice and dishonor to the memory of these volunteers (almost all of whom would have been veterans of the IDF) to blithely say that they were “slaughtered” or “massacred” by Hamas as unarmed noncombatants. Virtually all those in this subgroup died while executing their obligations to their kibbutzim as armed civilian security personnel or willing adjuncts to same. All of them are heroes.

{Note: We must remember, too, as we consider all the above, that the Israeli government deems Gazans who take up arms for any reason to be “combatants”; such individuals are not deemed “civilians” simply by virtue of not being formally inducted members of Hamas.}

Of the 878 civilian dead in Israel, we don’t know how many died in gunfights, but given the size of kibbutzim security details and the fact that these details actively engaged heavily armed Hamas terrorists while their fellow villagers understandably hid from the fighting, it’s almost certain that this number is at least 100—reducing unarmed civilian casualties to approximately 778.

(3) New reporting has adjusted even the new 1,200 figure.

According to this recent report by the New York Times, the original civilian death toll acknowledged by the Netanyahu administration was actually 846, not 878, meaning that the adjusted death toll—that is, the one that excludes armed civilian security personnel who were neither IDF troops nor in law enforcement—is 746, not 778.

(4) Many of those killed were not Israelis.

Does it matter that scores of those killed on October 7 weren’t Israeli? As a human matter—in terms of assessing the scope of the tragedy—no, not at all, even if we must acknowledge the irony in this admission, as Israel’s government rather infamously adjudicates the value of its own citizens significantly higher (even more than is already common in contemporary geopolitics) than the lives of non-citizens.

But this aside, yes, it does matter as a legal, geopolitical, and military matter. Nations don’t avenge the dead of other nations, even when and as they do mourn those dead.

So how many non-Israelis died on October 7? Well, we know from the New York Times that 31 Americans died on that horrible day, along with 39 French citizens and at least 34 Thai citizens. Meanwhile, using now-outdated figures, France 24 reported that, per an early Agence France-Presse tally, “around 200 foreigners have been confirmed dead by their national authorities, many of them also holding Israeli nationality.” The use of the term “many” here, rather than “most,” seems to indicate that at least 100 foreigners who don’t hold dual Israeli citizenship died on October 7, along with some number of dual citizens whose deaths we’d expect Israel to avenge.

But given the updated New York Times figures, which put the number of deceased foreign nationals at 104 considering only nationals of three nations, it is far more likely that the foreign-national death toll from October 7 is over 150 rather than a hundred.

This data would place the number of unarmed Israeli civilians killed on October 7 at approximately 596.

(5) “Friendly fire” may have killed a number of unarmed Israeli civilians.

It is essential that this possibility not be exaggerated, as every claim along these lines made by fringe websites has thus far turned out to be demonstrably false. But Israeli daily Yedioth Ahranoth has indicated at least the possibility of “friendly fire” in the early days of the war, and certain October 7 eyewitness accounts from Israelis suggest at least the possibility that a number of such incidents could have occurred.

It’s impossible to gauge how many incidents answering to this description might have happened while Hamas militants were in close engagement with—sometimes even in custody of—Israeli nationals, but it’s evident from the irresponsible conduct of the IDF with respect to civilian life from October 7 on that civilian casualties caused by the IDF were almost inevitable on October 7, enough to put a responsible estimate of the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas on October 7 closer to 550.

It is known, for instance—as it was reported by The Guardian—that IDF tanks did in fact shell Be’eri kibbutz, causing the destruction of buildings in a location where 108 Israeli dead were ultimately found. While this does not confirm that any of the Be’eri civilians who died in their homes were killed by friendly fire, it’s unconscionable that the IDF would fire on a civilian settlement, let alone under circumstances as chaotic and fluid as those of October 7.

One Be’eri kibbutz resident taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, Yasmin Porat, was later interviewed by CNN about her experience and said that when police arrived at the kibbutz that day—in response to her own phone call to them to plead for their help—officers didn’t follow the protocol one might have expected (hostage negotiations) but instead “shots start[ed] to happen between…the sides. One, two, three [shots], then—wow—one hundred [shots]. The hostages and the terrorists were all lying down [to avoid the Israeli gunfire], and I realized that I was going to die. Because it was not possible to get [out] alive from this situation.”

This certainly sounds like an environment in which innocent Israelis could have been killed by friendly fire, and if such conduct was repeated at other locations along the Israel-Gaza border on October 7, the number of Israeli civilians accidentally killed by fellow Israelis could be significant indeed.

In fact, Yasmin Porat herself—at just the one kibbutz whose invasion she was an eyewitness to on October 7—indicates she saw many unarmed Israeli civilians killed by the IDF. In an interview with Israeli State Radio, she stated unambiguously that a number of Israeli hostages were “killed by crossfire” between the IDF and Hamas militants, and that “undoubtedly” the IDF was responsible for the deaths of some Israelis. “They [the IDF] eliminated everyone, including the hostages”, she said.

{Note: Because Proof can’t as yet get an independent translation of Porat’s radio interview, it urges some caution about using it.}

Porat’s radio-interview account, including her reference “two [IDF] tank shells fired into a [Be’eri kibbutz] house” and “insane crossfire” during the fighting there, is both consistent with what she told CNN and with what The Guardian says of Be’eri. Porat even names a neighbor of hers who she says “undoubtedly” was killed by IDF fire, “Hadas.” Yet Hadas and other Israelis killed at Be’eri under similar circumstances would have been added to the Israeli death toll as victims of Hamas.

Meanwhile, Israeli media stalwart Haaretz reports that at one Israeli military base attacked on October 7, “The division was prompted to request an aerial strike against the base itself in order to repulse the terrorists.” Did this strike kill any civilians working on the base at the time? Were similar airstrikes ordered for locations besides IDF bases? We don’t know, but this Haaretz report gives us some indication of the desperation behind Israeli lines on October 7, and the ordinarily unthinkable methods Israeli forces were willing to employ to repel Hamas militants.

If, in light of all the above, the number of unarmed Israeli civilians killed on October 7 was in fact 550 rather than 1,400, this is an unthinkable number—a shocking tragedy—especially given the relatively tiny population of Israel and the brutal way in which some of these deaths occurred. Yet it must also be said that 550 is not 1,400, and that it’s deeply problematic that both in Israel and the West the killing of over 20,000 civilians in Gaza has now repeatedly been justified by increasing by 255% the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas.

And given that Netanyahu concedes this 550 figure could continue to “fluctuate”, it would be little surprise if long after the number of Gazan civilians killed in the 2023 Gaza War has topped 25,000 we learn that the commensurate number of Israel dead was 500.

(6) While the IDF has used public confusion about the definition of a “casualty” as a means of discrediting accurate Palestinian Ministry of Health casualty figures, we mustn’t commit that libel against the Israelis.

As The Times of Israel reports, over 4,300 Israelis were wounded on October 7. Those are October 7 casualties, by the conventional definition of that term used in wartime.

Just so, 240 hostages are being held by Hamas, a number that includes many foreign nationals but certainly at least 150 Israeli citizens. This means the full casualty count from October 7—with respect to Israeli civilians whose casualty status was caused by Hamas—nevertheless approaches 5,000 casualties in total. This “5,000” figure is not, of course, properly set against the 20,000 “death toll” in Gaza; while we do not have a full “casualty count” for Gaza at the moment, as a general rule—and as we see inside Israel—the number of wounded persons for every deceased person in a war is usually between two and six, putting the “casualty” figure for the Gaza Strip perhaps as high as 100,000. Given that even this figure would “only” represent 1 out of every 21 Gazan civilians having received any injury at all over a month-plus of fierce bombardment by the world’s fourteenth-strongest military, it would not be so very surprising.

(7) The word “massacre” is ill-applied to many Israeli civilian deaths on October 7.

This is by far the hardest part of this journalistic assessment to write, as it requires an very close look at harrowing events of the sort that we just heard about from Reuters.

Yet the story of what happened at the Be’eri kibbutz is telling. Many residents were killed by gunfire as attackers who could not see them tried to get to their safe rooms; other residents taken alive as hostages from safe rooms were later found deceased but still in handcuffs, with their manner of death still unclear (meaning that friendly fire upon Hamas militants traveling with hostages is still very much a possibility). Some residents of Be’eri were killed inside their homes after militants seeking to take them hostage set fire to their houses to try to induce them to leave them. Armed civilian security personnel were in many instances killed, as already noted, but so too were unarmed civilians who engaged in paramilitary resistance operations in support roles (acts of bravery that must not be papered over with deliberately inciting political rhetoric like “massacre” or “slaughter”). And of course there were many instances of militants firing indiscriminately into homes or throwing grenades where they believed civilians were hiding; these acts—ones that indubitably meet the definition of a “war crime,” and thus a “massacre” or “slaughter”—must likewise be understood as central to the horrifying events of October 7, 2023.

But what the large number of Israeli civilian deaths that occurred on October 7 under something other than these latter circumstances indicate to us is that the Hamas plan for October 7 may not have been what the Israeli government says it was.

Consider this CNN report, which looks at documents retrieved from Hamas militants’ bodies as one indicator of what the terrorist group intended to accomplish in invading Israel. Per CNN, the invasion plans found in the possession of dead Hamas militants in Mefalsim kibbutz included orders to “capture soldiers and civilians and to keep hostages [for negotiation].” This is bewildering new information for those who have only been exposed to the rhetoric of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as it has Hamas militants not only intending to capture rather than kill Israeli civilians but even to avoid killing Israeli soldiers in the interest of taking them as political leverage (leverage that could only be maintained if the hostages were well-treated pre-release).

In the same report, CNN reveals that invasion plans held by the Hamas militants who enter the Sa’ad kibbutz at first appeared to have very different orders—attackers were told, per found documents, to “inflict[ ] the maximum possible human casualties”—but once again there appears to be a translation issue here, as “casualties” very much includes “hostages” and, in the event, “no residents died inside Sa’ad.” This latter fact could either indicate a failed plan or one that never aimed at a massacre. Given that Sa’ad never experienced an attack on October 7 and therefore it is impossible to know what Hamas would have done had it entered the kibbutz as originally planned, we can look instead for guidance from the CNN revelation that in the attacked Melfalsim, where we know the plan was for kidnapping rather than murder, “no one was killed” either—a notional echo of what might have been the result of any attack upon Sa’ad kibbutz.

But in journalism we search for more than notions, and indeed there’s an additional piece of Hamas’s aborted Sa’ad battle plan that lends additional credence to the idea that its primary goal there would in fact have been to take hostages rather than kill innocents (emphasis added to feature the full quote provided only in excerpt above):

The [Hamas planning] document [found at Sa’ad], which was first reported by NBC News, says that Hamas fighters’ mission [there] was “controlling the kibbutz and inflicting the maximum possible human casualties on it, and holding hostages.”

While this translation requires significant follow-up from Western media, readers can likely already spot the contradiction in the current translation: “maximum” casualties, if casualties means “murder,” means taking no hostages at all. The word “maximum,” as translated here from the Arabic, only makes sense if the word “casualties” means “woundings” and/or “kidnappings” rather than killings. And indeed, this is the actual definition of “casualty.” Moreover—not to restate the obvious—but the fact that there were no murders at Sa’ad, per CNN, does undercut the idea that Hamas urgently wanted to cause the maximum amount of carnage there (whereas if the goal with respect to Sa’ad had always been hostage-taking, simply taking sufficient hostages from another location would have obviated the need to enter Sa’ad, consistent with what occurred).

But that’s not all. As CNN further reports as to the plans given to the Hamas militants tasked with “inflicting the maximum possible casualties” inside the Sa’ad kibbutz,

One group of [Hamas] fighters was directed to breach the [Sa’ad] kibbutz fence and destroy the guard room before “gathering hostages in the dining room and preparing to transfer a number of them to the [Gaza] Strip.” A second group was directed to “collect hostages and hand them over to the first group.”

No mention of murder is made here—only hostage-taking. This is consistent with the above-cited Reuters account of what happened at a third kibbutz, Be’eri, where it appears many of the civilian deaths were caused by Hamas militants recklessly trying to execute what appears to have been a hostage-taking plot. Indeed, Be’eri hostage Porat told Israeli State Radio that she and all the other hostages taken at Be’eri were treated “humanely”, even as “undoubtedly” some of those killed there were killed by the IDF or panicked local police. (To be clear, there’s significant evidence that Hamas killed innocents at Be’eri, though how many were killed in hostage-taking attempts or gunfights and how many were killed in wanton fashion remains unclear at this point.)

And indeed this distinction matters. CNN reports that the primary evidence Israeli intelligence officials are using to conclude that Hamas mainly intended to kill Israeli civilians on October 7 is the very Sa’ad battle plan that, as we’ve seen here, seems to imagine, instead, “only” a hostage-taking plot. Moreover, CNN goes on to note that

Hamas officials have claimed that its fighters were told not to kill women and children—and that such killings were the result of other unaffiliated militants who streamed across the Gaza border during the chaos of the attack.

But Israeli officials and experts have argued that the [Sa’ad] planning documents show that inflicting civilian casualties was a central part of the group’s mission.

Notice the deliberate mis-definition of “casualty” here to mean “murder” rather than what the term actually means.

Considering the October 7 Death Toll Without In Any Way Trusting Hamas

While Hamas militants are by no means—ever—to be trusted, given CNN’s report that Hamas leadership had said no women or children were to be killed on October 7, and given CNN then adding that, per these Hamas leaders, such deaths may have been caused in part by non-Hamas-sanctioned militants, it is worth considering at least the possibility of this claim being true as an explanation for (1) what we now know is a far smaller than expected civilian death toll; (2) the fact that in Be’eri and elsewhere, many of the deaths that occurred appear to have been part of a brutally botched hostage-taking plot; (3) a large percentage of the October 7 dead were Israeli combatants or adult-male-civilian combatant-aides or non-combatants; (4) the number of hostages taken by Hamas, at first thought to be “only” 120, turned out to be much higher (250, with some having now been released); and (5) the possibility of friendly fire accounting for more deaths than expected, as many of the Hamas militants were transporting Israeli hostages when they were confronted by late-arriving IDF forces.

{Note: It is worthwhile, here, to cite the Reuters account of Tom Hand, whose daughter Emily was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 but who he originally thought had been killed on that day. In a startling revelation, he admitted to international media that when he learned, it turns out mistakenly, that Emily had been killed by Hamas, “I was relieved. I was relieved that she was dead and it was all over, it would have been pretty quick.” Proof must wonder if this sentiment—that it’s better for Israeli hostages to be killed in Israel than taken alive to Gaza—was shared by the IDF and local police as they engaged Hamas militants in custody of Israeli civilians. In America, the lives of such civilians would always be privileged above the killing of any hostiles; in Israel, there is some evidence that cultural differences might have made Israeli forces less gun-shy about engaging hostage-takers than would have been the case in the West.}

But above all, we must keep in mind that it’s not only Hamas that says Gazans not affiliated with Hamas entered Israel on October 7 and committed atrocities Hamas didn’t orchestrate or sanction. The IDF that also says this. Per the Times of Israel, veritable “waves” of non-Hamas zealots entered Israel on October 7, with many of them committing murders that would later be added to the death toll the IDF chose to attribute to Hamas. (Such miscalculations are not dealt with in this report because we have no means of accessing their scale. But certainly such errors could reduce the unarmed, non-combatant Israeli death toll attached to Hamas to 400 or even 300.)

The late arrival by the IDF on October 7 is also worthy of significant discussion, as it is the chief complaint reported by Israeli survivors of October 7—who expect a known terrorist group like Hamas to be brutal, but were shocked by the inability of the IDF to show up on-scene in time to properly protect them on October 7. Indeed, this is one of the reasons that Netanyahu now has the lowest approval ratings of his career (with only 4% of Israelis—that’s not a typo—now saying they trust him). Prior to October 7, Netanyahu had moved much of the IDF to the West Bank to aid the far-right zealots there who, with the support of his Likud Party, were simultaneously working to both kill Palestinians and erect new settlements that would scuttle the “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis that Netanyahu opposes (note that from October 7 to today, 178 Palestinians in the not-governed-by-Hamas West Bank have been killed).

Indeed, for all that Reuters and other news agencies note the excellent intelligence the October 7 terrorists appear to have had as to the civilian communities they invaded, there also appears to be little doubt that the militants were as surprised at the absence of IDF soldiers as the residents of these kibbutzim were. Reuters reports that there are IDF installations both 15 minutes north and 15 minutes south of Be’eri, by way of example, suggesting that Hamas militants—whose plans appeared to be fixated on the timing of the arrival of Israeli troops in villages along the Israel-Gaza border—would have expected to begin facing the Israeli army within 30 to 40 minutes of infiltrating at least one of the kibbutzim they targeted.

Instead, what ensued post-invasion was hours and hours of Hamas militants apparently seeking to take hostages back to Gaza via a frenzied, brutally mismanaged effort that killed many of the would-be hostages both in their homes and in the fields near Gaza (once the militants had finally come under IDF attack). It remains possible that the Hamas plan for October 7—to kill Israeli combatants and (primarily, but not by any means exclusively) to kidnap Israeli civilians—may have been thrown into chaos by the very failures of the IDF that all Israeli citizens and specifically October 7 survivors are now loudly complaining to their government about.

None of these details render even a single moment of what happened on October 7 okay. October 7 was a carefully orchestrated, large-scale war crime. But they do cut against the prevailing narrative put out by the Netanyahu administration, which insists that Hamas sought mainly to murder civilians—particularly women and kids— and took hostages only as a last, desperate resort. That doesn’t appear to be the case, and the fact that it doesn’t appear to have been the case also explains why the civilian death toll from October 7 was much lower than Netanyahu told the world it was.

The problem is that none of this explains what happened at the Nova Music Festival.

The Nova Massacre

The idea that about 500, rather than 1,400, unarmed Israeli civilians were massacred by Hamas on October 7 causes a complication as to our understanding of the purpose of the October 7 attack—especially if some significant percentage of those 500 were killed in the midst of hostage-taking attempts. This said, we know that many of those 500 dead were massacred, as approximately a third of unarmed Israeli civilians killed on October 7 were killed while fleeing from a single site: the Nova Music Festival.

What happened at the festival is a mystery not only for its outsized contribution to the civilian death toll on October 7, but (a) for the fact that Hamas would attack a major international event at all, and (b) for the fact that the Nova Music Festival also saw the lion’s of the October 7 hostage-taking by Hamas, not just more than its share of the civilian carnage. So what orders were the Hamas militants who attacked the festival actually under—to take hostages or kill civilians? Or was the festival attacked by two different groups at once: Hamas, which took many hostages from the festival, and the unaffiliated Gazan radicals identified by the IDF, who did most of the killing? Either way, Hamas’s unusual focus on the festival appears to have left several of its initial targets—e.g., Sa’ad kibbutz—surprisingly untouched, per the CNN report cited above.

What happened at the Nova Music Festival begs too many questions to count, but at a bare minimum it presents us with these four:

1. Was this music festival a primary focus of the Hamas invasion. If so, why?

2. Was the international character of the festival seen as beneficial to Hamas?

3. Why was a site of such carnage simultaneously the site of so many kidnappings?

4. What orders had Hamas militants been given pre-October 7, as to the festival?

Every major-media report on October 7 confirms that Hamas somehow had amazing intelligence about the areas it planned to invade, so it seems certain Hamas knew a multi-day international music festival was happening in the middle of its invasion route. In any case, Hamas could have avoided the festival altogether if it wished—for instance, had it not wanted to turn its dispute with Israel into an international event that might needlessly galvanize some of the most powerful nations (and militaries) on Earth against it. Yet it chose to do the opposite, even seeming to target the festival in lieu of other locations.

This might be explained by a battle plan that privileged hostage-taking over killing—as the music festival had no armed security, whereas every kibbutz in Hamas’s battle plans not only had armed security but on-site armories—or it could be explained by the opposite: less security at the festival meant more opportunities to kill civilians, if that’s what Hamas (or, if non-Hamas militants who came through the wall into Israel alongside better-equipped and better-trained Hamas soldiers) wanted to see happen, instead.

It’s worth noting here that Hamas does have a less sophisticated and worse-trained rival in Gaza, the previously mentioned Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Certainly, we know from videos of the October 7 attacks that many of the attackers weren’t dressed in the way their apparent Hamas compatriots were; moreover, the attackers at times bickered among themselves; and some of the attackers clearly gleefully killed civilians—one video of a militant tossing a hand grenade into a packed bomb shelter comes to mind, horrifying—whereas others were obviously focused on taking hostages, instead.

A recent Times of Israel report may help answer some of the questions above. Broadly, it points to the possibility of the October 7 Hamas invasion of Israel being more of a badly botched military operation than a terrorist plot. According to the Times report,

• The evidence suggests Hamas wanted to attack military installations;

• the evidence suggests Hamas wanted to seize territory to hold it long-term;

• the evidence suggests Hamas wanted to fight its way through to the West Bank;

• the evidence suggests Hamas wanted to attack major cities (locations in which taking hostages at scale would likely have been logistically impossible); and

• the evidence suggests Hamas used Palestinian day-laborers—Gazans allowed access to Israel for work—to gather intelligence on border communities.

Apart from the last of these action-items, Hamas’s plan doesn’t seem consistent with (a) taking hostages in any appreciable numbers, or (b) focusing on civilian settlements nearby the Gaza-Israel border. What it suggests is that Hamas may have targeted the Nova Music Festival precisely because it was an international event that would draw international attention, and also the number of civilian casualties in the October 7 attack—however smaller than the Israeli government first claimed it to be—may be partly attributable (though of course in no way at all justified by) the terrorists’ failure to get to the IDF military targets or landmarks that they had initially intended to access.

The Times of Israel writes the following of the Hamas militants’ presumed objective:

According to current and former intelligence and counterterror experts, Hamas expected the Israeli response and was willing to make the sacrifice in order to sabotage efforts at normalization between Israel and the Arab world, such as with Saudi Arabia.

What’s unclear here is what “Israeli response” Hamas was hoping for on October 7 (putting aside, for a moment, the longer-term response it apparently anticipated).

For instance, as noted above it has now been universally reported that Netanyahu put the bulk of IDF forces in the West Bank in the days before the October 7 attack as part of a scheme to make Israeli control over the enclave permanent, irreversible, and contrary to every hope for peace held by other nation-states (including the United States but, tellingly, I Netanyahu’s favored 2024 POTUS candidate, Donald Trump).

Netanyahu’s dangerous redeployment of IDF forces aided religious zealots seeking to build new Israeli settlements in the West Bank and thereby destroy the potential for a two-state solution—leaving the towns near the Gaza border, which Hamas might have expected would be filled with Israeli soldiers and law enforcement officers, filled instead with almost exclusively civilians.

While Netanyahu’s pre-October 7 decision to ignore Egyptian intelligence about a coming attack originating from Gaza, to do all he could to secretly bolster Hamas, and to aid and abet the mass murder of Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli “settlers” hardly matters from a war-crimes prosecution standpoint with respect to the October 7 invasion itself. Hamas did what it did, for whatever reasons it did it, and none of these political schemes by Netanyahu reestablish Hamas’s October 7 crimes as something else. But Netanyahu’s clandestine complicity in the scope of the October 7 tragedy does suggest, coupled with the Times of Israel report above, that Hamas was far more interested in engaging the Israeli military as part of wartime operations on October 7 than dealing with civilians. Moreover, Netanyahu’s actions, and the IDF failures they engendered, may have been responsible for Hamas encountering primarily civilians, rather than soldiers, during its invasion. While the Nova massacre may have been a planned international incident—we don’t yet know—there’s no evidence that Hamas could have or did expect to meet primarily civilian resistance in the kibbutzim near the border, or that it anticipated its hostage-taking operations would have to be as sprawling as they ultimately were (keeping in mind that all the pre-October 7 Hamas battle plans we’ve seen so far appear to have urged taking civilians alive as hostages).

Once again, none of this justifies even an iota of what Hamas did on October 7. That can’t be emphasized enough. What it does do is explain why civilian casualties were actually much lower than Netanyahu claimed; why Netanyahu and his agents would have wanted that number to be far higher than it was during their initial declarations about Netanyahu’s war plans; and why Hamas ended up taking as many hostages as it did and in the places it did. Simply put, in some instances Hamas fighters, presented with civilian targets rather than the military ones they had obviously planned for, opted to kidnap civilians rather than kill them. Certainly this wasn’t an act of charity—but it does put in context why the October 7 casualty count breaks down as it does.

Conclusion

Proof will be writing much more, shortly, about the block-quoted assessment from the Times of Israel above. The extent to which October 7 was foreseeable and was caused, in the first instance, by certain events in the Middle East and—yes—the United States is worthy of more analysis.

What we can say, for now, is that the unarmed Israeli civilian death toll from inside Israel on October 7 is likely to be around 550, with the armed Israeli combatant death toll likely to be around 450. This means that about 45% of those Israelis killed on October 7 were combatants, and for every two unarmed Israeli civilians killed by Hamas, one unarmed Israeli civilian was taken back to Gaza as a hostage instead.

Given that this 45% figure comes in the absence of Hamas finding the IDF targets it expected and seemingly hoped to find, there’s reason to believe that had Netanyahu not engaged in the political games he did, the “percentage combatant” figure in the October 7 death toll might have been closer to 70% or 80%—making the invasion look much less like a terrorist operation and much more like a military operation. Compare one noncombatant dying for every four combatants to what we have seen from the IDF, for instance; in the Israelis’ wartime operations thus far, we have seen over ten noncombatants die for every one combatant. This despite the fact that Hamas has been and remains a terrorist group and the IDF is a well-resourced, well-resourced, well-respected conventional armed force. This despite the fact that the IDF has had Hamas surrounded from the beginning of this war—rather than the other way around—and thus is positioned to create the “percentage-combatant” death toll in Gaza it wishes.

Indeed, what’s far more opaque than the purpose and scope and scale of the October 7 Hamas invasion is the Israeli response. Given the reports from October 8 and October 9 to the effect that most of the Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel on October 7 were killed or captured within 24 hours of their arrival in Israel, and virtually no reliable accounting from the IDF yet on the question of how many Hamas terrorists have been killed since October 7, the international community is left with the above “20,000” figure for how many Palestinian civilians Israel has killed to avenge the deaths of the approximately 550 Israeli civilians Hamas killed—a disparity made more troubling by the fact that the majority of the 20,000 were children, women, the elderly and the sick.

Indeed, the IDF has struck hospital after hospital after hospital without providing any hard evidence that militants are in any of them, and (even more notable) without any Western aid workers who have returned to their home countries after being in those hospitals confirming that there are indeed Hamas bases beneath them—something they surely would have noticed or at least heard tell of while virtually living in these hospitals full-time for weeks. While none of this, even the IDF willfully bombing hospitals without sufficient evident that they are military targets, does anything to exculpate Hamas, what we’re learning about the October 7 invasion makes the initial IDF and Netanyahu death toll seem more like manufactured political cover, or even part of the execution of an ongoing plot to retake Gaza and end the United Nations’ two-state peace plan, than to exact vengeance for dead Israeli civilians. If Netanyahu or the IDF cared as much about the Israeli dead as they say, they would have exercised the same caution in reporting on those deaths as the Palestinian Health Ministry has in detailing Gazan deaths—recalling here that the PMH has understated such deaths by 45% (11,000 reported, 20,000 actual) even as Netanyahu and his allies in the IDF have overstated Israel deaths by approximately the same percentage. It does seem that the party to the current war who has committed the most consistent and egregious war crimes also has the greatest motive to lie about the deaths it says it is avenging.

The point of all the foregoing is that death tolls matter. Getting the data right matters. Not falsely accusing others of inflating numbers matters. Breaking down the numbers by casualty category and demographic category matters. Distinguishing with clarity between civilian and non-civilian casualties matters. Finding out how and where and when and why and by whom casualty counts are being developed matters (especially as the IDF has now placed under siege the PMH headquarters at al-Shifa Hospital, the very epicenter of the Gazan death-toll reporting the IDF so despises). Trying to consider the track record of the entities creating casualty counts matters. Tracking the ways that military and civilian entities that consider themselves inalterably “the good guys” use casualty figures—sometimes false ones—to justify atrocities matters.

And it matters, too, that looking into all of these questions gives us a degree of insight into what really might have been going on in the “fog of war” on October 7, 2023.

The story told by the Israeli government is that Hamas invaded Israel to kill civilians. The story now being told by Israeli media is that Hamas’s aim was largely military and geopolitical, and this is confirmed in part by the revised casualty figures we now have (especially how they break down by category). Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s rhetoric about how many “9/11s” October 7 represents was not only false mathematically—though that’s less important, of course, as mass death is mass death—but also now creates an environment in which journalists like myself are obligated to observe that whatever the scope of the tragedy the 9.364 million Israelis experienced on October 7 was, it’s hard to see how the much broader tragedy that the 2.048 million Gazans have experienced since then isn’t categorically disproportionate under international law.

Consider that on September 11 of 2001, 2,997 unarmed American civilians died at the hands of terrorists in a nation of 331.9 million. On October 7, 2023, a maximum of 575 unarmed Israeli civilians died from terrorist violence in a nation of 9.364 million, making the latter event the equivalent of 6.8 population-adjusted 9/11s (as opposed to the “twenty” claimed by Netanyahu). But what the Gaza Strip has now experienced, despite the fact that almost no one alive there today voted for Hamas when elections were last held in Gaza in 2006, is 20,000 unarmed civilian deaths from apparent war crimes in a locale housing just 2.048 million people; that’s the equivalent of 1,080 population-adjusted 9/11s.

It’s more like twice the total U.S. death toll from COVID-19 than a single terrorist attack.

There’s simply no comparison between the scope of the tragedy in Gaza and the scope of the tragedy in Israel, and not just because the one in Gaza is currently slated to continue indefinitely whereas the nation of Israel was made safe within a day of what increasingly looks like a failed Hamas paramilitary operation. Moreover, Netanyahu has admitted that the Israeli death toll may be further adjusted—downward, it seems—in the days to come, whereas every new discovery about the death toll in Gaza reveals it to be much larger than was previously thought.

Frankly, Netanyahu has as little excuse for how he has reacted to October 7 as former American president George W. Bush ever located for his actions after September 11.

President Bush reacted abominably to September 11, knowingly invading a country (Iraq) that had nothing to do with it and then ruinously seeking regime change in a second country (Afghanistan) where the primary American interest had in fact been a counterterrorism operation aimed at capturing and bringing to justice Osama bin Laden. As despicable as Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Party regime was—and as richly deserving of being toppled as it was—using 9/11 as a justification for doing so, let alone doing so with an eye on Iraqi oil, was deeply wrong. Just as wrong as Netanyahu planning a massive land grab in Gaza and the West Bank under the cover of seeking justice for Israeli war dead.

While America’s Afghan War was far more justified than the Second Iraq War, it nevertheless was finally misguided. It turned a needed counterterrorism operation into an inapt military one. What Netanyahu is doing now, given what we’re learning about the respective death tolls in Israel and Gaza, is an entirely different order of magnitude from what America did in the 2000s. It’s more like getting attacked by Country A at a scale of “x” and responding by nuking Country B at a scale of “100x.”

Netanyahu is well aware that half of all Gazans (1.024 million of them) weren’t even alive when Hamas was “elected” under the shadow of widespread sectarian violence, and a huge percentage of the other 1.024 million Gazans were alive but too young to vote in 2006. He knows, too, that of all the remaining Gazans—that is, all those alive today and old enough to vote in 2006 (maybe 512,000 people, based on what we know about Gazan demographics)—nearly half of them voted for Fatah rather than Hamas.

And even some percentage of those who voted for Hamas in 2006 did so out of the widespread fear Hamas generated in advance of that election, which it falsely cast as the first of many such democratic rituals. That leaves us with maybe 250,000 people in Gaza who happily voted for Hamas in 2006, out of a total population of 2.048 million. That’s 12%? Is the idea in Tel Aviv that killing these 12%—many of whom must surely (current polling estimates the number at 70%) have turned against Hamas during its now-seventeen-year reign of terror—justifies killing much of the population of Gaza?

And not to put too fine a point on it, but if 70% of the 12% of Gazans living today who voted for Hamas seventeen years ago have since recanted that vote, it means that only 75,000 Gazans currently in Gaza actually support Hamas—about half of whom, or 38,300, are believed to be active members of the terrorist group, according to Reuters.

How many women, children, infants, elderly, bed-ridden, and non-combatant public servants (like doctors, nurses, police officers, social workers, and judges) must die in Gaza to eradicate these 38,300 combatants (1.8% of the population of Gaza) or even the other 37,000 or so noncombatant Hamas boosters (who it’s a war crime to kill, anyway)?

While America certainly doesn’t have clean hands in critiquing how other countries respond to terrorist attacks, our moral standing—or lack of moral standing—doesn’t change the fact that what Benjamin Netanyahu is having his IDF do in the Gaza Strip is a systematic war crime more on the order of ethnic cleansings in the Balkans or Sudan than anything the United States has been involved with over the last 100 years.

If you’re interested in reading more research and writing from Seth Abramson, you can check out his Top 20 History substack, Retro, by entering your email address in the space below:

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{Author’s Note: The war crimes committed by Hamas on October 7 were horrifyingly barbaric. They can never be excused and must never be forgotten. Hamas is a terrorist group that must be fought and destroyed. Proof mourns the deaths of 1,041 Israeli civilians and 364 police officers and Israeli soldiers in the events of October 7, and affirms the right of the State of Israel to exist; to defend itself; to declare war on Hamas; to seek the aid of allies, including the United States; and to seek empathy and patience from the international community after what was undoubtedly the worst day for Jews worldwide since the Holocaust. This report, like the Biden administration, treats the people of Gaza as distinct from a government that most of them don’t support and which has refused to hold democratic elections for over seventeen years—longer than the lifespan of almost half the people now living under autocratic Hamas rule. Proof also makes a distinction between the Israeli people and their current government, which is run by a man and political party whose policies, including attempting to strengthen Hamas via economic aid, have provably failed. Just so, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are now guided by a series of political first principles that sadly have not been set by judicious, ethical, well-intended officials. The author of the report below is a licensed attorney in good standing with his state and federal bars, and he opposes war crimes in all circumstances—no matter who is committing them. He’s also a Jew who knows from years of religious study that questioning, challenging, and even turning away from the roles others expect you to play due to your past or identity is a sacred obligation when your most dearly held values are at stake.}

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Summary

An intensive, comprehensive, ten-day curation and macroanalysis of reliable major-media reports from the around the world—including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Spain, Israel, and Qatar—reveals, with high confidence, that the munition that struck the al-Ahli Hospital in northern Gaza on October 17, 2023 was fired from Israeli territory by Israeli forces.

Data regarding casualty counts (both killed and wounded) following the explosion was substantially reliable when and as it was released by the Palestinian Ministry of Health (PMH), an entity that has for years been relied upon by the international community—including governments, NGOs, major-media outlets, and subject-matter experts. In contrast, following the tragedy at al-Ahli the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) engaged in what appears in retrospect to have been a systematic campaign of deceit that included false casualty counts, doctored evidence, mistranslations, the omission and even obfuscation of inculpatory evidence, gross misinterpretation of multimedia, and disingenuous or even offensive rhetoric.

While the precise origin-point of the killer munition in this case remains unknown, all extant data points at either a Tamir interceptor missile with an 11kg warhead fired from a confirmed Iron Dome installation less than two miles east of Nahal Oz, Israel, or a 155mm artillery shell from a self-propelled howitzer fired from Nahal Oz itself. Nahal Oz is a kibbutz that is under a mile from the border between Gaza and Israel.

All of the foregoing is substantiated by videos (corporate-media and citizen-journalist), audio (corporate-media and citizen-journalist), time-stamp analyses, geolocations, Doppler readouts, forensic analyses of trace evidence, testimonial evidence, and repeated patterns of conduct by the principals involved in the event.

Media critics in the West are factually wrong in opining that U.S. major media “took the word of a terrorist group” in its coverage of the al-Ahli tragedy. In fact, U.S. media coverage of the event was careful, measured and correct—honoring the best traditions of professional journalism despite an environment in which news consumers wanted hard questions answered with ease. Major media was hampered by misinformation and in some cases disinformation fed to it by the IDF, as well as other actions taken by the IDF to ensure that its false narrative about the October 17 explosion at al-Ahli Hospital would triumph in the court of public opinion.

Introduction

For years I taught journalism at an R1 flagship public research university, University of New Hampshire, so compiling an after-action report on a major breaking news story isn’t new to me. But it’s not something I’ve done here at Proof before, and it’s certainly not something easily or lightly done when the story in question involves the deaths of scores or even hundreds of civilians, many of them women and children.

The importance of reviewing major-media reporting on the explosion at the al-Ahli Hospital in northern Gaza a week ago goes well beyond the harrowing nature of the event itself. The way in which media, and Western media in particular, succeeded or failed to adequately cover one of the single bloodiest events of the seventy-five-year history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict presents for working journalists like me (and for that matter, current or former journalism professors like me) a dilemma that isn’t going to go away and so must be addressed now—not merely as an after-action report, but as a guide for the future.

This said, none can doubt that the al-Ahli blast, even taken in isolation, warrants all the ink that has now been spilled reporting it—as well as all the reporting about the reporting about it.

The confirmed death toll of 250 Gazan civilians following the al-Ahli Hospital blast, with (as noted above) 500+ total killed and wounded, is, given the Gazan population of 2.048 million and the Israeli population of 9.364 million, the equivalent of 1,143 Israeli civilians being killed in a single event. Ten days before the al-Ahli blast, a series of horrific war crimes committed by the terrorist group Hamas on Israeli soil killed 1,041 Israeli civilians; 364 Israeli combatants—primarily IDF soldiers—were also killed. President Joe Biden called the latter attack, which occurred over roughly a 24-hour period, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the far-right Likud Party of under-indictment Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the October 7 Hamas attack the equivalent of “twenty 9/11s”, encouraging Western media to use percentage-of-population analyses to compare geographically and temporally distant tragedies. Of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda on the United States, Netanyahu had said at the time, according to a 2008 Haaretz report, that, despite the deaths of 2,996 American civilians on September 11, the events of that day were “good for Israel” because they “swung American public opinion” toward the Likud Party’s Zionist political agenda in Israel.

Netanyahu and his allies in the United States, and indeed even (a) large numbers of U.S. journalists who are neutral toward Netanyahu, and (b) American Jews who are hostile to him, have now concluded that Western media coverage of the explosion at the al-Ahli Hospital was a disgrace to professional journalism.

And from a certain limited standpoint, it was—but not in the way critics are saying.

And what are they saying? Well, writing in The Atlantic, Yascha Mounk deemed the reporting “wrong” and “mistaken” and said that it had caused “real damage”—even holding it up as a prime example of why “public trust in news reporting is so low.”

Writing in The Daily Beast, Matt Lewis decreed that, as to the al-Ahli tragedy, “mainstream media institutions failed in their duties to provide sober, fact-based reporting.” United States Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) was even more explicit in his words about one media outlet in particular, tweeting that “the New York Times didn’t ‘botch’ the Gaza hospital story. They did something worse. They intentionally wrote an attention grabbing headline that falsely pointed the blame at Israel to generate clicks during breaking news, without waiting for confirmation or the actual facts.”

The Times, in an editor’s note, eventually issued a pseudo-mea culpa confessing that it had “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 added that within 120 minutes of the blast its coverage had been clarified. In view of this, even Mounk, who’s far less charitable to the Times than it was to itself, admits that by the day after the blast—more or less the blink of an eye in war reporting on a mass-casualty event of unknown cause—a “fresh consensus” had arisen in the media that got the reporting of the ah-Ahli tragedy (in Mounk’s view) substantially correct.

That fresh consensus was that the IDF was exactly right in blaming the entire event on Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a cousin and rival to Hamas among Gazan terror groups.

But it wasn’t just Mounk pointing the finger at media over events at al-Ahli. Former CNN anchor Brian Stelter, whose longtime beat had been media criticism before he was let go, got his name in the papers again by calling early media coverage of the explosion “an atrocious series of mistakes.” Journalism-adjacent propaganda organ Fox News gleefully wrote that its cousins in the journalism profession had “egg on [their] face[s].” In the Washington Post, Max Boot wrote, rather confusingly, that the media had “judged Israel guilty” for the al-Ahli tragedy without providing evidence that anyone in media had issued a “judgment” on the matter rather than simply (as Boot ultimately conceded his complaint was) “picking up” the claims then being made by the PMH as they were being made in real time without confirming them as true.

There are hundreds of institutional and individual criticisms in this vein online, as even a quick Google search will confirm, so there’s no reason to offer any more here.

While such criticisms got their authors an enormous amount of clicks and attention, they have nothing at all to do with the practice of journalism—a profession in which claims by active wartime partisans are properly reported as they are made, not as a means of confirming them but by way of acknowledging that (a) such claims are themselves newsworthy, and (b) when such claims are made, they definitionally launch media and governmental investigations aimed at confirming whether the claims made are true.

Anyone suggesting that claims by wartime partisans shouldn’t be reported at all until an investigation that could take weeks or months or years has been conducted does not understand how journalism works. Indeed, almost no press release ever issued by the IDF could be reported on by media under this standard, as such releases have not been independently verified by anyone—and indeed most of them couldn’t be, as the IDF hasn’t allowed journalists to enter Gaza since the 2023 Israel-Hamas War began.

Indeed, Reporters Without Borders accuses the IDF of an “all-out media blackout in Gaza”, meaning that if Western media were to stop reporting claims made by wartime partisans as claims and simply ignored them altogether, there would be no coverage of the bombardment of Gaza at all. And while that might work out just fine for the IDF, which has thus far killed approximately 6,750 noncombatant Gazan civilians—many of them children—in just the last nineteen days, it does not work out well for anyone who cares about human rights or professional journalism.

As to the specifics of the current attack on media, these insist that—whether or not it was merely reporting Palestinians claims as claims (as it was; the phrase “Palestinian Health Ministry says” or “Palestinians say” or the equivalent was appended to every early major-media report on al-Ahli)—the facts media reported were wrong because they were provided directly by Hamas’s militant wing, the al-Qassam Brigades.

But this is false. Indeed, it’s false on both counts. The review below discloses that the first facts reported by media about the al-Ahli explosion were (a) correctly framed, (b) correct in substance, and (c) not supplied by the al-Qassam Brigades. Indeed, it seems the reason that, for instance, so many media critics are right now falsely stating that the first reporting on the al-Ahli tragedy suggested “500 dead” at the hospital (which is owned by Anglican Communion, as the Post notes “one of the largest Christian groups in the world”) is that the truth of what happened would reveal major media making none of the errors it stands accused of.

What is strangest of all in all this is reading “corrections” from major media outlets that well know they did nothing wrong. For example, at the bottom of this CNN report we have the cable network issuing a correction that says its early coverage of the explosion “did not clearly attribute claims about Israel’s responsibility to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza.” But here is the very first piece of coverage on the blast from CNN:

Not only are the first words in the coverage “Palestinian health ministry says”, but the coverage offered an initial death-toll estimate that turned out to be exactly right, used the conditional verb “may” to underscore that much about the incident was still unknown, used the word “preliminary” as the very first word in its story proper, and even includes a stunningly telling fact that it seems every media outlet in the world has now memory-holed: “The Palestinian government in Gaza said in an earlier statement that the strike on the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital had resulted in dozens of deaths” (emphasis supplied).

“Dozens” of deaths?

Western news consumers have been told that one of the chief proofs indicating that the Palestinian Health Ministry can’t be trusted to give reliable death toll figures—a claim that can only cheer the IDF, as it applies both retrospectively and prospectively and could give the IDF cover to cause civilian casualties without any accountability in Western media—is that the PMH immediately told Western media that “500” people had been killed at al-Ahli. And since that figure is now thought to be wrong, and wrong by a significant margin, these partisans and their allies emphasize, it means that from the start the PMH was trying to use the al-Ahli tragedy as war propaganda.

So why was the first PMH statement that “dozens” had died at al-Ahli—a figure that is well below the American government’s estimate? And why has Western media not alerted readers to this fact while it’s been under attack for crediting the supposed “first” PMH estimate, “500”?

In fact, the “500” estimate was the third provided by the PMH, and came much later.

Indeed, it may even have been a miscommunication between Western journalists and the receiving hospital on October 17, al-Shifa Hospital, which (see New York Times image above) was telling reporters that there were “over 500 wounded or killed” from the blast. As al-Shifa happens to be the local headquarters of the PMH, it’s easy to take numbers from the chief administrator there, Dr. Muhammad Abu Salima, as coming from the PMH itself. Just so, the figures emanating from al-Shifa were only a casualty count—a wartime figure that definitionally includes wounded persons, as some Western media outlets, including the New York Times, seem not to realize, often using the words “casualty” and “dead” interchangeably—meaning media may often have wrongly portrayed an accurate PMH casualty count as an erroneous death toll.

{Update on 10/29/23: The “500” figure has now been confirmed as a mistranslation by Western media. The PMH said “victims”, which refers to a casualty count—including wounded—and not a death toll. This statement by the PMH was therefore accurate.}

An Aside: Al-Shifa Hospital

Media organizations know, just as Israel’s government knows, that there is a “Hamas base” in al-Shifa Hospital—again, the receiving hospital during the al-Ahli tragedy, and therefore an entity the IDF might be feeling spiteful toward at the moment due to its role in documenting casualties from that event—only to the extent the PMH has its headquarters in al-Shifa, and the PMH is technically part of Hamas, and therefore its administrative offices in al-Shifa are, in technical sense, a “Hamas base” (for as much as the IDF deliberately misuses that phrase to suggest an al-Qassam Brigades base).

Yet now, at a time when the international community and journalists the world over need PMH data more than ever—and northern Gaza needs its largest hospital more than ever—the IDF has suddenly announced that al-Shifa is to be deemed by the IDF a “Hamas base” and therefore, presumably, a military target it will soon destroy.

Here is the graphic the IDF published on Twitter on Friday, October 27, possibly as a prelude to one of the biggest war crimes in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis:

Because these aren’t photographs of any “base,” merely graphic overlays provided by the IDF that are unconfirmed by any media organization, at approximately 4:35 PM ET on October 27 CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked a representative of the Israeli government what the sourcing is for the graphic above. The representative refused to say, but sought to assure CNN and its viewers and the international community that it should take as “ironclad” the Israeli government’s claims about al-Shifa (apparently, misstatements of fact and deceptions orchestrated by that government and itemized in this report notwithstanding).

Proof notes this sudden IDF campaign against al-Shifa and the PMH headquarters—which has appeared out of nowhere nearly three weeks into a war in which the IDF has already hit hundreds and hundreds of targets in Gaza—because the notion that the IDF just discovered the “main operations base” of the al-Qassam Brigades four decades into its struggle against Hamas, but, tellingly, only ten days after this specific location became the source of a public relations disaster for the IDF, suggests that something terrible and unjustifiable may soon happen to the doctors, nurses, EMTs, administrators, staff, and patients of al-Shifa. And the IDF appears to be engaged in a unilateral propaganda war inside the Western press as part of the lead-up to this new hospital-based disaster.

But there’s something else to be noted in the first coverage by CNN: it rightly treats the PMH and Hamas as separate entities, but only in the same way that it treats the DOJ and the Biden administration as separate entities when failing to do so could lead to confusion among readers.

And that’s exactly how journalistic practice must operate—both in the U.S. and Gaza.

CNN quotes sober, reasonable death toll assessments from the PMH (“dozens” and then, later, “200 to 300”) even as it also quotes, in the same coverage, “Hamas” calling the al-Ahli explosion part of a “genocide” in—notably—a separate statement from the PMH one.

Indeed, from the first minutes of the al-Ahli tragedy, PMH and Hamas were issuing separate statements because, while the former is technically part of the latter just as the DOJ is part of the Biden administration, the Gazans are just as capable of putting up a permeable wall between internal components of a whole as we Americans are (and to presume otherwise is profoundly problematic as a matter of ethnic prejudice).

In fact, it’s now evident that PMH expected to be allowed to put out sober, reasonable, honest, and accurate data by the militant wing of its parent organization, even as that militant wing was prepared to put out separate (one might argue highly emotional, unreasonable, dishonest, and inaccurate) statements about the same event. By virtue of noting the separate statements being put out by the PMH and Hamas, CNN was doing no more and no less than it would do with domestic political coverage: ethical journalism. It was communicating unambiguously to its readers that while there was reason to rely on PMH statements when it came to matters of public health, heated and rhetorically oriented statements from Hamas leadership—presumed to be, in a time of war, its militant wing—were being reported simply as a matter of course and not “for the truth of the matter.” We thereby see CNN adopting a PMH death toll that turned out to be correct while doing nothing at all to confirm, bolster, encourage, or otherwise advocate for the rank propaganda emanating from the al-Qassam Brigades.

We might also consider what seems to be the earliest New York Times report on al-Ahli:

Note that this reporting (a) clearly cites the Palestinian Health Ministry for the notion that an Israeli airstrike caused the explosion, (b) quotes the PMH as giving yet another death toll that turned out to be broadly accurate (falling in line with U.S. estimates, as the United States Intelligence Community reports “100 to 300” and the PMH here says “200”), and (c) did the responsible thing by saying that according to the PMH the number of “casualties” (meaning total dead and wounded, not merely the death toll) was “expected to rise” rather than trying to estimate where it would end up. The final, al-Shifa Hospital-confirmed death toll was 250, 25% higher than the first PMH figure the Times cited.

Note, too, that in this early New York Times coverage we already see the beginning of a miscommunication between U.S. and Palestinian entities. The Times here uses two words with notably different meanings, “killed” and “casualties”, interchangeably, thereby implicitly misreporting what the PMH is saying. That is, when the Palestinian Health Ministry reports “200 killed” it also, surely, has a considerably higher number of wounded persons in its (as we know from the Associated Press) computerized and color-coded casualty database. So when the Times indicates, above, that the number of “casualties” will rise from “200”, this is inaccurate—and due to a Times error, not a PMH error. In fact, while the number of “dead” might rise from “200”, the number of “casualties” would rise from a number the Times had never provided its readers in the first instance. This is why the final death toll reported from al-Shifa Hospital, the site where the PMH is headquartered, was “250”—a clear “rise” from 200—even as one of the later “casualty” PMH counts was “500” (or even, briefly, before correction, “833”), a “rise” from whatever initial killed-plus-wounded figure the Times never reported at all. Because the Times failed to ever distinguish between (1) killed, and (2) killed-plus wounded figures, Western consumers saw only an implausible spike from “200” to “500” or “833”; they never realized they were looking at two different assessments.

While it does seem that the Times made a critical production (not reporting) error above, attaching a photograph of a different blast site to its first report on the al-Ahli explosion, there’s no evidence of malice or systemic bias in this production error and, candidly, these things happen in wartime. They’re especially likely to happen when an armed force with unchallenged air superiority is sending so many munitions at local targets (over 8,000 munitions in nineteen days at last count, an average of 18 shells and bombs every hour, non-stop, for almost three weeks) that outlets are inundated with pictures of rubble. Sadly, it’s easy enough to get one picture of a newly created ruin confused with another.

One reason it is so important to break down the very earliest al-Ahli coverage, apart from the fact that it’s now the coverage most exposed to disingenuous attack from media critics, is that it’s also the coverage most likely to be forgotten by observers.

For instance, within a few hours of the al-Ahli blast the IDF was saying a number of things we now know were patently untrue: for instance, that the IDF had not been operating in the area of the hospital that night; that Iron Dome missiles never enter Gaza and therefore could not have been in Gazan airspace that night; that any and all live coverage of the skies over Gaza confirms that the only munitions in the sky were from Hamas or PIJ; and so on. Yet if we look at the last sentence of the CNN coverage above, we also find an IDF much less sure of whether it might have been responsible for what had just happened: “IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari says the IDF is looking into the reported strike, saying since it was fairly recent, the IDF is still unclear whether it was hit by an Israeli Air Force (IAF) strike.”

If the IDF had no operations in the area at the time, why would there have been any uncertainty about possible Israeli responsibility? Indeed, if the PMH was able to get an accurate death toll to the media within a fairly short period of time, so why was a much better-resourced, even more professional, and more completely staffed entity, the IDF—not coincidentally, an entity that also wasn’t under air bombardment at the time—unable to quickly determine whether it was active in a given area at the time?

We now know the startling and deeply disappointing reason for this: because the IDF was lying, and would continue to lie, about what happened the night of the explosion.

The key question now, which we’ll return to at length later on in this report, is why.

For now, it’s worth making one final note about the idiosyncrasies of the early hours of the coverage of the al-Ahli tragedy. As the IDF fumbled its way through the first hours of a public relations crisis, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to significantly outstrip even the findings of his own armed forces, not only accusing “barbaric terrorists” of being behind the al-Ahli massacre but—in a statement he has neither walked back nor ever provided any evidence for—having done so as part of an “attack” that was explicitly intended to kill a large number of their fellow Palestinians.

This, too, is a lie.

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Further Breaking Down the Early al-Ahli Coverage

I can find no instance of a single media outlet reporting on the al-Ahli Hospital blast without making clear that the information on the blast then being relayed was coming from the Palestinian Health Ministry. As major media has been reporting death tolls using PMH data since the beginning of the current war without any angst from either side in the conflict, media critics have no cause to complain about such sourcing now; indeed, there’s quite literally no other source available to major media in its effort to compile accurate Gazan death tolls. Why? Because the IDF has carefully ensured that no independent journalists are allowed inside Gaza. A cynic—or perhaps just a realist—would note that the IDF compelling exactly the sort of single-source reporting on Gazan death tolls it now decries is a disinformation strategy that armies have used for centuries and that cannot be laid at the feet of media or, for that matter, the PMH.

Even the most acidic critiques of early media coverage of the October 14 explosion cite headlines that unambiguously attribute the first disclosures regarding the event as coming from the PMH—an entity that media has repeatedly, not just for days or weeks or months but years, made clear is the civilian, administrative, noncombatant, public-service-oriented wing of Hamas. So if media has never hidden from anyone the fact that PMH is, org-chart-wise, a part of Hamas; and if the PMH is a non-militant civil unit; and if the IDF has ensured that the PMH is the only source media can use to catalogue Gazan deaths (under circumstances in which those deaths must be both reported and carefully catalogued because at least some of them could turn out to be IDF war crimes punishable by the International Criminal Court); and if the PMH was, in the case of the al-Ahli tragedy, an especially apt data source because the event in question involved a hospital and therefore the public health mission of the PMH; and if media instantly added to its coverage of the al-Ahli blast statements from the IDF once they emanated a couple hours after the explosion; what are the journalistic atrocities those attacking major media right now are referring to? Despite being a former journalism professor, I can’t locate them; indeed, I can’t locate any significant deviation from conventional journalistic practice in any of this.

One consistent component of the current media criticism, as noted above, is that the early coverage of this event got facts wrong—specifically, the death toll at al-Ahli.

But as I know because, like many of you, I was watching live CNN coverage when the blast occurred, the first reports from the PMH were measured (“dozens”) and the second and third accurate, as they put the death toll at “200” and then “200 to 300.”

The Biden administration and the USIC has since concurred with this assessment by placing the likely death toll from the al-Ahli explosion at “between 100 and 300.” And the New York Times would later cite, as noted above, the non-Hamas veteran hospital administrator at the receiving hospital on October 7, al-Ahifa, for the premise that the death toll was approximately “250.” In other words, all three of the first, second, and third statements that emanated from the PMH post-blast were wholly reasonable.

Many hours after the blast—once the IDF had had a chance to weigh in with a long series of claims that almost to a one turned out to be false (see below)—it’s possible that the militant wing of Hamas began exerting more control over the PMH due to this event, unlike any prior event in the current war, gaining international coverage and causing widespread outrage across the Middle East. It was in this context that a new figure appeared—“500”, which rose as high as “833” before dropping down to “471”, where it remains today—though it’s unclear which if any of these tallies were death tolls as opposed to casualty counts.

The Associated Press had confirmed, in a lengthy report on the PMH, that it takes its data directly from “hospital administrators…[who] keep records of every wounded person occupying a bed and every dead body arriving at a morgue. They enter this data into a computerized system shared with [PMH].” It takes very little imagination to conceive of a circumstance in which the PMH shared a casualty count (covering both wounded and deceased) and it was received by Western media as a “death toll.”

The bad faith now being exhibited by media critics is underscored by a falsehood they have been telling, synchronously, about the numbers above: they falsely claim that the first death toll ever put out by the PMH was “500” (a number Western media and intel sources agree is far too high) as a way of unethically erasing the first, second, and third statements by the PMH—which, again, were both accurate and show no signs of emanating from an entity that was then under pressure from Hamas’s militant wing.

While there is no excuse to be offered for Hamas militants later pressuring the PMH to increase its death toll estimate without any factual basis for doing so, if this is in fact what happened, a working journalist must nevertheless observe that this possible propagandistic meddling only occurred once the IDF had filled Western airwaves with information now confirmed to be disinformation: specifically, its claim that the death toll at the al-Ahli Hospital approached zero because there had been no mass casualty event there at all (see below for more). Moreover, a working journalist might observe that while we don’t definitively know whether the final death toll (“471”) from the PMH is accurate or not, the Israeli propaganda it may have been a partial response to has indeed now been confirmed as false.

None of this excuses either Hamas or the IDF. But it does underscore that the first data put out by the media, and for that matter the PMH, was reliable, and given that those in the fields of psychology and sociology have long since told us that we’re likely to believe—and continue to believe—the information we hear first, even if it’s later contradicted, (a) it is far more important that the PMH was correct early rather than late, and (b) the stakes for media critics disingenuously submitting that the first tally the PMH gave was “500” suddenly appear to be quite clear and powerfully cynical.

Moreover, it is only those angry about the reaction on the Arab street to the events at al-Ahli who are now, for the first time, declaring PMH death tolls mere propaganda. The same entity provided Gazan death tolls for the first ten days of the current war with almost no complaint from any quarter. The IDF itself, in fact, didn’t make any attempt to contradict PMH death toll figures with its own until the al-Ahli incident.

Why? Well, a cynic might say that the IDF doesn’t care about Gazan civilian deaths or injuries at this point, but a more practical commentator would amend that assessment slightly to say the following: the IDF knows PMH casualty figures inside Gaza are far more reliable than its own, as the PMH is on the ground in Gaza and has no need to lie about casualty data because—as the IDF knows better than anyone—it’s horrifying either way.

Arguable Media Mistakes Consistently Favored the IDF

So let’s break down, now, from the standpoint of a discussion one might have in a college journalism class, what really happened in coverage of the al-Ahli explosion.

(1) Flattening and unflattening. Israeli partisans and their allies want major media to deliberately engage in a questionable journalistic practice known (albeit most avidly in Composition circles) as “flattening.” Flattening eliminates the complexities of either a hierarchy or a narrative as a means of achieving desired rhetorical or political ends. For instance, when DOJ brings federal criminal charges against Donald Trump in both D.C. and Georgia, Trumpist partisans disingenuously demand that U.S. media report these charges as having been brought by “the Biden administration”—which is technically true—in order to falsely imply to readers that President Biden himself was involved in deciding which charges to bring against his current political rival. (In fact, there’s no evidence President Biden has played any role in these prosecutions at all.)

This DOJ-Biden-Trump analogy is illuminating because DOJ is indeed part of the Biden administration. It wouldn’t technically be wrong for media to say that the Biden administration brought charges against Biden’s likely 2024 political opponent, but it would be wildly misleading—and therefore journalistically irresponsible. The four key tenets of professional journalism are objectivity, accuracy, truth and honesty (collectively known as the OATH principles), and this situation is one of those less-rare-than-you-might-suppose instances in which a technically accurate statement can at once be not entirely true and definitely dishonest). It is for this reason, not due to partisanship, that U.S. media always uses the more specific term (“DOJ”) to denote where the key decisions in breaking news stories relating to Trump prosecutions are coming from.

And those now criticizing major media over al-Ahli have never complained about the media making a distinction between DOJ and the larger entity it is part of, because it allows media to report a story at once accurately, truthfully, and honestly. But in Gaza, these same media-watchers want major media to engage in the opposite approach. They do not want media to ever attribute any information to the PMH; rather, they want that information to always be attached to the larger entity the PMH is part of, Hamas. And the reasons for this are every bit as political as the reasons Trumpist partisans want media to write “Biden administration” instead of “DOJ”—to imply corrupt conduct and information where there is none. Indeed, if the IDF does bomb al-Shifa Hospital as it appears poised to do, it will be committing a heinous war crime in the name of this very same bait-and-switch. That’s how dangerous such rhetoric is.

So how do we know that PMH casualty data isn’t corrupt, even if the larger entity PMH is part of is Hamas? Because all parties to the current media criticism accepted the right of the PMH to put out casualty data before al-Ahli, and the right of media to report that data; because, as shown above, PMH data was in fact correct even during the early reporting on al-Ahli that media critics now decry; because even the IDF does not try to compete with the PMH as a source for Gaza casualty data because (a) it knows it can’t do so due to lack of ground access to mass casualty sites, (b) candidly it knows that it has probably killed about as many civilians as the PMH has been saying; and because the PMH has been deemed reliable by the global community for decades.

But even beyond all this, we must note that readers of major media have been told—over and over—that Hamas is the government of the Gaza Strip; that it has been since 2006; that the PMH is a part of Hamas; and that independent journalists are not being allowed inside the Gaza Strip by the IDF. So for media critics to now say, as many do, that media attributing a death toll to information received from the PMH is unethical and unprecedented and misleading are wrong on all three counts and are themselves engaging in what a journalist would deem an unprecedentedly disingenuous critique.

It is wrong to “flatten” DOJ as merely “the Biden administration,” just as it is wrong to “flatten” the PMH as a militant terrorist organization currently in active combat with the IDF rather than a noncombatant, administrative, civil-service entity which is in fact doing the job it is supposed to be doing when it releases death tolls to the media.

For all that some cranks may like to say that corporate media often falls for the fallacy that holds that getting news first is much more important than getting it right, in this case organizations like CNN actually got news out both quickly and accurately: (1) the PMH was indeed initially attributing the al-Ahli explosion to an Israeli airstrike (and with good reason, as we will see below), so major media was justified in reporting that claim (with full attribution as a means of allowing readers to assess its origin); and (2) the PMH indeed put out an initial death toll attached to that explosion that stood up even a week later as broadly consistently with statements from U.S. and non-Hamas Gazan sources.

(2) Catering to readers’ allergy to negative capability. “Negative capability” is an idea purportedly first expressed by the poet John Keats; in brief, it’s the capacity that a given consumer of information has—or as often does not have—for being left in a state of suspense about the resolution of a question. As you might imagine, both the consumers of major-media journalism and professional practitioners of major-media journalism suffer from a very low attraction to negative capability; news-consumers do not want to be kept in suspense by the reporting they read and corporate media outlets are almost exactly as loath to put their consumers in that position. This said, a responsible, ethical, competent journalist must at times reside in negative capability even as a consumer of news—unencumbered by the ethical responsibilities of being a journalist—need never do so willingly and can in fact refuse to do so as they like.

It will probably not surprise anyone reading this to hear that among the situations that most require negative capability from both journalists and their readers are mass-casualty events that occur in wartime. Such tragedies can take so long to accurately and comprehensively report upon that—especially in the early going—superlative journalism is often as not defined by telling readers what you do not know yet rather than what you do (no matter how this aggravates and perhaps even alienates them).

As you read this—well over a week on from the al-Ahli Hospital explosion—no major media organization has drawn a final conclusion on what happened at that hospital in northern Gaza on October 17. The United Nations hasn’t even begun an investigation.

Even the USIC says that it has only released a “preliminary” analysis of what it thinks likely happened. And President Biden, speaking only a day after the explosion, told Benjamin Netanyahu at a joint press conference that “based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you”—presumably not because by that point he had spent hours and hours digesting intelligence on the question but rather as a way of explaining his support for the Israeli response to the horrifying war crimes of October 7. (More recent CNN reporting on remarks by a spokesman for the Pentagon suggest that the United States now privately opposes the Israelis’ plans for a ground invasion.)

And yet, for all this, every criticism of major media for its coverage of the events at al-Ahli seems to imply—in some cases even aver—that the investigation is closed and that it is because we already know what happened at al-Ahli for certain this is exactly the right time to attack all those who got it “wrong.”

In reality, media was in the same situation minutes after the blast that it’s in today, a week-plus later: it can only tell us how the situation looks at the moment. It cannot resolve with any certainty what actually occurred on October 17 in northern Gaza, a fact that is echoed by nearly every munitions expert major media is speaking to now; all of them say there are sequences of events different from those put out by the IDF that they cannot exclude as possible explanations for hundreds of civilian deaths at a site that was at the time being used as a refugee camp.

So if all major media can do with this sort of event is tell us how things are looking at the moment without drawing final conclusions—and if the fantasy that conclusions have already been drawn about al-Ahli, a false premise now being spread by media critics, is as bunk as it is morally irresponsible—we must now ask the question: was media reporting on the night of the explosion a reasonable reflection of how things would have looked at the time, just as the reporting now is a reasonable reflection of what is known now? And the answer to this is (ironically enough) a definitive yes.

As discussed more below, as of October 17 not a single known Hamas or PIJ rocket failure (and there have been hundreds of them) has resulted in a mass casualty event.

Ever.

Indeed, the IDF itself (per Haaretz) says that 108 failed PIJ launches that resulted in a PIJ rocket landing inside Gaza—already an extremely rarified subset of all failed PIJ rocket launches, let alone all launches of any kind—resulted in a total of 4 deaths. So when journalists saw, as they and the whole world immediately did, that the al-Ahli explosion was a mass-casualty event with at a minimum many scores of casualties from a single munition strike, the idea that the culprit would be PIJ was almost unthinkable.

But that wasn’t the only information major media had at the time. It also knew, as has since been confirmed by the very Al Jazeera video of the night in question that the IDF has repeatedly demanded that Western journalists watch, that the area around the hospital was being pounded by Israeli airstrikes on the night in question—with a minimum of four such strikes hitting the area immediately around the hospital in just the ten minutes before the al-Alhi blast.

So the idea that the hospital would also be hit during these strikes was far from a shot in the dark; indeed, it immediately presented as a not just possible but likely scenario.

Not long after the explosion, the New York Times acquired and published audio and video of it—a now widely seen piece of multimedia that reveals that the explosion was preceded by supersonic acoustics that sound exactly like an Israeli JDAM airstrike (as many amateur acoustics analyses on YouTube quickly confirmed for casual listeners).

The point here is not to say that any of this information should have resolved the negative capability journalists were struggling to navigate in the aftermath of al-Ahli.

In fact, the opposite is true: whereas media critics wanted the media to instantly report, following the explosion, that there was no credible basis to think the IDF had or would do something like this—a statement that would be false, but would offer the benefit of resolving readers’ dearth of negative capability—the fact of the matter is that the lack of certainty journalists felt on October 17 over what had just happened was bolstered, not dissolved, by the information at their disposal. Indeed, in addition to all of the foregoing Proof notes that by the time of the explosion at al-Ahli media had already reported on multiple Gazan hospitals, schools, and refugee camps being hit by the IDF. One might even go so far as to say that on the night of the al-Ahli tragedy far and away the most likely explanation was that the Israelis had deliberately hit the hospital—and as we will see below, information would soon emerge that made this scenario even more likely than it initially was—and that major media therefore did yeoman’s work to keep itself in a state of negative capability rather than resolve matters in favor of the PMH narrative (quite apart from doing what media critics now imply major media should have done, which is instantly resolve matters in the IDF’s favor).

(3) Professional provincialism. The biggest problem in corporate media is not some well-worn maxim like “if it bleeds, it leads” or “getting it fast is better than getting it right”, it’s professional provincialism—or we might say tribalism or territorialism—which makes competing for-profit media enterprises loath to credit competitors or to even mention them, whether or not doing so would improve the quality of the reporting available to their consumers.

While we do on occasion see “first reported by” caveats in major-media reporting—brief phrases that alert readers to the fact that they are reading a report that merely confirms news earlier published elsewhere—this isn’t the sort of merely gestural collegiality proper hard-news reportage requires. To understood any story whatsoever, not just some of them, requires creating a matrix of data accumulated by all sorts of different journalistic enterprises, from domestic to international, corporate to non-profit, full-time to part-time, partisan to independent, breaking-news to investigative-reporting, same-day to archival, topical to topic-adjacent. That responsible journalism in the digital age actually requires networking scores or even hundreds of sources to give a comprehensive four-dimensional view of even a breaking news event is the reason that I became what’s called a curatorial journalist or metajournalist six years ago.

Admittedly, it’s much easier for me to do this work than it is for corporate media, as I’m an independent journalist who doesn’t have to sell ad space, doesn’t have any competitors per se, isn’t subject to Nielsen ratings, doesn’t have to be on-air and in the public view every second of every day, and needn’t worry so much about “credit” because I’m not trying to prove to readers that I have a network of proprietary sources but merely that I’m better at networking reliable major-media reports than others are.

When a mass-casualty even like the al-Ahli explosion occurs, the limited negative capability of readers causes pressure on corporate media outlets to resolve the matter of “blame” almost instantly, and to do so using a comprehensive in-house analysis the outlet can and will stand by because it supervised and double-checked every stage of it.

As you can tell, these are dangerous competing imperatives: corporate media outlets are expected to resolve difficult questions quickly, but also feel they must do all the work themselves to get the proper credit for it as well as maximum market advantage.

Responsible journalism in the midst of a crisis requires a very different path, however.

After the al-Ahli blast, what was needed was for curatorial journalists to provide a real-time evolving view of all investigations being conducted by all entities around the world—the better to see whether, say, a statement by PMH was supported by research from The Times of Israel and Channel 4 (UK) even as, at the very same moment, a new New York Times report and BBC video analysis were raising questions about a just-finished IDF presser. While such a real-time multidimensional analysis of parallel and intersecting investigations would not function to provide a simple and quick answer to complicated questions of responsibility, what it would do is offer those observing it unfold online a sense of the triangulated trajectory of the investigation, an evolving view of where things seemed to be headed at any moment rather than (as we definitionally see from any one media outlet) one or two news reports published many hours apart that comprise no more or less than what that outlet was able to accomplish since its last check-in. Whereas curatorial journalism scratches the itch—if imperfectly—of readers’ limited negative capability by implicitly saying to them, here’s (a) everything anyone knows (b) at this moment; meanwhile corporate media fails in both regards by being able to offer readers only (c) what one media outlet knows at (d) a small number of moments distant in time.

(4) A product- rather than process-oriented approach. The many differences between a value system that foregrounds process and one that foregrounds product are a major topic of inquiry in the field of Composition—another field I have spent years teaching in at the university level—but they have an equally significant purchase in journalism.

When a media outlet is focused on process rather than product, it does several things it might not do otherwise:

1. It informs its readers of all the things it wants to know but does not yet know;

2. it informs readers of what it’s doing to answer currently unanswered questions;

3. it gives readers a sense of what topics it’s most focused on at the moment;

4. it gives readers some sense of when they might next hear an update from it;

5. it cites other outlets while noting it hasn’t independently confirmed their work;

6. it issues real-time, even instant corrections or addendums, as necessary;

7. it is not afraid to let readers glimpse its internal procedures and protocols;

8. it summarizes major issues of concern, even if they cannot yet be addressed;

9. it itemizes urgent questions, even those unlikely to be answerable near-term; and

10. it manages readers’ expectations by telling them in advance how many reports it might take, or how many days or weeks of reporting might be required, for its present course of reporting to reach a natural, reliable, and satisfying conclusion.

We can understand, can’t we, why a corporate media outlet wouldn’t want to do most of these things? They all suggest uncertainty; all of them implicitly demand patience; all of them require collaboration; all of them de-mysticize a product that consumers are paying for (which they’ll likely value more if it remains beyond their ken); and all of them underscore the limited resources and capabilities of a single media outlet. Far better, any capitalist investing in or running a media company would say, to broadcast to readers confidence that you and you alone are the outlet that can get definitive answers for its customers—and in record time, too. That we news consumers often punish media outlets or independent journalists who value process as much or more than product makes us complicit in the infelicities of our corporate media culture; if, for instance, we did not mercilessly ridicule or punish good-faith investigators when they make and immediately correct mistakes, it would encourage journalists to more boldly risk indulging process-oriented practices. Just so, if we didn’t publicly devalue media brands whenever they rely in any fashion on other media brands, we would be encouraging the sort of collaboration across competing brands that is essential to an ethical, professional, process-oriented approach to journalism.

Adjacent to the distinction between a process-oriented value system and a product-oriented one is the matter of selective memory. Whereas a key value within an ethical framework oriented toward process is universal memory—that is, the widest possible awareness of everything a given process requires and incorporates—it is natural for institutions whose market value is tied up in product rather than process to want to eliminate from their self-mythologizing everything but the final consumer product they plan to offer.

Corporate media outlets often feel they must “memory-hole”—simply disappear—a good deal of their past reporting when it’s superseded by new reporting, and they feel this way because consumers punish those they’re paying money to for their mistakes.

The easiest way to escape this punishment, a corporate media outlet might feel, is to not only draw as little attention to those mistakes as possible but create a framework in which they quietly disappear over time.

We find signs of such collective-memory-tampering all over the al-Ahli reporting—most of it designed to replace evidence of “process” with a final consumer “product.”

For instance, one of the most important questions in the entirety of the al-Ahli probe has been, for obvious reasons, the trajectory of the munition that hit the hospital. Was whatever hit the parking lot of the al-Ahli coming from the direction of Israel (east) or the Gaza coast (west)? The IDF repeatedly told Western media that it knew for certain the rocket that hit the hospital had come from the west—the deep interior of Gaza—yet when those claims fell apart because of (a) Doppler analyses dependent on audio files and microphone directionality, (b) forensic analyses of burn marks that assessed what blackened concrete tells about the blast-patterns of different munitions, and (c) live video indicating the seemingly preposterous phenomenon of a rocket turning 180 degrees in midair, it was easier for corporate media outlets to simply report that the broader IDF claim of a PIJ rocket failure was likely correct, rather than note that the IDF had gotten basically every detail undergirding its broader claim provably wrong.

By focusing on product rather than process, and by memory-holing the sub-findings of a complex investigation in favor of reporting out a tentative—but maybe-close-to-final—assessment, major media at once gives the impression that the IDF is more honest than it is, that its investigators are more competent than they are, that media outlets do their work more seamlessly than is actually possible, and that questions that might well remain about the incident at al-Ahli (raised by the very sub-findings the media is memory-holing) in fact do not exist because those sub-findings, as if by magic, have been made to disappear.

By the same token, in its first presser about the al-Ahli blast the IDF said that there was no impact crater at the hospital compound, and that it knew this because it had sent a UAV over the site. Yet many Western news consumers still do not know—because most media outlets never reported it—that the IDF had carefully limited the still images released from this UAV flyover to ensure that the clearly visible impact crater at the hospital compound was never shown. This is an excellent example of an inconvenient fact being elided by a product-oriented approach to journalism and that having the effect of eliminating key evidence of intent. Yes, the IDF was wrong to say there was no impact crater, but isn’t it also probative evidence to know how and when and in what fora the IDF went about being wrong? Certainly, in a domestic criminal investigation we want to know if a suspect was trying to hide something, whatever our final conclusion on culpability for the crime in question might end up being.

Yet by the time all major media outlets worldwide were conceding the presence of an impact crater at al-Ahli, and even the IDF was acknowledging it, the fact of its initial denial had been just as thoroughly memory-holed as the fact that the initial PMH assessment of the death toll at al-Ahli had been correct. And so it is that an apparently deliberate IDF deception was erased alongside an admirable bit of candor from the PMH; and despite this pattern being repeated over and over in the days following the al-Ahli explosion (I’m only giving this one example as an illustration) the complaint now being made by media critics is that major media gave too much credit to the PMH and too little to the IDF. This reversal of what facts on the ground suggest and what responsible journalism—which includes considering the past accuracy of all sources—would demand only increases the likelihood that in the future the media will continue to be too credulous of claims by the IDF and too instantly dismissive of PMH data.

And that, in turn, gifts the IDF a massive and possibly even decisive victory in the information war that’s accompanied its military actions in Gaza. That’s a damning turn of events given that neither Hamas nor PIJ has any hope of winning the long-term military engagement with the Israelis that both are embroiled in right now.

(5) Semantics. It’s unsurprising that complex, highly fraught breaking-news reporting often produces semantic conundrums. It’s easy enough for two different readers to interpret the same word in different ways. The question is whether or when credible media criticism can depend on semantics.

For instance, the first map of al-Ahli Hospital released by the IDF put a dotted line around the main hospital buildings and the facility’s parking lot and termed the entirety of that land area “the hospital compound.” Yet when major media reported on a blast at “the hospital”, critics later squealed that such reporting was misleading because the “hospital buildings” weren’t damaged: a contention, without evidentiary support behind it, that the term “hospital” could only ever mean “hospital buildings” and never “hospital compound.” This is nonsense, of course—legally and in countless other ways a hospital is the entirety of its land holdings, not merely any one edifice on-site—but it was also only the beginning of the semantic games to be played by critics of major media’s al-Ahli coverage.

In fact, the massive October 17 explosion at the al-Ahli hospital compound (to use the IDF construction) caused the ceiling of an operating theater inside the compound’s main building to collapse and portions of the roofs of multiple buildings to blow away.

Yet critics of the major media reports on these events were offended by suggestions that a blast—which of course includes both an explosion and its concurrent concussive waves—had hit “hospital buildings,” even though in fact that’s exactly what happened.

This over-prescription of language is not just preposterous but nakedly partisan. It is accurate to say that the explosion at al-Ahli damaged both the hospital compound writ large and even specific hospital buildings, even if the brunt of the impact of the explosion came in that portion of the hospital compound comprising a parking lot.

The partisanship in demanding some other, more tortured description of these same events—something on the order of, “the primary impact of the explosive component of the al-Ahla blast fell on a parking lot within the hospital compound rather than on any of the hospital buildings themselves”—is further underscored by the fact that such high (or rather somewhat silly) semantic standards don’t run in both directions.

Consider the following: the IDF, the world’s fourteenth-strongest military, has been bombing an area the size of just two Districts of Columbia (or one-third the size of Los Angeles) for almost three weeks now, with the stated aim of decimating a comparatively poorly resourced militant group, and according to a new report in the New York Times the IDF hit a combined “720” Hamas “targets” in Gaza on its sixteenth and seventeenth day of bombing. Does anyone believe that the Gaza Strip has 720 identifiable military “targets”? Let alone 720 plus however many thousands of such supposed targets the IDF hit in the first fifteen days of its historic bombardment of one of the most densely populated human settlements on Earth? Simply by calling the locations where the IDF dropped its massive bombs “targets” communicates to readers that these bombings were warranted, were carefully planned in advance to only kill militants occupying discernible military positions, and only occurred in the precise locations that the IDF had intended them to.

The truth is that while there may be scores of valid military targets in Gaza, the IDF has never even tried to substantiate that there are so many military targets in Gaza that on the sixteenth and seventeenth days of its bombing that place, 720 valid new targets were found. Yet consider, for a moment, how Western reporting on the IDF bombing campaign would sound, and all the howls of protest it would generate, if the New York Times became as much of a stickler for semantics with respect to the IDF as critics insist it must be with respect to the Palestinians and wrote that after fifteen days of bombing a tiny scrap of razed land the IDF had found 720 new “buildings” to bomb.

And given that a building doesn’t become a valid military target under international law until a neutral party has adjudicated it as such, wouldn’t it be more appropriate for Western media to say that the IDF is hitting buildings, not targets? And even if it’s appropriate to call buildings—among them, we now know, both schools and hospitals—“targets” in supposedly neutral reporting, how many targets does the IDF get to hit in an area less than half the size of Pittsburg, New Hampshire before media asks for proof that any of the sites hit were properly adjudicated (even by the IDF) as “targets”?

That’s right, I wrote “Pittsburg, New Hampshire,” not Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Gaza Strip is 140.9 mi²; Pittsburg, New Hampshire—which I’m reasonably sure almost no one reading this has ever heard of—is 291.3 mi².

This, too, is a matter of semantics. Why does major media describe the Gaza Strip as being twice the size of the capital of the United States rather than less than one-half the size of a rural town in northern New England? The answer, of course, is clear enough—and it’s not because many Americans have any sense of the size of the District of Columbia; they don’t. But saying that the Gaza Strip is a little more than double the size of the seat of American government tends to convince Western news-readers that there might, just might, be 720 legitimate military targets in Gaza that somehow were not pulverized to powder in the first fifteen days of an Israeli air force with absolute, unchallenged air superiority over Gaza conducting an unrelenting bombing campaign.

On the other hand, news consumers would be hard-pressed to imagine there being even one valid military target in the much-better-resourced-than-Gaza Pittsburg, New Hampshire—and that would change only slightly if we imagined that there were some militants hiding there. But the idea of thousands and thousands of military targets in Pittsburg? It would be a non-starter, and any suggestion that that many bombs had been dropped there would launch war-crime concerns within 12 hours at the most.

What Happened at al-Ahli Before the Explosion

Whatever the proximate cause of the explosion at al-Ahli, we must remember that the effects of it were predetermined by events that preceded the launch of whatever munition hit the hospital. For instance, the day before the blast (Monday, October 16) CNN reported that the evacuation order issued by the IDF to all 1.1 million residents of Gaza City on Friday, October 13—which mandated that they abandon their worldly possessions within 24 hours with no idea if they’d ever be returning home, and that they do so whether or not there was any credible basis to believe they lived in or near a valid military target under international law, an evacuation order the United Nations called “impossible” and virtually guaranteed to cause a “humanitarian disaster”—was not honored in its spirit, as the IDF so thoroughly bombed roads immediately south of the evacuation zone that many innocent civilians died as soon as they stepped foot out of northern Gaza.

The result of this IDF betrayal—besides precisely the humanitarian disaster the UN had correctly predicted—was that many civilians in northern Gaza chose to abandon their homes but not leave Gaza City. Instead, they flocked in massive, unprecedented numbers to locations they were hopeful the Israelis would not bomb, because doing so would be a war crime: locations like, for instance, al-Ahli Hospital in northern Gaza.

In this they were disappointed, of course. Israel would either bomb or shell (see more below) the al-Ahli on Saturday, October 14, the day after the evacuation order. Then it called the hospital three times on Sunday to warn that further war crimes against the hospital and those sheltered there might be forthcoming. And so it was that whereas 108 failed PIJ rocket launches identified by the IDF in which the rockets landed inside Gaza had led to only four total casualties, the blast at al-Ahli on Tuesday, October 17 killed hundreds of civilians because, per CNN, “thousands” had come to shelter there.

And why were they sheltering there? Because of the unprecedented IDF evacuation order that had so understandably outraged the international community. Yet despite the United Nations announcing that this order would lead to disaster; and despite the IDF bombing refugees as they left the evacuation zone, convincing many to flock to hospitals like al-Ahli, Proof could find not one Western media source that explained to readers that while the al-Ahli explosion may or may not have been attributable to PIJ, PIJ had no role whatsoever in the scope of the tragedy. If the IDF hadn’t spent the preceding two-plus weeks committing war crimes in Gaza, the parking lot at al-Ahli would have been virtually empty; it wouldn’t have been doubling as a refugee camp.

We might add, too, that the IDF—along with the Egyptian government—had been blocking the transit of humanitarian aid from the southern Gaza border crossing at Rafah. Had that aid been flowing freely as it should have been, and as the United Nations and NGOs and the international community writ large had been begging it to, it would have given Gazans all the more reason to evacuate Gaza City with haste, and would have even more solidly ensured the relative abandonment of the al-Ahli Hospital grounds (any staff still working inside the building notwithstanding).

{Note: An El País report asserts that instead of three calls from the IDF to the al-Ahli on Sunday, October 15, it received one call each on October 14, October 15, and October 16.}

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The al-Ahli Explosion As Captured by Proof

This, below, was the first full Proof post on the explosion, published as the author of this report watched live CNN coverage of it:

As explained by contemporaneous Proof postings, the words “many, many more” came from CNN itself, not the PMH, and the reason for the estimate came from the fact that CNN had already reported that “thousands” of refugees had flooded the small—80-bed—northern Gaza hospital following the IDF evacuation order of October 13.

It’s worth noting, therefore, that from the outset the PMH gave very cautious death toll figures (first “dozens”, then “200 to 300”) even as CNN saw facts on the ground suggesting the toll would be much higher than this—a sentiment Israeli partisans and even some media outlets now disingenuously attribute only to “Hamas.” Moreover, one of the most respected journalists in the United States, CNN Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward, said that based on the video of the explosion she had already seen it was “hard to see” how such damage could have been caused by a PIJ or Hamas rocket that misfired (a notion the IDF was already floating at the time, without asserting it conclusively). And Clarissa Ward has certainly seen both Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rockets hit targets on the ground.

This is critical data about the event that has, unconscionably, been memory-holed.

If one of the most respected journalists in the United States looked at the scope of the devastation at the al-Ahli just after it happened and was willing to say on-air—a much higher standard than just thinking something to yourself, I can say here as a former sometime CNN political analyst for television broadcast—that it was “hard [for her] to see” this being a misfired rocket, does that, by itself, justify the initial Palestinian response to the event? After all, the Palestinians are surely permitted to express bold partisan sentiments, so what are we to say if even an objective observer says the same?

Do Ward’s words not, in fact—in addition to the IDF data on past PIJ rocket failures and the supersonic acoustics of the strike—underscore that even an objective observer of the situation would have strongly presumed some IDF involvement in the explosion?

As further catalogued by the Threads feed attached to Proof, one of the first public defenses of the IDF offered by Israeli partisans and their allies, echoing early claims by the Israeli army, was that it had not been bombing that part of Gaza at all that night. We would later learn just how false this claim was—see below—but even early on, there were signs that major media could have reported on, but did not, presaging the coming realization that the IDF had not been honest with Western media:

The IDF did itself no favors by following up on its dubious claims about its theater of operations with yet another public relations disaster: it posted on Twitter a video it insisted showed the al-Ahli explosion—and, moreover, showed that the munition that caused it emanated from Gaza—but then had to remove the video because the time-stamp on it showed that it had nothing to do with the al-Ahli tragedy whatsoever.

For all the attacks on the PMH for allegedly jumping the gun on the events at al-Ahli—when it fact the PMH turned out to have offered the most sober, careful, and correct assessment of them—there’s been no media criticism whatsoever of the free passes Western media gave the IDF for its numerous early misstatements, despite the fact that these misstatements were not just inaccurate but jumped to such convenient conclusions so quickly that they palpably discredited the IDF. After all, what are we to say when an organization provides, with deliberation, video “evidence” supposedly chronicling an event that in fact has nothing to do with that event at all? Fake news? Disinformation? Propaganda? A cover-up?

Or a “false flag”—the term the IDF used early on to describe the al-Ahli explosion?

It is interesting, therefore, that in his first CNN interview after the PMH had put out what turned out to be accurate information and the IDF had been caught posting fake news, IDF Spokesman Jonathan Conricus called the entire al-Ahli affair “fake news”, said it might have been “staged”, and said there could have been “few” or even “no” casualties. Have the media critics now attacking major media forgotten that this is the sort of obscene propaganda Western media witnessed the IDF putting out firsthand? Is there some reason such deceit shouldn’t have shaken Western media outlets’ faith in IDF candor? And what about the prime minister of Israel himself falsely calling the al-Ahli explosion a PIJ “attack” on civilians before he had any information on it at all?

Matters soon got worse—again due to misstatements by the IDF and its advocates.

In fact, there are not and were never any Hamas or PIJ munitions at the hospital. But the very fact that both pro-Israeli partisans and even IDF agents themselves were saying so suggested that the IDF was gearing up for a shift from its “false flag” libel to one that conceded an Israeli airstrike but simply argued that the hospital was a valid military target. Consider this now-deleted post by former Benjamin Netanyahu aide Hananya Naftali, who remains an IDF reservist after leaving Netanyahu’s service just 120 days ago:

IDF agents had thus put out two fake stories at once, neither of which media critics believe should have altered media acceptance of IDF narratives: (1) the false claim that there had been no explosion at al-Ahli at all, nor any casualties, and (2) the false claim that if there had been any such explosion, yes, it would surely have been the IDF, but only because (as in fact was not the case) there were Hamas munitions in the hospital.

Given Naftali’s affiliation with both Netanyahu and the IDF, his statement could have been—and by some, was—taken as a confirmation of the separate preliminary claims and observations made variously by Hamas, the PMH, and CNN’s Clarissa Ward. Even Conricus’s gruesomely false statement about there having been no deadly explosion at al-Ahli would have been seen by most historians, attorneys, human rights advocates, journalists, television producers, politicians, and partisans as an obvious indication of “consciousness of guilt”—an idea we get from criminal law that suggests that those who know they have done wrong often act oddly in public as part of their efforts to deflect attention from themselves (with the ironic effect of drawing more attention to themselves). IDF’s chief spokesman asking Americans to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears on live air on CNN was so bizarre that it met in every particular what a former federal criminal investigator and former criminal defense attorney like me thinks of when I think of consciousness of guilt, a thing I’ve seen up close many times.

It was at this moment, when major media had only attributed unequivocal claims of an Israeli airstrike to the PMH and/or Hamas militants, but when all the evidence seemed to confirm these allegations, that the New York Times published the first audio of the event, which can be heard here (turn audio up to hear the supersonic acoustics):

What followed were a slew of videos on social media confirming that this is not what a small, homemade PIJ rocket sounds like as it strikes a target—but that it is similar to what an Israeli airstrike sounds like.

So Proof conducted an analysis of Israeli airstrike locations. Was it true that the IDF had never struck a Gazan hospital before? Was it true that IDF airstrikes had never hit in the area around al-Ahli? The answers, sadly, were a very clear “no” and “no.”

This was followed by an outright denial of responsibility by PIJ, which contrasted with the (in paraphrase) “we’ll have to get back to you” that had come from the IDF.

Oddly, this statement turned out to be broadly true. While it is believed that the PIJ was in fact firing rockets at the time, it was doing so several miles from the hospital, at a cemetery on the Gaza coast. Moreover, it is clear that Daoud Shehab, in referring to the possibility that the al-Quds Brigades were operating “in the area” of the al-Ahli Hospital, was merely responding to just-released audio by the IDF, which claimed to represent a confirmation by Hamas militants unaffiliated with PIJ about there being a PIJ rocket installation on hospital grounds “behind the hospital.”

Not only did this latter IDF claim turn out to be untrue, but a Channel 4 investigation would reveal that the IDF-provided audio was a fake—an “edited” and “manipulated” splicing together of two different audio files—that not only included a mistranslation that turned a rumor (a discussion of what “they” were saying about the explosion) into a confession (with “they” being mistranslated as “we”), but (a) involved individuals from an organization the IDF had no evidence had anything to do with the al-Ahli blast, as PIJ is a rival of Hamas and there is no reason for Hamas to know what PIJ is up to at any given moment, and still worse (b) appeared to be an attempt, again, to leave open the possibility that Naftali had been right and that the hospital was a valid military target—which perhaps, at least theoretically, it might have been, if PIJ was launching rockets from near hospital grounds. But, contra the spliced audio, it wasn’t.

The IDF would later change its story and claim the munition that hit the al-Ahli was launched from miles away, but its early dissembling explains why the PIJ denial was worded as it was—and why, on the terms under which it was issued, it was accurate.

Still, despite all this, Proof wrote that “we must reserve judgment”, as by then the IDF had rolled out its new theory: that a PIJ rocket fired from miles away had exploded in midair (but somehow retained all its flammable fuel anyway), and had then fallen to Earth with—somehow—the supersonic acoustics heard on the New York Times video.

During this pause to reserve judgment as the IDF attempted to substantiate its claim, Proof published the following analysis on Threads:

The findings in the second post were particularly timely: the IDF had hit hospitals in the days preceding the explosion at al-Ahli; the IDF had also hit another type of so-called “target” that it is a war crime to bomb, that being a refugee camp; and those who huddled at the al-Ahli were clearly right to do so, as the evacuation routes the IDF had been urging northern Gazans to follow had in fact been bombed mercilessly by the IDF both before and after the evacuation order.

By dawn on Wednesday morning, Western media’s narrative had changed to favor the IDF explanation for the event without cataloging any of the misstatements, deceit, and/or propaganda it was—by then—clear the IDF had deliberately provided to them.

Daylight brought photos and video of the impact crater in the al-Ahli parking lot that the IDF had said didn’t exist, but media merely focused on its comparatively small size. Burn damage on buildings and broken roof tiles were taken not as evidence of the oddly large reach of the explosion, but the idea that the PMH had misled the West into thinking hospital buildings had been struck when they hadn’t (though even the IDF admitted the “hospital compound” had been hit by a munition). And in fact the photographs media released did show building damage; reports of a collapsed roof in an operating theater inside the hospital were not (and have never been) contradicted; there’s no evidence of any formal PMH claim that a hospital building itself had been destroyed; and El País reports that “videos…taken from inside the Al Ahli facilities also reveal damage to the facades of some of the center’s lower buildings, including a Baptist church”). Instead of all this, Westerns news consumers were told that the forensic evidence at the scene was consistent with a munition flying in a simple arc from the southwest to the hospital, which in fact—we would learn—it likely didn’t.

But the new evidence, wrong and/or misleading as it was, seemed to support the IDF narrative, and launched major recriminations against U.S. major media for “getting wrong” an event that had only happened hours earlier and that it had drawn no final conclusions about. Indeed, the event was so recent that one could argue that the only acts of irresponsibility in play were the words of those who declared all investigation into the incident at the al-Ahli over the moment the IDF released its first evidentiary packet to the press. Why? Because everything in that packet turned out to be untrue.

Tracking Major Media Reporting on the Explosion

The best way to proceed, now, is to look at how major media outlets have addressed abiding claims from the Palestinians and the Israelis with respect to the blast at al-Ahli: that is, to consider at once both the Israeli claim that a Qassam (Hamas) or al-Quds (PIJ) rocket whose engine exploded in midair accidentally hit the al-Ahli, and the two leading explanations for the event put forward by Palestinian sources both in and out of Hamas and PIJ—either that the hospital was deliberately hit by an artillery shell emanating from Israel or that the hospital was accidentally hit by an IDF Tamir interceptor rocket whose original target had just exploded and therefore couldn’t be located anymore.

The idea that the blast had been caused by a U.S.-provided IDF bomb of either the 500-pound, 1,000-pound, or 2,000-pound variety, with a bolted-on JDAM guidance system (this, a “JDAM”)—which, if true, would have been a sign of a deliberate non-artillery IDF airstrike—was more or less discarded by both sides as a discussion point early on. The size of the explosion at the hospital and the width and depth of the impact crater just wasn’t consistent with such an explanation, and (it must be said) it’s a mark of a desire to learn the truth that Palestinian sources turned away from this theory once it was deemed an impossibility.

Just so, initial allegations from Israeli partisans that Hamas or PIJ could have planted a car bomb at the scene as a “false flag” to falsely implicate the IDF in a terror attack, and an alternative possibility floated by others to the effect that there was a munitions depot under the hospital that had suffered an accident and thereby caused the blast, were quickly set aside by the IDF as there was no evidence to support those claims, either. (And as we have seen, the initial IDF claim that the munition that caused the al-Ahli blast had both originated from and exploded on hospital grounds was eventually disavowed by the IDF itself.)

With such false suppositions out of the way, we can analyze the foremost major-media reports regarding the al-Ahli tragedy as to the three plausible possibilities that remain:

1. A broken Qassam (Hamas) or al-Quds (PIJ) rocket accidentally hitting al-Ahli.

2. An errant Tamir Interceptor (IDF) accidentally hitting the hospital.

3. An intentionally fired Israeli artillery shell (IDF) hitting the hospital.

The first of these options would likely qualify as a war crime by Hamas or PIJ, as the indiscriminate firing of unguided rockets from Gaza has long been deemed such by the international community because these launches make no attempt to distinguish between military or civilian targets, and indeed civilian targets are struck much more often than military ones.

The second of these options would certainly further enflame Palestinian sentiment against the current IDF offensive in Gaza, but wouldn’t constitute a war crime—as Israel has a right of self-defense, and that includes attempting in good faith to shoot down rockets headed toward its territory.

The third of these options would likely qualify as a war crime by the IDF because it would constitute the deliberate targeting of a civilian hospital facility.

All of the foregoing is complicated by an additional confirmed fact: that IDF forces already probably perpetrated a war crime with respect to al-Ahli Hospital, deliberately striking it with an artillery shell on Saturday, October 14, 2023; the strike caused four casualties (all woundings). The IDF then acknowledged this war crime by calling the hospital, depending on the major-media source, either (a) three times the following day, or (b) once each on October 14 and October 15 and October 16, in each case to confess that the October 14 strike had been a “warning” for the doctors, nurses, and staff of the hospital to immediately vacate the building. The urgency of such warnings—putting aside their inhumanity, as no doctor, nurse, or hospital administrator would willingly abandon patients to die of thirst, starvation, immolation, or building collapse—suggests the IDF saw the al-Ahli as a potential future target for military operations.

And yet, in a war that has already killed over 7,000 Gazan civilians in just 20 days, the four casualties caused by the October 14 strike—however unacceptable they may be under international law—are likely to be ignored if it can be shown that the much larger strike 72 hours later, one that attracted so much international attention, was in fact the result of Palestinian actions. (It is less clear how the world would react if the blast was found to be the result of an errant Tamir interceptor missile, an accidental strike that most Palestinians would perhaps understandably still be quite unlikely to forgive or forget.)

There’s also the additional complication of the casualty count attendant to this tragic incident, which must be addressed again simply for the purpose of placing this issue temporarily to the side while addressing how major media assessed the highly variated narratives of causation put forward by the IDF, Hamas, and the PIJ. Even as the precise al-Ahli casualty count remains unclear, the fact of this being an authentic mass-casualty event is no longer a matter of dispute and cannot be treated as such.

Shortly after the explosion, when the whole Arab world, indeed much of the world regardless of religion, was reeling from the news of it—remembering that, as a percent-of-population, the apparent al-Ahli death toll equates to “twenty 9/11s” just as much as the attacks of October 7 do—the IDF, through the Conricus statement already noted above, made the grave mistake of calling the al-Ahli blast a “false flag” that in fact may have involved few or even no casualties on the al-Ahli compound.

At the time, the Palestinians were still collecting pieces of dead children in body bags without any imminent hope of determining which body piece went with which body, so many were the dead and maimed in the formerly crowded al-Alhi parking lot. They surely had in mind, as they completed this unspeakably grim task, that the al-Ahli parking lot had only become a crowded refugee camp because of an IDF evacuation order the United Nations had decried as impossible and inhuman from the moment of its announcement. So the initial casualty count provided by the IDF—more or less zero—was not just wildly false, but about as offensive as could have been published to the international community at the time.

The PMH initially said there were “dozens” dead, then an “estimated” 200 to 300 fatalities, the latter an estimate confirmed by non-Hamas al-Shifa Hospital administrator Dr. Muhammad Abu Salima, who reported 250 confirmed deaths—a figure well within the range thereafter reeleased by the USIC (“100 to 300”).

The PMH, headquartered at the October 17 blast’s receiving hospital—as noted, the aforementioned al-Shifa—thereafter changed its estimate to “500,” but at a time when Dr. Salima was using that exact figure as a total casualty count, suggesting that in reporting out this new PMH data Western media did what it had already done several times by that point: translated a casualty count as though it were a death toll.

Having said all this, it does appear that something thereafter happened—whether it was the intercession of Hamas’s militant wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, or something else, such as a decision to switch from death tolls to casualty counts without making the switch clear to Western media—that caused the PMH’s early accurate assessments to become inaccurate or at least more confusing. Western news consumers who had by then been told by the USIC that there were “100 to 300” dead at al-Ahli briefly saw a figure from the PMH (“833”) that seemed inflated if it was indeed (and it might not have been) a death toll. That figure later settled to its current resting place, “471,” but problematically, Hamas’s militant wing is now rejecting all calls from reporters to see evidence substantiating that figure.

In sum, we can say that the IDF casualty count was both false and offensive; the PMH count was for some time both timely and accurate; and then something happened—possibly innocent, possibly not—that caused the PMH counts to begin to seem wildly off the mark (and, moreover, outside the ability of Western journalists to confirm).

So neither side has done anything to cover itself in glory as to casualty figures other than those civil servants at the PMH who originally spoke to the media post-blast. Because these non-combatant public officials are technically part of Hamas, and because later claims that may have come from a different wing of Hamas were false or at least appear to be so, and because the IDF has had some success in leaving the impression that its first false claims about casualty counts were never made at all, most of the discourse online on the matter of the al-Ahli casualty count simply says one thing: the Palestinians lied about it. Yet the truth, in this as in so many other events and crises related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is far more complicated.

Indeed, the same is true as we try to put in perspective the events of October 7 and the blast at the al-Ahli Hospital that this report is focused on. We have considered, above, how percent-of-population analyses—first urged on us by the IDF and the Netanyahu administration—position both events as considerably more destabilizing than 9/11. Putting aside the complications that always attend to analyses of this particular breed (for instance, ground troops haven’t attacked the American mainland since the U.S. Civil War, so the events of September 11 were experienced with that history in mind; by comparison, the last ground engagements in Israel prior to October 7 occurred less than a decade ago, during the 2014 Gaza War that killed thousands of Palestinians) it was reasonable for the Israeli government to try to put October 7 in terms the West could understand; but surely noncombatant Gazans have the right to do the same?

And by this analysis, the al-Ahli tragedy—simply as a matter of death toll and casualty count—outstrips in scope the horrific events of October 7. But even more than this, it occurs in the context of the Gazans experiencing exponentially more civilian death on their much-smaller-than-Israel land than their neighbors to the east. If we’re to heed Netanyahu on the matter of how to assess tragedies; if we’re to value the life of a Palestinian the same as we do the life of an Israeli; it becomes clear that not only was the al-Ahli tragedy larger in scope than October 7, but it came upon the Gazans and their allies after “twenty 10/7s” had already occurred inside Gaza in the ten days prior.

While of course these two horrific events can’t for now be readily analogized because October 7 was an unprovoked war crime and we do not yet know what October 17, as indicated above there was every reason on October 17 for the Palestinians to believe that what they had just experienced was also a war crime. A deliberate strike of any kind on a working hospital building adjacent to a refugee camp can never be deemed a just response to any provocation, especially when no military strikes have emanated from that hospital or that refugee camp. So one could imagine the Palestinians being in as much a state of shock and horror on October 17 as the Israelis had been ten days earlier, and perhaps more so given that while Hamas is a known terrorist group that the international community expects may engage in terrorism at any moment, the IDF is supposed to be a disciplined fighting force that complies with all international laws.

The important distinction to be made here, of course, is that whereas the the Israelis immediately knew—and had no reason whatsoever to doubt—that Hamas terrorists were responsible for the horrors of October 7, it was not immediately clear who had been responsible for October 17, for all that the statements emanating from the Arab world in the wake of the al-Ahli tragedy instantly assumed it to be the work of the IDF.

So again we must ask, were there reasons for this initial presumption—whatever the analysis presented to Proof readers below might conclude? The only answer an ethical journalist can offer to this query is yes.

As noted above, the al-Ahli had already provably been struck by the IDF just 72 hours earlier; the IDF had acknowledged this strike, calling it a “warning”; the hospital had gotten three phone calls from the IDF in the hours just before a second munition hit its compound on October 17, with each call telling doctors, nurses and administrators to abandon their bed-ridden patients immediately and urgently (the understandable implication being that the urgency was attributable to a coming airstrike); Al Jazeera later confirmed that at least four Israeli airstrikes hit the area around the hospital in the ten minutes prior to the blast; it’s now been confirmed (and there is much more analysis on this below) that the munition that hit the hospital indeed came from the direction of Israel, so any eyewitness to the event who was not killed by it would have immediately spread the word that the seeming attack had come from the direction of Gaza’s then-current tormentors; the acoustics that accompanied the blast, as quickly published by a video confirmed by the New York Times and taken just a matter of yards away from the blast site, suggested an intact munition moving at supersonic speed rather than an unpowered (engine-free) piece of falling shrapnel; the IDF had struck a number of hospitals with airstrikes in the days preceding the al-Ahli explosion; the IDF had previously falsely accused PIJ rocket failures for its own war crimes, as was quickly observed online by Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC, a fact of course already known to Gazans and one that might understandably have led them to believe that the IDF felt it could commit war crimes with impunity by blaming them on Palestinians; and even the IDF acknowledges that 108 prior PIJ rocket failures had led to a total of just four deaths, whereas this single event—it was clear from the moment it happened—had led to exponentially more, and therefore did not leave anyone on the ground thinking it could be just the failure of a comparatively small homemade munition.

This last note is particularly important, as certainly so many Hamas and PIJ rockets have fallen in civilian areas in Gaza that those of us in the United States might quickly assume the first presumption of any Gazan when an explosion occurs to be that it’s a failed rocket launch by a local militant group. But in fact, for as frequently as Hamas and PIJ rockets fail, not only are Israeli airstrikes and artillery strikes significantly more common, but they are exponentially—exponentially—more deadly, and therefore far more in keeping with the carnage and loss of human life that was visible at the al-Ahli Hospital the moment the raging fire at the hospital compound was put out.

In fact, there is nothing we know of in, recorded Gazan history, that offers a precedent for the failure of the engine of a small homemade rocket killing hundreds of people.

All of which takes us to an observation a Proof reader made that bears repeating: this horrific tragedy must be said to be a finger in the eye of Occam’s Razor.

The only way a tragedy like this unfolds is if a series of unfortunate and unlikely events happen all at once and in quick succession: an IDF evacuation order that is so preposterous in its scope and proposed timeframe that it leads to general chaos and panic in northern Gaza, and sends civilians who don’t believe they can abide by the order in time running to local civilian facilities they believe will keep them safe from Israeli airstrikes; the subsequent creation of an impromptu refugee camp in the parking lot of the al-Ahli Hospital; The apparent presence of cars in that parking lot that still had fuel in their tanks; the fact that a wildly disproportionate number of Gazans (to a degree that would bewilder any American demographer) are women, children, and the elderly, who are reported by military analysts to be particularly susceptible to injury or death from powerful concussive events; and the fact that the blast occurred at night in an area the IDF had been deprivung of electricity, making it a chaotic scene even notwithstanding that new refugee camps are often chaotic scenes.

And of course the chaos of the immediate post-blast moment was more horrifying than even the panicked evacuation and emergency-shelter processes that preceded it.

The above-cited tweet by until-recently Benjamin Netanyahu aid Hananya Naftali not only stated with unwavering confidence that the event was an Israeli airstrike, but even went so far as to explain why the airstrike had occurred: because (Naftali falsely opined) the IDF, an organization to which he still belongs, had learned that there were Hamas militants hiding munitions on hospital grounds. The chaos caused by this claim in Gaza was beyond anything we experienced in the West, of course, as those on the ground at the al-Ahli knew, as we in the West at that point did not, that the IDF had made three phone calls to the hospital in the preceding 72 hours which likewise implied such a “finding” about Hamas by IDF officials. So Naftali’s claim would have seemed triply plausible. Moreover, in just the 600 seconds proceeding the blast, the refugees at the hospital would have heard not one or two or three but four distinct Israeli aerial bombardments in the area, making it an absurdity for anyone on-site to think that a fifth such explosion had come from Hamas or the PIJ rather than the IDF.

Indeed, for anyone not now in Gaza to sit at home and imply that quick assignment of blame to the IDF by those on the ground at al-Ahli was an act of prejudice or simply unfettered fury is to not just ignore but cruelly cast aside every circumstance around the blast. The mere fact that the blast came after a week of non-stop IDF bombing of Gaza confirms that the survivors of the blast, desperately searching for live bodies in piles of appendages and dead women and children, were well-primed to believe that what they were witnessing was the aftermath of yet another seemingly indiscriminate bombing of innocents.

Compiling Reliable Major-Media Sources on the Blast

Approximately 48 hours after the al-Ahli explosion, Proof began linking to the earliest major-media analyses of the event, all of which relied on geolocation, time-stamping, forensic evidence, testimonial evidence, documentary evidence, and/or expert opinion from experts in everything from munitions to acoustics, crime-scene preservation to the historical tactics and strategies used by both the IDF and Hamas.

Here are links to essential reading on the al-Ahli blast that Proof posted on Threads:

1. BBC: analysis

2. The Middle East Eye (UK): analysis

3. The Archbishop of Canterbury: statement*

4. Channel 4 (UK): analysis

5. CNN: analysis**

6. Mother Jones: commentary

7. The Bulwark: commentary

8. Al Jazeera: analysis

9. Al Jazeera: further analysis

10. The Guardian: audio and video

11. France24: analysis

12. Australian Broadcasting Network: analysis

13. The Times of Israel: audio***

14. BBC: further analysis

15. Channel 4 (UK): further analysis

16. Al Jazeera: digital investigation

17. CNN: further analysis^

18. The Wall Street Journal: analysis

19. The New York Times: analysis

20. The New York Times: further analysis

*The Archbishop of Canterbury is the head of the Anglican Church, which owns the al-Ahli Hospital.

**Proof cites this reporting because it is newsworthy, but noted at the time the many issues with it. The issues are as follows: (1) Bellingcat, the BBC, and Channel 4 had all by the time of this report confirmed a small impact crater, contra IDF claims; (2) an earlier strike on the hospital had, by the time of this CNN report, been confirmed by both the Archbishop of Canterbury and a BBC interview with a priest in the local diocese, so that information had clearly not been sourced from the PMH; (3) the New York Times had by this time quoted the head of the receiving hospital, al-Shifa, as confirming that 500+ people had been killed or wounded in the explosion, meaning that a “casualty” tally of 500 or more would no longer been exclusively attributable to the PMH; (4) the Middle East Eye had by this point confirmed that the IDF intercept had serious translation errors in it, and therefore it would’ve been better had CNN not referenced it at all; (5) CNN for some reason continued to air only the video of the moment of the blast from the New York Times, not the audio, thereby obscuring critical acoustic evidence of what had happened; (6) and the cable network’s interview with Dr. Fadel Na’eem was confusing, as he said he “found an overwhelming scene” when he completed a surgical procedure he was doing at the time of the explosion but does not say if the scene was outside the operating theater or outside the hospital itself. Finally, (7) CNN didn’t note, and to my knowledge has never noted, that a former aide to Netanyahu called the explosion a known IDF airstrike before retracting his claim.

***The IDF-provided audio at this link has since been debunked. I offer it here in the interest of completeness.

^The Proof response to this reporting can be found here.

The links above to the statement from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the analysis by Channel 4 were particularly important because they established ten new facts that hadn’t been available when pro-IDF partisans had declared their al-Ahli probe closed (and began shaming those who, as they put it, had gotten the story “wrong”):

1. The IDF indeed bombed or shelled the al-Ahli Hospital on Saturday, October 14.

2. That bombing or shelling indeed had caused casualties (four wounded).

3. Following that IDF bombing or shelling, the IDF made three calls to the al-Ahli.

4. Those calls admitted that the October 14 event had been a “warning.”

5. The IDF ordered all doctors, nurses, and administrators at al-Ahli to evacuate.

6. Staff refused to do this because it would have condemned their patients to death.

7. Staff had these events in mind when an explosion occurred on the hospital grounds just 48 hours after the IDF confession of a “warning” bombing or shelling (and its implication that immediate evacuation of the hospital was required due to some unspecific upcoming exigency).

8. While it was originally thought that the Sunday, October 15 calls to the al-Ahli were simply the routine post-evacuation order calls the IDF made to at least 22 hospitals in northern Gaza, that now appears not to have been the case.

9. Doppler audio analyses (coupled with data on microphone directionality) and forensic burn analyses suggests that what whatever hit the hospital was moving from east to west—from the direction of Israel toward militant positions inside Gaza—rather than west to east.

10. It is therefore possible that eyewitnesses at the scene were relaying to others that they knew whatever had hit the hospital grounds had come from the direction of Israel.

The first items in the list above were soon enough confirmed by the New York Times:

This critical information was thereafter confirmed yet again by the Los Angeles Times.

Widespread Criticism of Major Media As “Anti-Israel” Begins, Though Any Errors Clearly Favored the IDF

The first comprehensive analysis of casualties at al-Ahli by the New York Times was wildly wrong.

While the Times insisted that “American intelligence agencies have assessed that a deadly blast at a Gaza hospital on Tuesday killed 100 to 300 people, [which is] a more conservative estimate than that given by officials in Gaza”, in fact the first PMH assessment (“dozens”) was less than the U.S. assessment; the second PMH assessment (“200”) was in essence exactly the same as the U.S. assessment; the third PMH assessment (“200 to 300”) was in the same range as had been provided by the U.S. assessment; the fourth PMH assessment (“500”) came out at the same time that al-Shifa was reporting “over 500” total casualties—killed plus wounded—so we can’t know how to assess its accuracy; and the fifth and sixth tallies put by the PMH (“833” and “471”) came so long after the events at al-Ahli that, by then, one wonders if the al-Qassam Brigades had temporarily taken over comms for the PMH and were putting out information-war rhetoric to match the IDF’s rather than public health data.

That the first four tallies put out publicly by PMH were less than or equal to the U.S. assessment, even as the first and only IDF attempt to assess the scene at al-Ahli was information-war propaganda—the IDF’s Conricus telling CNN that there were “few” or possibly even “no” casualties at the hospital—underscores that the PMH was from the start the more reliable data source as compared to the IDF. In fact, one wonders whether, had the IDF not started publishing a massive wave of what is now known to be disinformation post-blast, the al-Qassam Brigades would have left the PMH public health data well enough alone and not attempted to expand the truth of the matter to fit what had—by that point in the multiple news cycles that encompassed the al-Ahli explosion—become unambiguously an information war. In any case, if the IDF is not to be seen as discredited for giving the most erroneous and indeed disingenuous data on the al-Ahli blast, it’s hard to understand how anything but anti-Palestinian bigotry could explain declaring the PMH no longer credible when its first four public data releases were spot on. (Even its sixth and final figure, “471,” may still represent a total casualty count—killed plus wounded—and therefore it’s entirely possible that it’s correct and that only a briefly assayed and then withdrawn “833” was misinformation).

And yet where America stands today, on October 28, 2023, is that President Biden has just announced that “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using”, and this misdirected circumspection has been followed up by a new article in The Bulwark entitled “Don’t Trust the Gaza Health Ministry”, a piece whose author Will Saletan introduced it on Threads by saying “Biden is right…the ministry and its data can’t be trusted, particularly after [the PMH’s] persistent misreporting about the Al Ahli hospital tragedy.” Unsurprisingly, Saletan repeats the canard that the very first statement from the PMH insisted “the Israeli airstrike had killed at least 500 people.” That this is false doesn’t change that it is now what most Americans believe.

Saletan certainly has an uphill battle in his effort to convince Americans that they should accept IDF data about what’s happening inside Gaza over anything from the PMH. As the Washington Post reports, “news outlets and the United Nations rely on Gaza’s Health Ministry for death tolls”, adding that the IDF has “closed [Gaza] to outside journalists”—meaning independent verification of death tolls has become an impossibility not because of the PMH but because of the IDF—and that “the U.S. State Department cited [PMH] death toll statistics in a report published only a few months ago.”

So what do those outside the American government say? They too trust the PMH, according to the Post: “Many experts consider figures provided by the ministry reliable, given its access, sources and accuracy in past statements.” For instance, Human Rights Watch told the Post that “Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable. In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.”

This last point is important in assessing not only what Saletan is saying right now but what we’ve been hearing lately from even such a leader in major media as the Times.

If the IDF can use the al-Ahli incident as an instrument to convince the West not to take PMH death toll data seriously, it may well be the biggest IDF propaganda victory this century—an overnight transformation of the PMH from an entity known to have exhibited “accuracy in past statements” to one that is now ignored despite the fact that its data on the al-Ahli tragedy were largely correct.

But even with the inaccuracies in the first New York Times analysis of the situation at al-Ahli, which inaccuracies are now parroted by lesser outlets like The Bulwark, one acknowledgment from an entity still deemed significant and reliable by both parties seems to have been conveniently overlooked: “U.S. intelligence officials cautioned that they do not fully understand what happened at the hospital and are continuing to collect information.”

Readers of this report will soon find that this buried Times lede is a textbook instance of foreshadowing.

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Essays at the Threads Feed Linked to This Publication

Before we turn to the big twist in this investigation—the next section of this report—I want to, at the request of readers of the Threads feed associated with Proof, republish here the essays I initially posted on that platform as all these events were unfolding.

Essay 1: “Bad Faith” (Wednesday, October 18, 2023)

{lightly edited for readability, content remains untouched except for bracketed language}

The amount of bad faith I’ve seen online in the last twenty-four hours is staggering.

And yes—while I hate this phrase, and I only use it if it’s accurate—the bad faith is coming from “both sides.”

It’s difficult to find even one post on social media that’s accurate with respect to the events of the last day in Israel, whether it’s a poster confusing Hamas and PIJ, fumbling the known definition of words like “casualty” or “false flag”, or exhibiting confusion about what counts as a “source.” It’s a total mess.

So I’ll try to disentangle fact from fiction here.

Hamas did not cause the strike on the al-Ahli Hospital. According to both the IDF and the United States government, PIJ—Palestinian Islamic Jihad—did.

Yet it is also the case that no major media organization in the United States has accepted the identical IDF and Biden administration explanations for the incident.

All major media organizations are saying, instead, that they cannot independently confirm what happened one way or another. Just so, the United Nations has not accepted the IDF (or U.S. government) explanation for the incident. The United Nations says, instead, that it will be launching its own investigation on an expedited basis.

But one thing no one is saying is that the hospital was bombed for the purpose of killing civilians. The IDF says PIJ did so by accident; Hamas and PIJ imply that the IDF wrongly adjudicated the hospital—or some location in its immediate environs—as a legitimate military target. Given that [the IDF says] there was a PIJ missile battery in a cemetery beside the hospital, and that the IDF was aware of the battery, and given that the IDF has had launched strikes on and near hospitals before, both theories have superficial credibility.

Even so, certain terms have a meaning and can be—and are being—misused.

The IDF is wrong to call the blast at the hospital a “false flag,” because that would imply it was premeditated (which the IDF admits it was not); that there were no or few casualties (which independent sources contradict); and that there was never any good-faith basis for anyone to fear that the IDF had hit a hospital. Rather, the IDF seems to be suggesting that dozens of Gazan civilians having nothing to do with Hamas formed an impromptu conspiracy about an event that had just occurred.

The facts, of course, reject this.

Just so, certain words, like “casualty,” have a meaning and can be—and are being—misused. The definition of that term includes not just killed but wounded (and many other categories identified by the United States Armed Forces that are not relevant here). The initial casualty estimate came from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, a non-militant civil-service entity, not from Hamas militants. That estimate was 200 to 300; much later it was changed to 500. An independent source at the receiving hospital, al-Shifa Hospital, thereafter confirmed there were 500+ “casualties” in total.

In the same vein, certain words—like “source”—have a special meaning in journalism that must be preserved.

While some types of facts a journalist may seek to confirm via geolocation, time-stamping, visual confirmation, forensic data, or multiple sourcing, casualty data—here, killed plus wounded—for a receiving hospital is correctly confirmed by interviewing an independent, non-combatant hospital administrator or a sufficient proxy for same. The New York Times did that here to confirm the casualty count, yet nevertheless the IDF continues to make false claims about the casualties at al-Ahli.

We must likewise remember that PIJ munitions are comparatively small and make comparatively small explosions. You can Google videos confirming this for yourself.

The blast at the hospital—as confirmed by the New York Times in a video it geolocated—was a big one, suggesting a munition moving at great speed. This caused many to understandably suspect, but not confirm, a JDAM-guided IDF bomb. But there’s an alternate explanation: a falling failed munition with residual fuel hitting a car or cars that had gas in their tanks in the parking lot of the al-Ahli.

Certainly we know, from endless videos published by major media, that many Gazan refugees were sheltering in the parking lot of the hospital. CNN had already reported that “thousands” of refugees were on hospital grounds. This readily explains how a falling failed munition striking gas tanks from parked cars could (a) create a large explosion, and (b) cause mass casualties—both killed and wounded—consistent with what Times sources say. This would also make the IDF claims of false casualty counts incredibly offensive.

This said, there can be no doubt that Hamas and PIJ rockets do often fail. And there can be [litte] doubt, as we’ve seen [what appears to be] video of it, that at least one PIJ rocket did fail on October 17 in the vicinity of the al-Ahli Hospital. The IDF admits it was aware of that particular barrage of Gazan rockets, and implies that it planned to use its Iron Dome to intercept it.

While Iron Dome doesn’t generally hit rockets on ascent, it’s hypothetically possible to do so—and certainly doing so could cause a rocket to blow apart. But we have no evidence that that’s what happened here.

There is nevertheless good reason to be skeptical of the IDF’s statements. For example it hasn’t allowed journalists into Gaza, which suggests that it doesn’t want non-Gazan reporting in Gaza. And given that both the IDF and its partisans habitually say that all Gazans are under Hamas control, keeping non-Gazan journalists out of Gaza creates a situation in which only IDF declarations need be accepted. And of course—this aside—the IDF has also killed thousands of Gazan civilians in the last ten days, which quite understandably and justifiably hurts its credibility.

This doesn’t meant that Hamas, PIJ, or even civil-service entities that are part of the non-militant wing of Hamas—like PMH—are significantly credible. In fact, the lack of credibility to be found in all of the available partisan sources in Israel and Gaza is one reason why journalists covering that area (much like journalists everywhere else) must use testimonial and documentary evidence rather than simply the reputation of one group or another to report on events. No partisans get the benefit of the doubt in the midst of a war; ultimately, the evidence shows what it shows and journalists must focus on that abiding maxim.

Under that maxim, the early evidence for the IDF certainly looked bad. This was in small part because one source (the New York Times) accidentally published a photo that seemed to show major hospital damage, but frankly that same source also published an accurate video of the blast site that damaged IDF credibility because it showed not just a huge blast well beyond what’s commonly associated with Hamas or PIJ rockets but also a blast that was accompanied by supersonic acoustics not usually seen with smaller, Gazan-militant munitions.

But admittedly, the IDF did thereafter turn the tide of evidence somewhat. It showed UAV footage of damage to the al-Ahli parking lot but not (at least not apparently) the hospital buildings themselves. And it shared what it said was an audio intercept of two Hamas militants discussing what they’d been hearing: that a PIJ rocket had failed and fallen on the al-Ahli Hospital. Yet the IDF did itself no favors by calling the tragic incident a “false flag” and saying that the PMH casualty counts were made up. That was both offensive and untrue—even if the IDF had nothing to do with the hospital blast.

Yet journalism—as I know from having been both a working journalist for thirty years as well as a journalism professor at an R1 flagship public research university—does not shape its reporting on the basis of public relations mistakes. The IDF’s public relations as to the al-Ahli explosion has been atrocious from start to finish, but that doesn’t mean the IDF struck the hospital. It simply means that the IDF inflamed passions against it internationally after there was some early evidence suggesting it might have not wanted to do so on the basis of the actions it took Tuesday night.

What happened at the al-Ahli Hospital at once matters—striking a working hospital, as the IDF did in Beit Hanoun a few days prior to October 17, is a war crime—but it also does not, inasmuch as whether or not the IDF killed hundreds in this particular hospital, all sides appear to agree that the IDF has killed thousands of Gazan civilians over the last ten days and that it has done so while blockading Gaza from receiving food, water, fuel, electricity, or medical supplies (not to mention blocking women and children from evacuating Gaza through the Rafah border crossing). All this remains a fact, and an urgently relevant one, whether or not the IDF was behind the al-Ahli blast.

As things stand now, the most likely explanation for what happened at the hospital—though, to be clear, media and United Nations investigations must still be waited on, as neither Hamas nor the PIJ nor the IDF nor even America’s federal government can be deemed neutral investigators—is that a PIJ rocket either failed on its own or was blown up by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system in midair, and because the PIJ rocket had residual fuel in it when it hit the al-Ahli parking lot, and because there were cars with gas in them there along with hundreds of refugees taking shelter, the PIJ munition caused a surprisingly big explosion and an unusual number of casualties.

While the IDF will rightly say that if PIJ hadn’t fired rockets anywhere near hospital grounds this wouldn’t have happened, the PMH could rightly say in response that if the IDF had let women and children flee Gaza through the Rafah border crossing and also given more time for noncombatant Gazan men to flee northern Gaza, there would have been no refugees at all in the hospital parking lot and this event, even if had it still unfolded on the same date and at the same time, may have caused no casualties.

Both sides are justified in making such arguments.

But where we are now on social media is that everyone wants to prematurely declare the villain in the al-Ahli tragedy. Some will point at the IDF, others Hamas, others PIJ, others the PMH, others the Biden administration or major media or even the Egyptian government—which many people understandably feel could be doing more right now. Some might focus, instead, on Hezbollah, arguing that it has put the IDF into a frantic two-front situation by firing rockets south from Lebanon. And of course there are those who will never forgive the United Nations and England for negligently partitioning the Ottoman Empire a century ago. The blame can and does goes on and on. But I think major media has done the best it can; like any human endeavor errors sometimes occur. I primarily focus on the fact, here, that the parties in this war that are “partisans” have acted like partisans and are likely to continue to do so.

So what do we do now?

Well, I know what we don’t do.

We don’t suddenly pretend that Israeli partisans who have been silent about civilian deaths in Gaza have the moral high ground. Journalists are right to feel that such partisans are not objective, will never admit any IDF error even when or as it has been robustly confirmed, and are in no position to lecture anyone about objectivity. Just so, those who have been apologists for Hamas or PIJ terrorism either recently or ever—given how many innocent civilians terrorism has killed in the Middle East—do not get to cloak themselves in righteousness in the aftermath of highly dubious IDF actions.

Nor should media critics try to rewrite history to curry favor with partisans of any stripe. From the very beginning of the saga of the al-Ahli explosion, major media has accurately reported the claims being made by PMH and has never said, or implied, that it has come to its own independent conclusions about anything. It has instead been partisans on both sides (the militant wing of Hamas and the Israeli armed forces) who too quickly issued statements that turned out to be inaccurate. On the PIJ side, we saw a refusal of any responsibility and initial claims that al-Ahli hospital buildings had been hit hard; on the IDF side, we saw the refusal of an accurate casualty count and preposterous allegations of a “false flag” incident.

So were there any media errors at all in the early al-Ahli coverage? As far as I can tell, the New York Times may have accidentally posted a photo in its initial report that was not from the hospital site. But more importantly, CNN failed to push back on gross misstatements from IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus, whose false claims included switching between calling the PIJ rocket a PIJ rocket and a Hamas rocket, attacking PMH casualty counts, and raising silly fears of a possible false-flag conspiracy. By the same token, I do deem it a failure of major media to have not provided viewers with proper context regarding impermissible pre-al-Ahli IDF airstrikes. Such information would have contextualized Palestinians’ and other Arabs’ grave fears about IDF strikes.

What was not a media error was quickly reporting what the PMH claimed happened and framing it—as major media did—as simply a statement by the PMH about what it then believed had happened. That’s journalism. Some in America may wrongly think that events never get reported upon until they’re independently confirmed, but in fact media must report claims by government entities because such claims are newsworthy in themselves. Why? Because they can, do, and must lead to real-time investigations into whether the content of such claims are true. Which is what we’ve gotten over the last ten days.

If you’re reading this and your desire is for major media not to issue any report when a government makes a claim—unless, presumably, it’s a government you like, in which case all bets are off—the only thing you can do to ensure your sensibilities are never offended in this regard is turn your television off permanently. Because what you’re requesting simply isn’t journalism.

So no, it would not be accurate to say that major media “accepted” the PMH view of events by reporting it. Major media reported PMH’s claims and then began a realtime investigation of them—which is exactly what it should have done.

And as most of us know, investigations are messy.

So if you don’t like what you’re now hearing from this thirty-year working journalist and former journalism professor, that’s fine. We’re all human; we have emotions.

Especially right now.

There are surely other feeds on which less-qualified people will tell you things more in line with your existing views. And there are surely similarly or even more-qualified people out there who have no ethical code and will in consequence tell their readers—as I will not—whatever they want to hear. And needless to say there will always be non-journalist partisans willing to do the same.

Essay 2: “Retractions” (Wednesday, October 18, 2023)

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There’s some confusion about how retractions work in journalism, and when they are appropriate.

Any media outlet that reported that it independently confirmed IDF responsibility for the blast at the al-Ahli Hospital might indeed want to issue a “retraction” after the United Nations investigation is completed. While there may be Arab media outlets in this category, I have not seen any American ones—and that is where all the media criticism in the United States has thus far been directed. What U.S. media outlets have done so far is report the claims and evidence they have at the time they have them, while (as importantly) underscoring to viewers and readers that the news event being reported on is still developing.

If, as Yashar Ali has alleged, the New York Times did in fact accidentally publish a photograph of a building collapse unrelated to the al-Ahli hospital blast, a “correction” should be published. But it would indeed be a correction rather than a “retraction.” There’s a difference; in this case, I don’t believe reporting accompanied the Times photograph, so the Times would simply be alerting readers to the fact that it accidentally published [as a production error] an image unrelated to its news report.

Having said this, I know that there’s no reason—at this emotional time, when all of us are mourning civilian deaths—for anyone to heed a call, from me or anyone else, to “consider the journalists.” By way of analogy, I’ve tried homicide cases in the past, and while I know how gruelingly difficult and psychologically complex that is, I also do understand that no one follows media coverage of a murder trial thinking about the trial’s impact on the attorneys. So while I don’t say the following as a means of asking for empathy that I know isn’t forthcoming, I do want to say—as it’s simply stating a bald fact—that it isn’t easy to be a journalist at this moment.

If you’re on social media right now and your attitude toward what you’re now seeing happening in Israel is “screw all those people”—whatever side of the war the “people” you’re referring to are on—what you’re doing is categorically easier than what any working journalist is trying to do. This doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to your emotions and partisanship, because of course you are; but it does mean that you’re not similarly situated to those trying to practice ethical journalism in the midst of a war.

Essay 3: “Iron Dome” (Friday, October 20, 2023)

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This thread is partly informational—with a focus on the operation of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system—but it also offers new insight into recently disclosed evidence about the Tuesday blast at the al-Ahli Hospital.

The PMH [early on] estimated that the blast caused 200 to 300 deaths; the receiving hospital, Al-Shifa, has confirmed 250 dead. Total casualties—i.e., including wounded—are believed to be around 500, as the PMH estimated early on. Meanwhile, the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) preliminarily estimates somewhere between 100 and 300 dead.

The Tamir interceptors used in the Iron Dome system can travel anywhere from 2.5 miles to 42.5 miles to reach a target. More important for our purposes here, however, is the fact that Tamirs appear to exclusively intercept incoming rockets at either the apex of a rocket’s flight or, far more commonly, during its descent. This limitation of the Iron Dome technology is an understandable one, but also works out fine for Israel because nearly all Israeli settlements are several miles from the Gaza border (and of course some are much farther) so an “apex-or-after” protocol leaves no geographical blindspots.

It was little surprise, then, when IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus, who appears frequently on CNN, waved away the possibility that Israel’s Iron Dome could have been involved in any way—even indirectly—with the blast at the al-Ahli Hospital on October 17. He told U.S. media that Iron Dome doesn’t operate “in Gazan airspace”, and from a certain standpoint that unequivocal contention makes sense: given the apex-or-after operation of Tamir interceptors, and where current permanent Israeli settlements are located, Tamirs should never really need to enter Gazan airspace.

But something changed in this calculus shortly before the al-Ahli blast, indeed on the very weekend the IDF bombed the al-Ahli Hospital on Saturday, October 14. This is the now-confirmed event that caused four casualties and was followed in short order by the IDF calling the hospital three times to issue urgent warnings for it to evacuate.

Since then—and especially since the much larger explosion at al-Ahli on October 17—many have wondered, what was the urgency behind those three IDF calls? Was the Israeli army already planning to strike the hospital 48 hours later? We have no idea—at all. But we do know one exigency that the IDF was dealing with that weekend.

Specifically, that weekend the IDF completed the largest [short-notice] reservist mobilization in the history of the State of Israel, putting over 360,000 troops on the Gazan border. That figure represents almost 4% of the population of Israel. More importantly, it represented at the time a significant change in the then-current Israel-Hamas war theater, as suddenly the IDF had its most valuable military assets—its soldiers—in a place they’d never been before in such massive numbers: on the Gaza border. And that positioning definitionally created new threats to the Israeli military.

Given that rockets from Gaza can reach as far as Tel Aviv, those 360,000-plus troops were—once they’d been moved to the Gaza border—in immediate danger from Hamas and PIJ rockets.

Based on current CNN and New York Times reporting, we also now know that the IDF has a massive congregation of tanks sitting several miles north of Gaza; some number of tanks in Be’eri (due east of Gaza); and a large mixed (infantry and armored cavalry) force in the northeast corner of Gaza, around Sderot. We further know, from CNN, that at least this third new massing of IDF troops has been regularly firing into Gaza.

So with all that preamble, let’s return to Israel’s Iron Dome.

If a Hamas or PIJ militant fires a rocket at Tel Aviv from Gaza City, of course the Tamir that intercepts it on an apex-or-after basis will only ever be in Israeli airspace—as Tel Aviv is significantly north of Gaza along the Mediterranean coast. But what if the IDF were to put more than 360,000 troops on the Gaza-Israel border? And what if, Israel having done so, the PIJ were to then fire a rocket barrage at those troops on the Gaza-Israel border? How would Iron Dome protect them then?

To answer this question, Proof uses the two maps below. The one on the right is an IDF-published map, and it shows a PIJ rocket barrage that we know existed (there are many independent videos of it) heading toward the airspace over the al-Ahli Hospital.

Of course, that barrage wasn’t targeting the hospital—or indeed any location in Gaza.

Based on its trajectory, that confirmed PIJ rocket barrage was intended to strike the IDF forces now massed on the Gaza-Israel border. The second map below (the one on the left) aids in representing this by including my own markings placed atop the latest New York Times visualization of known aerial bombardments by the IDF.

In the left-hand map above, the red dots were placed by the Times, and represent newer confirmed IDF strikes; meanwhile, the orange dots were likewise added by the Times but represent older confirmed IDF strikes. The aquamarine dot I have added here marks the approximate location of the cemetery on the Gaza coast that the IDF now says the caught-on-video barrage of PIJ rockets were fired from (keeping in mind, that the IDF originally released a supposed Hamas audio intercept contending that these same rockets came from directly behind the hospital on hospital grounds, but as has already been noted in this report, that intercept has been debunked). The yellow dot in the map, which I’ve added, is the approximate location of the al-Ahli Hospital.

As for the white stars, these too were added by me. The uppermost one simply points toward an off-map position north of Gaza: the massive gathering of IDF tanks I noted above. This location is well off the map—by miles—and isn’t on the Gaza border itself.

The bottom-most white star is where the New York Times confirms the IDF has tanks at Be’eri. The middle star is simply intended to denote a “median incursion point,” meaning that—given that CNN has confirmed that the IDF intends to invade Gaza soon—this is the access point that would get the IDF to the largest number of known targets the quickest.

While we know where all those IDF tanks are in the north—and we know there are troops at Sderot, a town just a little beyond the northeast corner of Gaza, not marked on the map but readily visualizable just by its geographic position relative to Gaza—and while we further know that there are some tanks at Be’eri, the fact that the IDF has over 360,000 troops to spread along its fifty-mile border with Gaza means that we don’t really know where most of those ground troops are.

So suffice to say that when PIJ launched a barrage of rockets toward Israel on Tuesday night—rockets that were going to fly over the al-Ahli Hospital—there is every reason to think that those rockets were headed toward some newly discernible concentration of IDF troops on the Israel-Gaza border. Which meant that, if Iron Dome was going to be used to protect those troops on the border, it was going to have to do something on Tuesday it wouldn’t otherwise have ever had any cause to do: send Tamir interceptors into Gazan airspace.

In fact, an apex-or-after missile defense system can’t protect IDF troops massed on the Israel-Gaza border without sending Tamir interceptors into Gaza—it’s just that simple. The maps above are intended, in part, to help Proof readers visualize this mathematical inevitability.

So what happened on October 17 above the al-Ahli Hospital? Well, we know a barrage of rockets heading northeast into Israel had been fired from the Gaza coast miles west of the hospital; we know their trails disappeared from video somewhere over Gaza City; and we know that at least one of them suddenly exploded in midair near al-Ahli.

While a Channel 4 UK investigation now suggests that the Hamas “intercept” the IDF provided the international community was both “edited” and “manipulated” before release—and while we know that the men speaking on it, in any case, weren’t from PIJ but Hamas, and therefore didn’t know what they were talking about (one of them even absurdly thought the PIJ barrage came from just behind the hospital grounds, a false claim he repeated three times, rather than a cemetery miles away from the al-Ahli)—but this audio is still helpful to investigators in a way no one would have expected.

In the “intercept” audio, one thing the militants from Hamas say about their rivals in the PIJ militant group is that they have never seen a rocket failure from PIJ of the sort the IDF was at the time insisting had occurred: an explosion in midair over Gaza that caused a mass-casualty event on the ground. To be sure, many PIJ rocket engines fail, and some fail over Gaza, but that doesn’t mean that they result in a midair explosion and certainly doesn’t mean they kill hundreds of innocents. This part of the IDF-published audio calls to mind, for me as a former federal criminal investigator, the fact that October 17 was almost certainly one of the first nights a Tamir interceptor had ever entered Gazan airspace to protect IDF assets, in this case border-mustered troops.

So now we come to the really stunning part of this saga.

If you’ve watched the Channel 4 video linked to above, you know that independent agencies have now provided credible evidence to Channel 4 of two related facts:

1. Doppler sound analysis suggests that the munition that struck al-Ahli came from northeast of the hospital, not—as the IDF has repeatedly claimed—the southwest.

2. Burn marks on the al-Alhi parking lot confirm this Doppler analysis by way of likewise suggesting a munition coming from the northeast, not the southwest.

To be clear, this does not resolve who was responsible for the al-Ahli Hospital blast.

But it does raise significant questions about why so many Israel-allied governments, such as Canada, have issued public findings—accompanied, oddly, by still-classified analyses—that attribute to a supposed “[southwest to northeast] flight pattern of the incoming munition” their conclusion that the munition had to have originated from Gaza. Since Channel 4 first revealed that this flight pattern was a fallacy, the New York Times has confirmed that analysis by the respected British media outlet (see below).

While this new information doesn’t resolve precisely who fired the munition at issue, it does creates new possibilities for the answer to that pressing question, including a number that are, in certain respects, still in keeping with existing American and U.S.-allied assessments:

1. A PIJ rocket could have—as one CNN-aired video suggests—curved in flight, possibly passing over al-Ahli and then returning to strike it from the northeast.

2. Downward-falling PIJ rocket shrapnel from an encounter with a Tamir could have come from the northeast (if the rocket was hit after passing over the hospital with shrapnel from the interception heading back in the direction of the hospital).

3. Downward-falling Tamir rocket shrapnel from an encounter with a PIJ rocket could have come from the northeast (if the rocket was hit after passing over the hospital and shrapnel from the interception headed back in the direction of the hospital).

4. An errant Tamir could have hit the hospital after the PIJ rocket it was tracking exploded in midair, leaving the Tamir without any remaining target to track.

What no longer looks like a possibility is a conventional IDF airstrike using a precision-guided, U.S.-provided bomb with a “JDAM” guidance-system bolt-on.

Munitions experts suggest a 500-pound bomb with a JDAM bolt-on—what we see in most IDF airstrikes, though there are also 1,000-pound JDAMs and 2,000-pound JDAMS—should make a 3m x 3m impact crater in soft earth. At al-Alhi Hospital, we see an impact crater in concrete (so admittedly, we might expect, were a 500-pound JDAM involved, a slightly smaller crater than 3m x 3m)—that is 1.0m x 0.75m. That’s much smaller than one would expect to see following a 500-pound JDAM airstrike.

On the other hand, a Tamir interceptor is a 200-pound missile. Proof has yet to see anyone analyze whether the al-Ahli crater could have resulted from an errant Tamir.

For that matter, Proof has yet to see anyone in or out of media ask whether the crater at al-Ahli could be from the shrapnel of a Tamir that had successfully struck its target.

Nor have I seen any journalist ask whether the crater could be from the shrapnel of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that didn’t have an engine failure but impacted with a Tamir.

Any of these scenarios would explain the midair explosion seen in so many videos said to be connected to the al-Ahli tragedy. And they would explain the Doppler and burn-mark forensic evidence of a munition or shrapnel coming toward the hospital from the northeast, without in any way negating the known fact of a PIJ cemetery launch.

Some reading this may now wonder, but if any of those possibilities had in fact been involved here, wouldn’t they have been talked about already? The simple answer is no.

Once the IDF put out its evidence, and the USIC accepted its rather convenient self-exculpation, public discourse on al-Ahli more or less fell apart. It continued only in major-media fact-checking videos and in reports like the one you’re reading now. The protests regarding the need for more investigation emanating from media outlets like Proof notwithstanding, major media has only just started publishing its first analyses of the acoustics, munition, and trajectory questions raised by the events at the al-Ahli.

And as for the possible involvement of Israel’s Iron Dome, that component is now being presented for the first time here at Proof. To date, major media has dismissed such a notion out-of-hand by relying on statements made by the variably truthful Mr. Conricus.

What the ongoing al-Ahli investigation reveals, we must remember, is that no one wanted this tragedy to happen. Hamas did not; PIJ did not; the IDF did not. Each had humanitarian, diplomatic, and strategic reasons for not wanting to see an event like this occur. So it should be no surprise that this massive loss of life happening required a series of unexpected events. But perhaps—though much more investigation is needed—a historic border muster and a new mission for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system had something to do with it. I hope major media will look into that possibility.

Essay 4: “Rocketry” (Friday, October 20, 2023)

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I’d thought I’d written my last essay on the al-Ahli explosion, but then a most curious report appeared out of nowhere—one that convinced me to discuss a topic relevant to the unsolved mystery of the tragedy at al-Ahli: rocketry.

Yesterday, Al Jazeera reported on a new French military intelligence assessment that largely backed the USIC and IDF versions of events at al-Ahli, concluding that the blast there was caused by a munition with a 5kg warhead.

The problem is that that appears to be impossible.

Before I explain why, let’s first reestablish what we do and don’t know about the blast, noting as we begin that the odds of the explosion being a war crime by either side—meaning the deliberate targeting of a hospital by a wartime partisan—have dropped to [nearly] zero. The tragedy at al-Ahli was almost certainly a tragic accident; the question now is how that accident came about, and how it led to such an enormous loss of life and such enormous confusion both on-scene and around the world. It’s because of this loss of life and persistent confusion that we start here with hard facts.

The hard facts reveal some truly abominable behavior by the IDF, but none of it [at present] amounts to a war crime. A war crime would have seen the IDF deliberately bombing al-Ahli Hospital with a 500-pound (or 1,000-pound, or 2,000-pound) U.S.-provided bomb with a JDAM guidance system bolted on; that clearly didn’t happen. Such a strike would have caused, at a minimum—with a 500-pound JDAM—a crater 3m x 3m in size, whereas the impact crater at the al-Ahli Hospital was 1.0m x 0.75m.

This said, much of the confusion around what happened at the hospital originated in erroneous information provided by the IDF, misdirections orchestrated by the IDF, and certain—what appear to have been—outright fabrications. We can’t get inside the mind of IDF personnel, but presumably the IDF feared that if it were blamed for even an accident at al-Ahli, it could spark a regional war, cost it U.S. support, and ultimately lead to even more mass death.

Meanwhile, much but not all the information emanating from the Palestinian side was reasonably if not precisely accurate, with a major caveat: the Palestinians accused the IDF of deliberately bombing the hospital, when that doesn’t [at present] appear to have been the case. This said, there were reasons for Palestinians in Gaza to suspect the IDF might have done what they thought (and many still believe) it did, and so, in the aftermath of a mass-casualty event, such accusations were understandable.

The IDF said, for instance, that there was no impact crater at al-Ahli, showing in its first presser a misleading UAV video that elided the part of the al-Ahli parking lot where the crater was. This cost the IDF credibility, as it was practically no time at all before Bellingcat had published a picture of the crater, photos of Palestinian police excavating the crater were shared internationally, and military experts began using the easily confirmed crater to gauge the size of the munition that hit the al-Ahli lot.

Building off its false—or, at a minimum, recklessly or negligently erroneous—claim of there being no impact crater at al-Ahli, the IDF next insisted the whole event must therefore have been a “false flag” (as IDF Spokesman Jonathan Conricus called it on CNN) with few or perhaps even no casualties. This wasn’t just false, but an obscenity; major media around the world was, at the time, broadcasting photos and videos of the dead and injured, many of whom were women and children. This wasn’t a “false flag.”

The IDF next released a data packet to international media that constituted, it said, its own objective investigation of the event. Almost all the content in the packet turned out to be false, further damaging IDF credibility and raising questions worldwide about why the IDF was spreading so much deceit if it had done nothing wrong. (And again, the answer still might turn out to be that the IDF aimed to avoid negative consequences from the incident, rather than that it was actually hiding a war crime.)

For instance, the IDF packet contained an alleged audio intercept of a conversation between two Hamas militants. As Channel 4 (UK) has since shown, audio analysis indicates this alleged intercept was in fact a heavily “edited” and “manipulated” splicing together of two discrete audio-data sources. More importantly, per the Middle East Eye (UK), the intercept contained at least one major—possibly deliberate—IDF mistranslation that turned “they” into “we” and thereby generated a false confession.

And unfortunately, the intercept made for even worse evidence than that. Not only was the conversation the IDF said it had intercepted between Hamas militants—when the IDF would ultimately say it was a rival group, the PIJ, that fired the munition it says hit the hospital—but the IDF thereafter sowed out-of-region confusion about the difference between Hamas and PIJ by several times sending Mr. Conricus to bolster the relevance of the Hamas intercept by wrongly saying that Hamas (and not PIJ) fired the rockets in question.

Moreover, it turned out that the Hamas militants in question—if the intercept, with all its splicing, was even a conversation that actually took place—had no idea what they were talking about. One of them inaccurately said, not just once or twice but three times, that he understood the munition that hit the al-Ahli Hospital parking lot to have originated from a cemetery right behind the hospital.

Even the IDF would later have to admit that this was inaccurate. There were no munitions on hospital grounds, and no PIJ missile battery anywhere near al-Ahli.

The IDF data packet released to the international press also included maps claiming that, if it hadn’t come from near hospital grounds, the munition that hit the hospital must instead have been fired from southwest of the blast site, from a cemetery on the Gaza coast over two and a half miles from the ospital. According to the Channel 4 analysis, however, both Doppler and burn-mark forensic analyses show that, whatever hit the al-Ahli, it came from the northeast of the hospital (that is, in the direction of Israel) rather than from the southwest (which would be the direction of the Gaza coast).

At its first live presser, the IDF’s spread of disinformation continued. It said that it had never struck a hospital in its then week-long bombardment of the Gaza Strip; this was untrue, as at least five hospitals in Gaza had already been hit by IDF airstrikes, including, most shockingly, as would soon be confirmed by the BBC and even the Archbishop of Canterbury—whose Church owns al-Ahli Hospital—the al-Ahli itself.

The hospital had been hit by the IDF 72 hours earlier, in a strike that wounded four.

The IDF also said, in its first presser, that it hadn’t been bombing the area around the hospital on October 17. That too was false. Al Jazeera footage—indeed, from the same reel the IDF directed reporters to—showed the IDF striking the area of the hospital at least four times in the ten minutes just before the al-Ahli blast. The IDF also said that it had never fired Tamir interceptors from an Iron Dome launcher in a way that sent Tamirs into Gaza. The same Al Jazeera video seemed to show it had done so that night.

If we turn, for a moment, away from IDF reaction to the explosion, and focus instead on the Palestinian reaction, we quickly find that it has been ruthlessly misrepresented in Western media. I have no explanation for why major media in the United States has allowed this to happen, but perhaps it’s because American journalists have no belief that their readers understand anything about the history of Gaza—and therefore may not be equipped to handle the subtleties of truly accurate reporting from the region.

So let’s cover a few basics that offer important context for the Palestinian reaction— both formal and informal, institutionalized and diffuse—to the al-Ahli Hospital blast.

Hamas is now, as most know, the government of Gaza. It was elected to that position in 2006, at a time of great violence and confusion in Gaza. No elections have been held in Gaza since. What we must take from that is the following: when a terrorist entity elected in 2006 amidst violence spends the next year killing its political opponents im Fatah, and then never again allows a democratic election to be held, and rules through the fear spread by its military arm (the al-Qassam Brigades), and half the current population of the said theocracy wasn’t even alive in 2006—even as many others were but were far too young to vote—it’s silly for anyone to suggest Gaza is democratic, that Hamas represents Gazans, or even that current Gazans chose Hamas to rule them.

So while Hamas is indeed a terrorist group that must be decimated—and undoubtedly committed the most heinous war crimes imaginable on Israeli soil on October 7, in response to which crimes Israel has both the right to defend itself and a responsibility to declare war on Hamas—the only way Hamas has been able to rule Gaza for 17 years is by having at once a military arm (the aforementioned al-Qassam Brigades) and a non-combatant, administrative component that exclusively acts as a public servant (a component that includes the PMH).

The problem this bifurcation of operations creates for Gazans—a problem the IDF is now exploiting—is that the IDF, and for that matter partisans around the world, can refer to any civil servant in Gaza as “Hamas” and thereby imply that any media outlet that in any way credits anything said by anyone inside Gaza is either “taking the word of Hamas” (a common refrain on social media lately) or, at best, taking the word of a terrorized Gazan civilian who feels they can only say what Hamas wants them to (a contention that, with whiplash speed, repositions to supposedly Gaza-representative Hamas as in fact brutal tyrants whose citizens don’t agree with them on anything).

Because the IDF won’t allow journalists into Gaza, and because the IDF and its allies have created a rhetorical framework in which no Gazan—whether militant Hamas, non-militant Hamas, or a Hamas-ruled civilian—can be trusted, the situation on the ground is one in which (and surely the IDF is thrilled by this) the only source that U.S. media can safely credit about what’s happening in Gaza is the IDF. Which is a real problem, given that not only is the IDF at war with Hamas and killing Palestinians en masse but, as we’ve already seen, a good deal of what the IDF says to the West is false.

It’s with all this in mind that I say the following: Western media in fact hasn’t reported claims from the al-Qassam Brigades—the armed-terrorist wing of Hamas—unless the claims were a direct response to IDF claims (for instance, as the IDF claims either PIJ or Hamas fired the rocket that hit the al-Ahli Hospital, every media outlet must out of a sense of journalistic responsibility report the denials that thereafter issued from PIJ and Hamas; this is a common convention in reporting, and ought not be scorned by news consumers—whatever their feelings on Hamas).

But it’s a different thing for Western media to report, not automatically confirm but just report out, claims made by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, part of the non-combatant, administrative, civil-service wing of Hamas.

Yes, Western media could instead decide, as many of my fellow progressive Jews are now insisting, that Hamas is Hamas and that because of this Western media must only ever cite IDF claims, but as a retired journalism professor I know that’s unacceptable. By definition, Western media would have become, at that point, mere war propaganda.

If it had its own way, Western media would ignore all partisans—both Hamas and the IDF—when it comes to critical wartime hard data like casualty counts, instead relying on hundreds of its own journalists reporting from on-site. But the IDF isn’t allowing that. In other words, to the extent Western media had quoted claims made by the PMH in the wake of the al-Ahli blast, the necessity of doing so was attributable to the IDF, not Hamas. By keeping journalists from Gaza—despite knowing that Western media can’t respond to such a maneuver by simply becoming an IDF propaganda vehicle—the Israeli army has created the very bind that it now so loudly complains of.

So for those wondering, reading this report, why the IDF appears to have lied so often in the aftermath of the explosion at al-Ahli Hospital, that appears to be why: there are no journalists allowed in Gaza right now, so the IDF knows that it can tar every Gazan as “Hamas” (or, at best, a civilian terrorized into parroting Hamas’s rhetoric) and in so doing try shame its global allies into a no-Gazan-can-be-quoted rhetorical framework.

Western media, to its credit, has refused—and that’s one reason it quoted the PMH on October 17. The IDF had tried to back it into a corner, but ultimately it failed to do so.

So did the PMH lie post-blast, as the IDF did? Actually, no. Despite misinformation now spreading like wildfire about what “Hamas” said after the blast (again, a blanket term intended to make readers think we’re speaking of the al-Qassam Brigades and not the PMH), what actually happened after the explosion at al-Ahli is this: the first [formal] post-blast death-toll estimate from the PMH was 200 to 300, and it turned out to be broadly correct—as the USIC says “100 to 300”, and the receiving hospital that night, al-Shifa, says “250.”

Meanwhile, partisans have used mistranslations and confusion about the meaning of the word “casualty”—a word that, per everyone, including the United States Armed Forces, includes wounded persons—to suggest that “Hamas” wildly exaggerated the al-Ahli death toll by speaking of 500 casualties. But when one includes the wounded, as one should, there likely were around 500 casualties (indeed, al-Shifa gives that number).

Having said this, more recent reports have the PMH now giving Western media a death toll of 471. If I write here that I’m unconvinced that this is precisely what the PMH is saying, I have good reason for that doubt. The last three New York Times reports on the al-Ahli tragedy have casually misdefined the word “casualty” to mean only deceased persons. So I have some real concern that the PMH is telling the Times 471 “casualties” (likely an accurate figure) and the Times is reporting it as 471 “dead.”

Having said this, I did observe, above, that the PMH has made major misstatement: it accused the IDF of deliberately hitting the al-Ahli, which appears to be false. So why did it say that? Well, perhaps because the IDF had hit the al-Ahli 72 hours earlier. Or perhaps because, after that strike, the IDF called the hospital three times in the next 24 hours to order everyone out of the hospital—apparently because the IDF thought (wrongly, it turns out) there might be munitions there—and therefore it might be held to be a valid military target.

In other words, any one of us in the Palestinians’ situation would’ve earnestly believed what happened on October 17 to be an IDF strike. The IDF had hit multiple hospitals in the preceding week, including the al-Ahli; it had given warnings to the al-Ahli that suggested a future strike; it had made countless misstatements and issued doctored evidence in its first evidentiary release to media about the event; it had been bombing the area of the hospital in the minutes before the blast; it has a documented history of accusing the PIJ of failed launches that later turn out to be IDF airstrikes; it had both Tamirs and JDAMs in the area at the time, despite falsely saying it had neither, and much more in this vein—including the fact that the first audio of the blast suggested an airstrike, not shrapnel falling, and that even the Hamas intercept the IDF released indicated Gazan militants had never heard of something like this happening due to a failed rocket launch. As already noted, even internal IDF data shows a whopping 108 past PIJ rocket failures with Gaza touchdowns caused only four total civilian deaths.

And we simply can’t ignore here, either, the fact that the Palestinians were under the influence of what the law calls an “exciting” event (using that adjective here in its antiquated sense, meaning an event that provokes particular types of statements and beliefs, not a sense of anticipation or exhilaration). Two hundred fifty Gazan dead in a population of just over 2 million is the proportional equivalent of more than 1,100 dead in Israel. As already noted, that exceeds the currently known civilian death toll from the events of October 7 in Israel.

So let’s now talk about rockets.

Specifically, the explosive payload that rockets carry in their warheads, which is measured by mass.

As observed above, it was big news recently when Al Jazeera reported French military intelligence saying that a 5kg warhead had caused the al-Ahli blast. The problem is that [there don’t appear to be] any rockets or missiles in use in Gaza or Israel that employ a 5kg warhead. All the warheads in play are notably larger. And even if a larger-than-5kg-warhead munition were to break in half without exploding in midair—as some claim happened here, despite the Al Jazeera video of the suspect rogue rocket fully disintegrating in midair followed by a small blast at a site near the hospital—that wouldn’t, by some bizarre algebraic war-mathematics, generate a 5kg warhead.

So let’s consider, now, the ordnance in play in the 2023 Israel-Hamas War.

Both Hamas and PIJ name their small rockets after their military arms: Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades have Qassam rockets, and PIJ’s al-Quds Brigades have al-Quds rockets. There are four versions of both rockets: Qassam 1, Qassam 2, Qassam 3, and Qassam 4; al-Quds 1, al-Quds 2, al-Quds 3, and al-Quds 4. While PIJ is considered to be much less powerful or influential in Gaza than Hamas, media reports state that it may at present have the slightly better arsenal of rockets. Even so, al-Quds rockets are generally seen as the equivalent of Qassams.

Back in 2012, the Jewish Policy Center estimated al-Quds rockets to have an 8kg warhead. They’re believed to be bigger now, over a decade on, as the warheads in these rockets have been increasing over time. For instance, the obsolete Qassam 1 rocket did have a 5kg payload, but since then Hamas’s payloads have ballooned:

• Qassam 2: 10kg warhead

• Qassam 3: 20kg warhead

• Qassam 4: 10kg warhead

But just as interesting as the data above is the following data on an IDF munition:

• Tamir Interceptor: 11kg warhead

We now know, contra initial IDF claims, that Tamirs were indeed zipping through Gazan airspace during the time of the al-Ahli blast to take out other PIJ rockets in [a roughly contemporaneous] barrage as the alleged rogue rocket that caused the blast at the al-Ahli. This means that on the night of October 17 we had a lot of rockets in the air near the hospital that were between 10kg and 20kg warhead-wise, with no reason at all to imagine that any of them were instead carrying a 5kg payload.

This is the context in which French intelligence says it thinks the munition at al-Ahli had a 5kg warhead, and therefore must be Palestinian.

Except that, as we’re seeing here, that doesn’t track.

Remember that 500-pound JDAM bomb I was discussing earlier (which would likely be a U.S. Mk82)? That has a payload of 87 kg and produces a 3m x 3m impact crater.

So how do we imagine a mere 5kg warhead managing to cause a 1.0m x 0.75 crater?

This may help explain why the IDF was so keen to hide the impact crater in its first UAV footage, with it going so far as to explicitly tell Western media that there was no impact crater at al-Ahli at all. As you might imagine, if there were no impact crater at all, that would mean either a ground explosion (like a car bomb or an accidental fuel tank explosion) or an extremely small homemade device (something with an explosive payload of 5kg or less that couldn’t plausibly be called a military-grade IDF munition).

Either of those possibilities would likely exculpate the IDF. Indeed, in recent days pro-Israeli partisans have even been spreading a photo of the crater left by a known Gaza-militant rocket to show that it looks identical to the al-Ahli crater. And it does! Which means that that’s the size crater we would expect from a rocket or missile [or artillery shell] with a payload between 10kg and 20kg—a payload range that explicitly includes another type of munition that we know was above the hospital on Tuesday: the Tamir.

The foregoing explains, too, why the IDF was not only keen to hide the al-Ahli crater but also to say something else that turned out to be untrue: that there were no Tamirs in Gazan airspace on Tuesday, as Iron Dome “doesn’t operate in Gazan airspace.” It may be that that was true two weeks ago, but once the IDF moved 360,000 troops to the Gaza border, it maintained an Iron Dome emplacement (see the New York Times graphic below) in just the location on the border that, if it fired Tamirs at the cemetery it says PIJ was firing its rockets from, might well send a Tamir toward the hospital.

If we now return to the Doppler and burn-mark forensic evidence recently published by Channel 4—which shows a munition hitting the al-Ahli lot from the northeast—and we take the French, American, and even IDF intel implicitly confirming that 1m x 0.75m impact crater is caused by a munition with roughly a 10kg warhead, we find that the possibility of the al-Ahli Hospital being hit by a Tamir remains very much in play. Nor is it clear that even French intelligence would robustly dispute this, as the focus of its analysis was actually on whether a JDAM caused the blast. Clearly it didn’t.

So what two types of rocket do we know were meeting in the airspace in the vicinity of the al-Ahli Hospital at the time of the October 17 blast? Roughly 10kg Tamirs (IDF) and roughly 10kg al-Quds (PIJ). What if they struck one another? Could the hospital blast be from falling shrapnel? That’s unlikely, given that Al Jazeera showed a much smaller, two-seconds-earlier blast near the hospital that is much more likely to have been falling shrapnel, if there was any. Besides which, falling shrapnel following the complete disintegration of a rocket wouldn’t present now as a 5kg—or even a 10kg—warhead, let alone cause supersonic acoustics or leave an impact crater of such size.

So we might well conclude that if the munition that hit al-Ahli Hospital came from the southwest, it was likely a 10kg al-Quds rocket that experienced engine failure and fell intact to Earth. If, instead, the munition that hit al-Ahli came from the northeast—as Channel 4 reports was the case—it was likely an intact 11kg Tamir interceptor that missed its target or simply had no target left to strike (as would be the case if the PIJ rocket it was targeting exploded in midair).

This would also explain the massive death toll at al-Ahli, as it would mean that what investigators are looking at is the aftermath of an intact munition accidentally hitting a refugee camp erected in a parking lot.

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The Shocking Twist: The Artillery Theory

Perhaps the best investigation done so far on the al-Ahli explosion is the one below from Al Jazeera. For those who don’t know, Al Jazeera is based in Qatar, a U.S. ally—indeed, the nation where the U.S. keeps its largest base in the Middle East. The media outlet is regularly rated as reliable for its news coverage (with its overall rating being brought down somewhat by editorials, in the same way, say, we see an excellent news organization like the Wall Street Journal hampered by the obvious biases of its editorial page). At the time that Al Jazeera, funded by the Qatari government, published the report below, America’s allies in that government were working around the clock to secure the release of American and other hostages from Hamas. So there’s no reason to believe there’s prejudice or bias affecting Al Jazeera coverage of an organization that Qatar’s close ally in security matters—the United States—long ago designated (and quite rightly so) a terrorist organization.

What the shocking Al Jazeera video analysis below confirms (using video, ironically, that even the IDF urged Western media to analyze closely) is all of the following:

1. Tamir interceptors were active in Gazan airspace on the night of Tuesday, October 17, contra claims by the IDF.

2. IDF airstrikes were pummeling the area around the al-Ahli Hospital on Tuesday, October 17, contra claims by the IDF (indeed the IDF has hidden the truth of the matter by refusing to release to Western media its military logs from the night in question).

3. The PIJ rocket barrage from the cemetery near the Gaza Coast that the IDF has focused on had nothing to do with the al-Ahli tragedy because all of the rockets in that barrage were destroyed by Tamir interceptors.

4. The rocket the IDF has focused on most extensively was in fact a solo firing from another, unknown location; this solo rocket, however, was also intercepted by a Tamir. It exploded—and disintegrated—in midair a full seven seconds before the al-Ahli blast and five seconds before a much smaller blast in the area that could have (but certainly cannot be confirmed as) shrapnel from this destroyed solo rocket.

5. The munition that hit the al-Ahli Hospital did not come from Gaza, as no other Gazan rockets can be seen in any Al Jazeera video—despite a host of cameras facing at that part of the Gaza Strip. The munition therefore had to have come from Israel, a finding consistent with Doppler and forensic burn-mark analyses.

What the Al Jazeera report doesn’t address is whether the blast at al-Ahli was simply an “extra” Tamir interceptor fired by the IDF or some other sort of munition.

The New York Times has now stepped in to fill in the blanks in the Al Jazeera analysis.

In a shocking new report, the Times concurs with the Al Jazeera SANAD investigation above, declaring that “a widely cited missile video does not shed light on what happened, a Times analysis concludes” (emphasis supplied). The video in question is the one the IDF has rested its case on; that the USIC appears to have relied upon; and that most Western newsreaders tuned out of the entire al-Ahli affair after viewing. But as the Times now confirms, it simply doesn’t show what it was said to have shown.

Despite being, as the Times typifies it, “a widely cited piece of evidence as Israeli and U.S. officials have made the case that an errant Palestinian rocket malfunctioned in the sky”, in fact “a detailed visual analysis by the New York Times concludes that the video clip—taken from an Al Jazeera TV camera live-streaming on the night of October 17—shows something else. The missile seen in the video is most likely not what caused the explosion at the hospital. It actually detonated in the sky roughly two miles away [from the al-Ahli], the Times found, and is an unrelated aspect of the fighting that unfolded over the Israeli-Gaza border that night” (emphasis supplied).

While adding that it is still “plausible” that some failed rocket launch could’ve caused the al-Ahli blast, the Times admits it no longer has no evidence to substantiate such a claim—despite the Al Jazeera footage discussed in the SANAD video above being “one of the most publicized pieces of evidence that Israeli officials have used to make their case.”

The “doubt” the Times now has about the IDF’s and the Netanyahu administration’s claims “complicates”, the newspaper says, “the straightforward narrative they have put forth.”

As if presaging the direction in which its investigation has taken it, the Times notes that the IDF has been responding to Hamas’s horrifying October 7 war crimes with a “relentless artillery” assault on Gaza. Taking the lead in that assault are self-propelled IDF howitzers that fire 155mm shells. Here’s what a hit by such a shell sounds like:

The Times reports that, if one only looked at video of the al-Ahli blast itself, one could conclude that it is “consistent with a failed rocket falling well short of its target with unspent fuel.” But because no such rockets can be seen in any video from Al Jazeera or any other source, the Times turns to a separate but little-discussed fact about what was happening near the al-Ahli Hospital on October 17: “Israeli bombardment was taking place, and two explosions near the hospital can be seen within two minutes of [the al-Ahli] being struck.” The Times adds, ominously, that an IDF spokesman, Major Nir Dinar, flatly refused to tell the Times “how far away [from the hospital] the nearest strike was.” And as noted above, the IDF has likewise refused to release any military mission logs—documents that itemize strikes—from the night in question.

The Times adds that the comparatively small impact crater at the al-Ahli Hospital is in fact “consistent with a number of different munitions”, including Israeli artillery.

Tellingly, it then adds the following, acknowledging the Saturday, October 14 strike by the IDF on the al-Ahli for the first time (emphasis supplied):

Israel has fired more than 8,000 munitions into Gaza, in what has become a brutal assault, and had even hit Al-Ahli Arab Hospital with an illumination artillery shell three days earlier, according to video evidence and the hospital’s official Facebook page.

As if these twists and investigative reversals weren’t enough, the Times goes on to explicitly eviscerate the only theory about the al-Ahli explosion the IDF has offered over the last ten days. “The Times [has] concluded that the missile [that the IDF says hit the al-Ahli Hospital] was never near the hospital. It was launched from Israel, not Gaza, and appears to have exploded above the Israeli-Gaza border, at least two miles away from the hospital.”

This stunning revelation at once confirms that the IDF was firing into Gaza on the night in question; that protecting its troops on the Gaza border appears to have been a priority for the IDF at the time; and that the IDF would have known—from its secret, never-revealed military logs—that the munition it was calling a PIJ munition was in fact one of its own.

While the New York Times images above can seem a little confusing at first, they confirm some harrowing truths:

1. Not only is the explosion the IDF falsely linked to the al-Ahli tragedy nowhere near the al-Ahli—it occurred in Israel—but it is consistent with the hospital being in the firing solution of both an Iron Dome site firing Tamir interceptors into Gaza in the direction of the hospital and troops at Nahal Oz firing 155mm self-propelled howitzer shells in the direction of the hospital.

2. In fact, it is almost certain that the failed munition launch the IDF has been pointing to is a failed IDF launch, as neither Hamas nor PIJ have missile defense systems or even precision-guided rockets—so they have no way to intercept or shoot down an Israeli munition in midair. The IDF munition must have exploded on its own.

3. The fact of such a failure creates a necessary corollary: that the IDF did not want that failure to occur; that it had fired the munition because it wanted it to head in the direction of the al-Ahli Hospital (whether or not that was its explicit target, as it had been just 72 hours earlier); and that, having failed to send the solo missile seen in the Al Jazeera video to its intended destination, the IDF would have fired another munition in the same direction if not—and this is even more likely—a barrage of munitions in quick succession, which could explain why five seconds after the failed IDF launch there was a small explosion near al-Ahli Hospital, and then two seconds after that the explosion that killed hundreds of civilians there. The size of the latter explosion could be explained by the presence of cars with fuel in their tanks in the parking lot of the hospital.

As the Times notes,

[We] synchronized the Al Jazeera footage with five other videos filmed at the same time, including footage from an Israeli television station, Channel 12, and a CCTV camera in Tel Aviv. These different videos provided a view of the missile from north, south, east and west. Using satellite imagery to triangulate the launch point in those videos, the Times determined that the projectile was fired toward Gaza from near the Israeli town of Nahal Oz shortly before the deadly hospital blast. The findings match the conclusion reached by some online researchers.

In addition, the videos show that the projectile in the Al Jazeera footage was launched after the barrage of Palestinian rockets Israeli officials assessed was responsible for the hospital explosion.

This latter revelation keeps the possibility of a Tamir interceptor on the table as a possible explanation for the al-Ahli explosion, even as it appears to leave the Times with no scenario in which the munition that hit the hospital originated from either Hamas or PIJ. Indeed, in a striking finding, the Times notes that “more than 25 seconds elapse between the final Palestinian rocket [fired on any known video of the area from that night] and the hospital explosion” (emphasis supplied).

This would at first blush appear to preclude the munition being Gazan in origin.

The Washington Post, addressing the same video that the IDF said showed a PIJ rocket, writes that

The projectile’s origin location was in the vicinity of an Israeli military site, satellite images show. Experts said the site, imaged by Planet Labs on October 20, has features that are consistent with known examples of Iron Dome missile batteries, including blast walls arranged directly next to launchers.

About fifteen seconds after launching, and after changing its direction and arcing toward the west, the projectile that originated from the vicinity of the suspected Iron Dome location exploded in midair.

Five experts who reviewed the videos told the Post that the projectile appeared to be a Tamir interceptor missile fired by Israel’s Iron Dome system, based on its behavior and launch location.

“All we are seeing [in the video pointed to by the IDF] is the [Tamir] missile interceptor”, said Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and scientist-in-residence at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “These interceptors are then constantly changing their course to correct for the expected intercept point in time and space.”

Unlike the unguided rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups, which follow ballistic trajectories, the missile’s snaking path through the sky before exploding showed a “clear non-ballistic trajectory you expect from the Tamir interceptor”, Dalnoki-Veress said.

Keep in mind that the IDF insisted there were no Tamirs in that area of the Gaza-Israel border on October 17.

The Times concludes that “it cannot independently identify the type of projectile that was fired from Israel, though it was launched from an area known to have an Iron Dome defense system.” It notes that while the IDF maintained it had fired no Tamir interceptors into Gaza that night, the IDF also refused to prove this to media by sharing its military logs with Western journalists or—candidly—anyone at all.

Moreover, even if it’s true that no Tamirs were used by the IDF on October 17, the IDF has acknowledged it was firing artillery shells into Gaza that night, including in the area of the hospital, but refuses to say how close to the hospital any of them came—keeping in mind that the IDF deliberately fired a shell at the al-Ahli 72 hours earlier.

The USIC responded to the Times report by saying, via “a senior intelligence official”, that it “could not rule out that new information would come to light that would change [its] assessment”—even though, for now, that assessment has not changed.

The IDF being responsible for the al-Ahli Hospital massacre through its second artillery strike on the hospital in 72 hours would explain everything about the IDF response: its unwillingness to share military logs; its unwillingness to share maps of where its munitions hit in the area of the hospital that night; its misidentification of what it knew was an Israeli munition heading into Gaza as a munition being fired in the other direction by its enemies; attempts by the IDF to hide the fact of an impact crater at the hospital that was consistent in size with the craters caused by 155mm Howitzer shells; the changing IDF story about where the rocket that hit the hospital was supposedly fired from (because in fact the IDF had no evidence that any such rocket existed); the initial amazement expressed by the IDF at the reported casualty count at al-Ahli, as its last artillery strike on the hospital had caused four casualties rather than hundreds; the shock of Hamas militants—even in the heavily edited and manipulated and mistranslated audio provided by the IDF—at how something like this could have happened due to PIJ error, as despite prior failed rocket launches by PIJ nothing on this scale had ever occurred in the history of that militant group; and all the other facts this report has noted, like the fact that the IDF repeatedly has hit civilian targets with shells and bombs in this war, repeatedly called al-Ahli Hospital following its own self-described artillery-shell “warning” to the hospital (which call necessarily intimated that more such attacks could be forthcoming), and repeatedly has blamed PIJ for its own errant strikes on the assumption that Western media will do what it appears to have done here: wrongly blame Palestinians for things Israelis did.

In short, there is no longer any credible evidence linking either Hamas or PIJ to the explosion at al-Ahli Hospital.

And there’s a mountain of evidence—acoustic, documentary and forensic, for starters—linking the massacre to the IDF.

{Note: There were early signs that the Times was moving toward the position it now occupies. The Times’s analysis of the al-Ahli explosion before its latest one included, for instance, this: “The strike could have been caused by a different Israeli munition that causes a smaller impact [than a JDAM], such as an errant interceptor fired by an air defense system or an artillery shell.”}

This explanation—that it was artillery fired from inside Israel that hit the al-Ahli—is gaining steam. As the BBC now reports,

The Forensic Architecture agency, a UK-based organization that investigates human rights abuses, has carried out its own analysis of the crater, and suggests it is more consistent with the impact marks from an artillery shell—which it concludes came from the direction of Israel.

It says that the scarring patterns above the crater are consistent with the shrapnel damage that would be expected from an artillery strike.

The BBC continues on to note that “several types of artillery have been deployed by Israel since the start of the conflict, including M109 155mm howitzers and M270 MLRS rocket launchers”, and that one BBC source, Mark Cancian of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, says—in the BBC’s paraphrase of his findings—that “based on evidence so far, it [is] difficult to differentiate whether [the impact crater at al-Ahli was caused by an artillery shell, a mortar, or a rocket, [as] it could potentially be any of them.”

Another BBC source, former United Nations war crimes investigator Marc Garlasco, who also worked as a Pentagon intelligence analyst for years, has said of the midair explosion the IDF claims was a PIJ engine failure that it is “consistent with an Iron Dome interception.” While the BBC doesn’t yet formally adopt either the artillery or Iron Dome explanation for the al-Ahli massacre, it does declines to offer any further buttressing—citing the New York Times report on the issue—for the claim that the Al Jazeera video the IDF pointed media to shows the munition that hit al-Ahli Hospital.

Meanwhile, other media outlets have offered attempts to the defend the IDF narrative that are truly torturous. The Washington Post, for instance, has just published a report alleging that a barrage of rockets fired from a cemetery 2.5 miles southwest of the al-Ahli Hospital is in some unexplained way still in play as possibly responsible for the explosion there. The problem? The Post concedes that the explosion came 44 seconds after the rocket launches in question; this is a problem because Hamas rockets and their PIJ equivalents are widely reported to move at “about a mile per second”, so in order to credit the seemingly debunked claims of the IDF the Post is asserting that a Hamas rocket suffered an engine failure above the al-Ahli just a few seconds into its flight and then did nothing at all—nothing that can be tracked, at least—for over 40 seconds before landing in the parking lot of the hospital.

While of course any such rocket was fired at an upward angle, so even if fired from 2.5 miles away from the hospital it wouldn’t (despite its speed) pass over the hospital just 2.5 seconds into its flight, even the experts spoken to by the Post calculate the flight time at al-Ahli airspace of a rocket under these circumstances in a way that makes the conclusions of the Post seemingly unsupportable, or least highly unlikely. One expert told the newspaper that the absolute maximum conceivable flight time in the scenario now imagined by the Post is 37 seconds (with an average flight time from the cemetery to the hospital at 31.5 seconds, as calculated by this expert); as for the second expert the Post spoke to on this question, he offered an absolute maximum flight time of 45 seconds but an average flight time of 35 seconds. So if the Post had been hoping for an average flight time of about 44 seconds—in keeping with the video it was looking at—its search fell not just short but between nine and thirteen seconds short, which in such a constrained timeframe is a veritable eternity. (The newspaper notes that the very last rocket in the barrage was fired just 30 seconds before the al-Ahli explosion, but then quickly admits that, even so, “There [is] no visual evidence to prove that any of the[se] [rockets] failed and crashed.”)

Perhaps this is why the Post is simultaneously saying that “the evidence we reviewed does not rule out the possibility that an unseen projectile fired from somewhere else struck the hospital grounds.”

Moreover, even as it cites sources saying that “an artillery strike…would have left substantial fragments and probably not caused the massive fireball seen in videos”—correct observations rendered useless by the fact that we simply don’t know if any fragments were found at the scene, and the fireball seen on video could readily have been caused by an exploding fuel tank in the al-Ahli parking lot—the Post now admits that even if the IDF narrative is broadly true, which it can’t confirm, the specifics of it are definitely false. Thus (emphasis supplied),

the Post’s analysis found that a key video filmed and aired by Al Jazeera, which the Israeli and American governments have cited as evidence that a rocket failed and landed on the hospital grounds, instead shows a projectile launching from a location miles away in Israel, near an apparent Iron Dome air-defense battery. Experts said that the widely circulated video probably showed an Iron Dome interceptor missile that collided with a rocket more than three miles from the hospital and most likely had nothing to do with the hospital explosion.

How many Post experts now categorically dispute the IDF’s explanation for the blast?

According to the Post, “more than two dozen.” Which raises the question: why did the IDF think its flimsy explanation would stand? Was it only ever intended for a political audience—perhaps an audience of one, like Joe Biden—rather than UN investigators?

If that was the IDF’s plan, it worked. The U.S. government’s intelligence apparatus under President Biden, per the Post, has pinned the al-Ahli massacre on America’s enemies in the region—Hamas and PIJ—exclusively by considering “unpublished intercepted phone conversations, an analysis of the damage at the hospital, and four publicly available videos.” The videos clearly, dozens of experts now agree, do not show what the USIC concluded; the analysis of the damage at the hospital is now universally agreed to be inconclusive; and the Biden administration has not pointed to any intercepts in the region besides the one the IDF published—which we now know was doctored. In short, the USIC explanation for its conclusions has collapsed just as conclusively as the Israeli army’s explanation has. And unlike the Post, the USIC is, for apparently political reasons, happy to ignore what the paper calls “the limits of trying to remotely investigate incidents in war zones without on-the-ground access.”

Those limits were put on all of us, readers of this report will recall, by the IDF and its allies in the Egyptian government: “Neither Israel nor Egypt, which together have effectively blockaded Gaza for more than sixteen years, have let foreign journalists into Gaza since the latest war began, making a close examination of the explosion scene impossible.” And now the IDF won’t even, per the Post, “comment on whether it has used any munition classified as a ‘rocket’ since the war began.” Which leaves us all to wonder, why the continued secrecy from an army that insists it has nothing to hide?

{Note: In a buried lede, the Post also reveals that Palestinian authorities did in fact—in a stark comparison to, and possibly a rebuke of, the IDF’s anti-journalist regulations—allow Palestinian journalists access the al-Ahli blast site the morning after the explosion. During that review, and consistent with claims by Hamas that no fragments of the munition that caused the blast remain, “none of th[e] images [taken of the impact crater at al-Ahli or the area around it] showed clear weapon remnants, which are a critical piece of such investigations.” While it’s possible such fragments could have been removed under cover of darkness, and indeed there are photos of Palestinian police looking inside the crater, such a delicate and complex retrieval would be difficult to do at nighttime in an area littered with emergency personnel and, horrifically, human body parts—even if it could be confined, as it couldn’t be, to the impact crater. That is, an artillery shell explosion would likely have left fragments in various areas outside the crater as well.}

The Post report offers one additional tantalizing glimpse into where the next stages of the al-Ahli investigation could be headed: “The size of the crater and the blast bore some similarities to an impact from a 155-millimeter artillery round, a munition in the Israeli arsenal, said Chris Cobb-Smith, a security consultant and former artillery officer in the British army.” Meanwhile, a report from a leading Spanish media outlet, El País, records that “The level of destruction at the Al Ahli facilities is much lower than what a guided missile can cause, and it is closer to what a rocket or an artillery piece would do.”

As to whether the hospital might have been a target for a 155mm artillery strike on October 17, the Post notes that not only was the munition that landed on the hospital 72 hours earlier a 155mm IDF artillery shell, but the sort of shell that the IDF uses to “illuminate areas or mark [future military] targets.”

Conclusion

The consequences of misreporting the al-Ahli explosion weren’t just journalistic.

They were deadly.

As Al Jazeera reports (with video), within approximately a day of the al-Ahli blast—with most of the West absolving the IDF of any responsibility for it, despite video of the IDF heavily bombing the area around the hospital minutes before hundreds were killed—the IDF was back bombing near hospitals, in this case the al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City. Video of the event shows terrified patients and hospital staff scurrying inside the main hospital building for safety from what was indisputably an IDF airstrike. And why not? No part of Western coverage of the al-Ahli explosion had involved any U.S. journalist or politician asking (let alone urging) the IDF to think more and speak more about its policy of bombing areas nearby working hospitals.

Notably, the munition acoustics heard in the video above sound almost identical to those heard at al-Ahli, though what this means exactly is unclear. Was the al-Quds strike also a howitzer shelling rather than a precision-guided bombing? We don’t know, and it’s unlikely it will ever be looked into by journalists the way the al-Ahli blast was, especially now that the IDF’s ground invasion of Gaza has officially begun.

There are far worse atrocities ahead, many fear.

Indeed, even before the war in Gaza reached what Netanyahu has called its “second phase”, and after the near-miss at the al-Quds Hospital, it was clear that the al-Ahli tragedy—the equivalent of twenty 9/11s for the Gazans as it was—had changed little. Just a few days after the bombing near al-Quds, the IDF bombed a mosque in the West Bank, where Hamas has no authority whatsoever. Then it killed seventeen people…

…in a church.

The Christian Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem issued the following statement regarding the horrifying massacre at the St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church:

“Targeting churches and their institutions, along with the shelters they provide to protect innocent citizens, especially children and women who have lost their homes due to Israeli airstrikes on residential areas over the past 13 days, constitutes a war crime that cannot be ignored.”

The IDF would say, of the St. Porphyrius massacre, only that it had “damaged a wall.”

Yes, really.

The IDF’s “damaging of a wall” killed relatives of a former U.S. congressman, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI):

All of the foregoing aside, it is not at all difficult to understand why many Americans were predisposed to believe the IDF’s version of events with respect to the al-Ahli blast. Hamas and PIJ are terrorist organizations; they kill civilians indiscriminately and do not value human life; the former rules Gaza as an autocracy, without any abiding belief in democracy; just days before the events at al-Ahli, Hamas had brutally murdered—in many cases tortured—Israeli citizens on Israeli soil in what must not only be described as a heinous war crime but be universally and unambiguously condemned by all. Proof does so a thousand times over: it condemns both Hamas and PIJ for their war crimes and hopes both entities will be destroyed as soon as possible.

And there’s no “but” at the end of all that—there’s merely an “and.”

And that “and” is this: the IDF has a history of committing war crimes and is doing so right now. While it fights for a rightly valued U.S. ally that is a democracy, and while it without question does far more than Hamas or PIJ ever has to avoid casualties among the civilian population of its adversaries, it also sees itself as being in a situation most Americans can’t possibly understand: surrounded by murderous enemies who not only want to defeat it but want the nation it represents wiped off the world map completely.

None of this authorizes the IDF to commit war crimes.

No one on Earth—whatever their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or geopolitical positioning—is authorized to commit war crimes. In fact, the opposite is true: the laws of war are not merely an ineluctable part of the body of international law, but were specifically devised with full awareness of all the vile things human beings feel they’re entitled to do in wartime. It’s not just that war crime statutes contemplate the situation the Israelis are in, they contemplate every imaginable scenario in the history of warfare. Nor, to be quite clear, do the Israelis offer a legal defense for their actions in Gaza; the IDF response to its demonstrable history of committing war crimes is not a legal one but a political and diplomatic one—one that relies on the fact that the State of Israel has made wise alliances in the Americas and Europe (and increasingly even in the Middle East) intended to give it a “pass” on things it definitely did do. Indeed, one of the only concessions the IDF has made to the international laws of war is that it does not gloat after its war crime; rather, it does the marginally more respectable thing and tries to simply pretend it didn’t commit one, then goes out the next day to act in exactly the same fashion it did the day prior. Thus the shelling or bombing of the St. Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church and other churches, the al-Ahli Hospital and other hospitals; all the refugee camps shown on the map near the top of this report, and even schools in Gaza that double as refugee camps. Even civilians’ homes are hit, as you can see in the before-and-after images atop this section of this report.

There is a reason hundreds of left-leaning human rights attorneys have warned President Biden that he may soon become legally complicit in IDF war crimes. It is not because they dislike Joe Biden, as indeed the opposite is true; and it’s not because they’re anti-American, as in fact human rights attorneys are more aware than perhaps any other class of public servant that America has enormous potential for good in the world—in fact even more than ever before, if it simply learns from the mistakes of its past and turns away from either itself committing or enabling in others conduct that is deemed so contemptible by all humanity that it’s strictly forbidden even in wartime.

Proof closes this report by reminding readers that Jack Smith—in whose hands the future of American democracy may now rest—is a war crimes prosecutor who left his job in Europe to lead the prosecution of Donald Trump over his actions on and before January 6. Smith knows better than the rest of us, though the rest of us have certainly gotten our lesson in this over the last few years, that if bad conduct goes unpunished it will be repeated. Thus the continued bad conduct of Donald Trump. While the IDF cannot and should not be analogized to Trump—for instance, it believes in democracy and only lies some of the time—what is true for Trump is true for the IDF in at least one respect: America does itself no favors by enabling rather than putting a stop to grotesque, inhumane acts that threaten to lead, in the short term, to World War III.

The IDF is the fourteenth-strongest military on Earth; it has a history of defeating as many as five invading armies at once; it has the most powerful allies on Earth, to include not just the United States, Canada, and nearly all of Europe but (increasingly) Russia and certain powerful nations in the Middle East (like Saudi Arabia and the UAE); it is dealing with a land area half the size of Pittsburg, New Hampshire, and a militant group that is poorly provisioned and poorly equipped and poorly resourced and poorly run; it has, unlike the United States, a population of one mind about its continued survival and about the sacrifices all its civilians must make (like military service) to ensure that survival; it has a viable long-term path before it—a “two-state” solution—to achieving peace with its immediate neighbors; it has a viable short- and medium-term path, via the ongoing Abraham Accords, to make peace with its largest and most intractable regional adversaries. Of all the militaries in history, it’s not the one with a viable case to make that it can’t make war without committing war crimes.

But all that aside—focusing, now, simply on events inside America—we can’t let our understandable empathy, sympathy, admiration for, and (still more than this) common cause with the Israeli people draw us further into what domestic demagogues here in the United States, men like Trump and Elon Musk, most dearly want: the destruction of professional journalism. Whatever your feelings on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, it simply cannot include wanting journalists not to report the truth about what is now happening in Gaza and Israel. Indeed, even if you want the Biden administration to back corrupt career-criminal Benjamin Netanyahu no matter political maneuvers he makes; even if you want the occasionally deceitful and prone-to-war-crimes IDF to continue to do whatever it likes in Gaza, no matter how many dead Gazan children it produces; even if, God forbid, you are a religious zealot or white-supremacist bigot who has an abiding animus toward Arabs generally and Muslims specifically; it does not behoove you, or anyone, to demand the death of professional journalism. Mere reporting doesn’t stop war crimes, force presidents to take particular public policy positions, or advantage (or disadvantage) specific ethnic and religious groups—or, rather, it only does so if we let it. If, instead, we protect the autonomy of journalists to report what their most ardent and responsible investigations discover, journalism becomes only what it was—as I know from being a former journalism professor—in the beginning supposed to be: a mechanism for the creation of a common language.

When information transfer is open, honest, transparent, accurate, responsible, and well-resourced, it does not shape events but defines our ability to discuss them and make informed decisions together about the future. The horrific tragedy at the al-Ahli Hospital is of course first and foremost a humanitarian disaster, but it is also—if (a distant) second—a historic challenge to responsible journalism that we all, journalists and non-journalists alike, must strive to meet. That is what Proof has tried to do here.

Appendix A: A Note to Readers

The following was posted by the author of this report on Saturday, October 21, 2023.

I understand some people reading my journalism on the al-Ahli Hospital tragedy want me to be the vengeful Jew. That is not how I was raised in Judaism and that is not how I was raised, period. Israeli lives are precious; Palestinian lives are precious. Full stop.

For taking this stance, there’s a price I’m willing to pay.

It includes hatemail; lost followers; even a person who just unsubscribed from my substack Proof by writing in the Notes field, “lost respect for author.”

Another Proof reader unsubscribed with a notation that constitutes one of the most heinous things anyone has ever said about me, and could not less represent my values: “He’s cheering the death of Israelis.”

As I’ve often said—and not just online, either —if your values don’t cause you pain sometimes, they’re not values. I especially appreciate this image recently posted by Ben Collins of NBC News, taken from the substack of Marisa Kabas:

I also agree with this recent essay by former President Barack Obama, including this:

I also agree with this statement from the International Committee of the Red Cross:

Appendix B: A Proposal for a Temporary Humanitarian Ceasefire

On social media platforms, people understandably—one might even say rightly—get upset when users issue critiques without ever offering solutions. So simply for the sake of pushing back on any who say that war crimes in Israel and Gaza are the only reality we can expect or have any right to expect, I wrote up this ten-point proposal for a temporary humanitarian ceasefire (doing so before the idea of such a ceasefire was rejected by the Israeli government as “despicable”, after which statement it later added that efforts by the international community to prevent further civilian deaths in Israel and Gaza “will go down in infamy” and serve only to confirm “that the United Nations no longer holds even one ounce of legitimacy or relevance”):

1. The United States, Israel, Russia, Egypt, Jordan, France, and China should work together on a temporary humanitarian ceasefire. The involvement of allies of both Israel and Gaza would help to assure the parties keep to any agreement they sign.

2. For an agreed-upon period of time, Israel should pauses airstrikes in Gaza so that any and all Gazan women and children who want to leave the Gaza Strip can do so safely using the Rafah border crossing in southern Gaza.

3. The United Nations should set up a refugee camp in the Sinai Peninsula that is enormous in size, funded from international sources around the world (both governmental and NGO), and is conclusively blocked off from the rest of Egypt.

4. Egypt should receive a guarantee, in any such ceasefire agreement, that the IDF will not contest these evacuees’ “right of return” to their domiciles in Gaza, whether or not those domiciles still stand at the conclusion of the current war.

5. During the ceasefire, humanitarian aid to Gaza—including food, water, fuel, electricity, and medical supplies—should resumes at not just its regular pace but an accelerated one, and in an enlarged quantity, with Israel agreeing not to bomb the Rafah border crossing even after the end of the airstrike pause noted above so that these humanitarian convoys can come through safely and unimpeded.

6. Concurrent with all of the foregoing, Hamas must release all 229 hostages known to currently be in its custody.

7. The resumption of humanitarian aid to Gaza will allow noncombatant Gazan men—who won’t be permitted to leave Gaza in any ceasefire agreement—to survive for an extended duration by sheltering indoors, perhaps even in designated zones the IDF does not intend to focus on as part of its coming ground invasion.

8. The IDF should declare that, at the conclusion of the ceasefire period, all armed men in Gaza will be considered combatants.

9. The IDF will likely at the conclusion of any ceasefire agreement send over 360,000 ground troops into Gaza to fight Hamas in the ground war Hamas wants (as it has no air force) and the IDF requires (as Hamas is largely in its underground tunnels, now, and after nearly three weeks of persistent bombing, the IDF can no longer credibly claim that there are new military targets aboveground worth striking).

10. The IDF should agree to a cessation of standalone airstrikes while retaining the right to use close air support for its ground troops during its invasion of Gaza. There’s a different between using gunships to aid infantry and continuing to use bombs or shells to further raze a scrap of land that’s already been leveled several times over. Gaza must still exist, after the current war, for refugees to have a place to return to and for a two-state solution—the only imaginable resolution to the current crisis—to remain a possibility. (Though it will clearly take removing Mr. Netanyahu from power in a future Israeli election for such an aim to be realized.)

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{Note: Prior Proof updates on the Israel-Hamas War, all free to access, can be found at these links: 1, 2, 3. Subscribe to Proof below to gain full access to its archive of hundreds of reports.}

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The Israel-Hamas War By the (Harrowing) Numbers

CNN: 360,000 IDF troops are now surrounding Gaza.

ABC: There have been at least 11,344 Gazan casualties (2,600 killed, 8,744 wounded).

ABC: There have been at least 4,627 casualties in Israel (1,400 killed, 3,227 wounded).

WSJ: The Israelis have counted 1,500 dead Hamas terrorists in Israeli territory.

ABC: Among the Gazan dead are at least 724 children and at least 458 women.

CNN: The Committee to Protect Journalists says 12 journalists are dead, 8 wounded, and 2 missing in the fighting.

ABC: 29 Americans died in the Hamas attack, according to the latest death toll. 15 remain missing, according to a live CNN report at 11:36PM ET on Saturday, October 14—with a maximum of 4 of these Americans believed to be in Hamas custody.

CNN: Israel is currently at peace with 2 of its neighbors (Jordan, Egypt) and at war with 3 (Lebanon, Syria, and Hamas in Gaza). With a Saturday airstrike on the Aleppo International Airport in Syria, Israel has now engaged in military operations against all three of the entities it is at war with within the last week.

CNN: The United States has now moved 2 of its aircraft carrier strike groups closer to Israel.

WHO (image taken from CNN website at 1:04AM ET on Monday, October 16, 2023):

Approximately 80% of the 280 Bodies Found in Two Kibbutzim After the Hamas Attack Included Signs of Torture

SKY NEWS: {Click the link to the left to watch the video. Viewer discretion strongly advised.}

Israelis Restore Water in Southern Gaza, Northern Gaza Remains Cut Off From Water

AXIOS: “Israel resumed on Sunday the water supply to the southern Gaza Strip after strong pressure from the Biden administration, two Israeli officials told Axios. Israel’s decision to completely stop the water supply to Gaza [had] exacerbated the already dire humanitarian situation there, with aid groups warning water supplies were quickly running out.”

The Gaza-Egypt Rafah Border Crossing Opened at 2AM ET on Monday—But Only for Two Limited Purposes

MSNBC: “Just hours after Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with the Egyptian president, Palestinian officials confirmed the Rafah border crossing from Gaza into Egypt will be open for foreign nationals, including roughly 600 Americans trapped in Gaza….[and] as foreign nationals are coming out of Gaza, humanitarian aid will be going from Egypt into Gaza.”

Iran Makes An Implied Threat to Go to War With Israel

CNN: “Iran warned of ‘far-reaching consequences’ if Israel does not stop its attacks on Gaza. ‘If the Israeli apartheid’s war crimes and genocide are not halted immediately, the situation could spiral out of control and ricochet far-reaching consequences’, Iran’s Mission to the United Nations said. Earlier on Saturday, Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Amir Abdollahian voiced a similar sentiment in a meeting with Qatari Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.”

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Iran Meets with Hamas in Qatar

REUTERS: “Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian met with the leader of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in Qatar’s Doha, Al Jazeera reported on Saturday.”

Violence Has Now Exploded in The West Bank and East Jerusalem Also

CNN: “A total of 47 people have been killed, and hundreds of others injured, since Saturday in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, during clashes with Israeli forces and by settler gunfire.”

Even More Violence Has Now Broken Out in Syria

BBC: “Syrian state media says Israeli forces have hit the country’s two main international airports with missiles, putting them out of action. State media said runways had been damaged at both Damascus and Aleppo airports and flights would be diverted to Latakia, a city in north-west Syria. Israel has not commented on the strike. It has previously attacked targets in war-torn Syria, linked to Iran. Iran’s foreign minister was planning to fly to Syria on Friday.”

United States Preparing for Possibility of Sending Its Troops to Gaza or Israel

CNN: “The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a rapid reaction force capable of conducting special operations, is making preparations in case it is ordered closer to Israel to bolster the United States’ force posture there, multiple U.S. officials tell CNN. The unit, which is currently on board the USS Bataan amphibious assault ship, is comprised of over 2,000 Marines and sailors and would be capable of supporting a large-scale evacuation. Among the mission essential tasks for a Marine Expeditionary Unit are evacuation operations and humanitarian assistance.”

BBC Journalists Assaulted By Israeli Cops As a Reuters Journalist Appears to Have Been Killed by the Israelis

CNN: “The BBC said Friday that a group of its journalists covering Israel’s war with Hamas were held at gunpoint and assaulted by Israeli police in Tel Aviv. The disturbing incident, which the BBC said occurred on Thursday night, came as the team of three journalists drove to their hotel in a vehicle ‘clearly marked as media’, the British news network said. The BBC said that the team was ‘dragged from their vehicle’, searched and pushed up against a wall during the stop. One of its journalists said that when he tried to film the incident, an officer threw his phone to the ground.”

Reuters: “A Reuters video journalist was killed and six other journalists injured in southern Lebanon on Friday when missiles fired from the direction of Israel struck them, according to a Reuters videographer who was at the scene.”

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Israel Planning Major Crackdown on Domestic Dissent

HAARETZ: “Israeli Communications Minister [and Likud Party politician] Shlomo Karhi is promoting regulations that would allow him to direct police to arrest civilians, remove them from their homes, or seize their property if he believes they have spread information that could harm national morale or served as the basis for enemy propaganda.”

FBI Warns of Increased Terror Threat in America

CBS: “[Terror] threats in the United States have been rising since Hamas invaded Israel a week ago, FBI Director Christopher Wray and FBI officials said Sunday in a rare phone briefing for reporters. ‘The threat is very much ongoing and in fact, the threat picture continues to evolve’, Wray said. ‘Here in the U.S., we cannot and do not discount the possibility that Hamas or other foreign terrorist organizations could exploit the conflict to call on their supporters to conduct attacks on our own soil.’ He said that Jews and Muslims alike, as well as their institutions and houses of worship, have been threatened in the United States and told reporters that the bureau is ‘moving quickly to mitigate’ the threats.”

Chicago Area Boy Killed Due to His Islamic Faith and Israel-Hamas War; Mother Hospitalized But Will Live

NBC: “A Plainfield Township [Illinois] landlord who fatally stabbed a six-year-old boy and seriously wounded his mother targeted them because of their Islamic faith and the Israel-Hamas war, according to authorities. Joseph Czuba, 71, was charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and two counts of a hate crime, the Will County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release on Sunday.”

How to Donate to Humanitarian Aid for Gazan Civilians

CNN: {To donate to a vetted list of nonprofit organizations engaged in humanitarian work in the midst of the current catastrophe in Gaza, see this link at CNN.}

{Note: To donate to a vetted list of nonprofit organizations engaged in humanitarian work in the midst of the current catastrophe in Gaza, see this link at CNN. Note that the images in the below report are not individually captioned; all are taken from the last week in Gaza and hail from reliable media outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and NBC News.}

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Introduction

As breaking news from CNN confirms earlier reporting from major-media outlets in the Middle East—first curated in America by Proof—that indicted far-right Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in fact had prior warning of a major escalation in violence coming from the Gaza Strip well before the invasion of Israel by Hamas, conditions in Gaza have become a major focus of international attention.

The tragedy of what’s happening inside a narrow, cramped land area often called “the world’s largest open-air prison” is raised exponentially by the looming sense that the geopolitics-transforming effect of Hamas’s horrifying war crimes in Israel could have been significantly mitigated had Netanyahu acted responsibly to protect his people.

This report acts as an itemization of an unfolding human tragedy of epic proportions, and this Introduction as a discussion of foundational facts undergirding the tragedy.

About half of the 2.3 million residents of Gaza are children. Even before the Israel-Hamas War began, 70% of Gazans wanted Hamas to disarm—but were (and still are) in no position to make it happen. The Gaza Strip is so small that it’s approximately the size of two Districts of Columbia, even as its “built-up urban areas” are six times more densely packed than America’s capital city (see graphic below).

There is no escape from Gaza by land or sea. The tiny stretch of land is under a formal siege on all sides. To the north and east, 300,000 Israeli reservists surround it, a force representing more than 3% of the entire population of Israel. Were a similarly high percentage of the U.S. population to surround Washington, D.C.—or two districts of comparable size—the massed army would number 10.3 million soldiers. To the south, the Egyptian government is blocking Gazans from escaping to the Sinai Peninsula.

If indeed Gaza is “the world’s largest open-air prison,” it’s exponentially more so now—as where previously 18,000 Gazans left the Strip daily to work in Israel, now no one is allowed to leave for any purpose whatsoever. This only adds to the area’s population density, particularly in the urban areas where most of the hundreds upon hundreds of Israeli air raids and mortar attacks (one every third seconds, per France24) are falling.

And in a stunning development, the Netanyahu administration has now ordered the United Nations to evacuate the 1.1 million Gazans living in northern Gaza (north of the Wadi Gaza Wetlands) to leave their homes—likely forever—and evacuate to the southern portion of the settlement-cum-prison within 24 hours, a task that the UN immediately and understandably termed “impossible.”

The New York Times map below helps show why this evacuation order is inhumane as well as unprecedented (putting aside that the area that encompasses the two escape routes is under an unceasing bombardment by Earth’s fourteenth-strongest military):

MSNBC now reports that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are “ready” to invade the Gaza Strip via ground assault. As they stand at the cusp of doing so, Israeli airstrikes have already taken a horrifying toll on the local population in what Reuters reports is “by far the most powerful bombing campaign” in the 75-year-old, historically bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Per CNN, in just six days Gaza has suffered at least “1,900” killed, significantly more than this injured, and at least “430,000 displacements”—a euphemism for innocent refugees who have nowhere to go because their homes are gone or are now unsafe.

This figure represents almost 20% of all people in Gaza. It’s expected to skyrocket in the next few days.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has informed the over 300,000 very well trained and provisioned Israeli Defense Force (IDF) troops on Gaza’s border that the Netanyahu administration has formally “released all restraints” on their conduct once they enter Gaza—an obvious recipe for rampant war crimes. Indeed, in view of this development this headline from The Intercept cannot be seen as at all surprising:

This Proof report assesses the state of the critical resources needed by the innocent civilians in Gaza to stay alive. This is not a report about Hamas; that terrorist group’s formally trained military arm—known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades—is said by Israel to number only “several hundred” (and many members of this core group are presumed dead, given that 1,500 Hamas terrorists executed an “intricately planned assault” on Israel less than a week ago). Even if we now add to this number, as we most certainly should, the terrorist group’s 30,000 sympathizers and internal security guards, at its maximum strength—which it definitionally is not at—Hamas represents 1 of every 76 people in the Gaza Strip.

The other 75 people out of every 76—99% of the population of Gaza—have no Hamas affiliation whatsoever, and opposed Hamas’s militancy at a 70% clip even before the group’s unprecedented invasion of Israel led to Gaza staring down utter destruction.

And it’s not just utter destruction, either—but destruction in the most violent terms imaginable.

According to a news summary of a just-released report from Human Rights Watch (emphasis supplied)

Human Rights Watch has confirmed reports of Israel firing white phosphorus munitions during attacks on Gaza and along its border with Lebanon.

White phosphorus poses a high risk of excruciating burns and lifelong suffering, and its use as an incendiary weapon in civilian areas is a war crime.

All these harrowing developments complicate beyond description the emergencies in Gaza with regard to all of the essentials for human survival itemized by Proof below.

Food

Siege starvation is unquestionably a war crime, which puts allies of the Israeli people—which includes Proof—in an untenable position, as this is quite clearly what the government of Israel is now doing to Gaza in full view of its people and all the world.

Not only is Gaza under siege, but entry of food or water is being blocked by the IDF.

Nor can the intent of, and the animus behind, this war crime be deemed unclear. As Just Security reports,

“On Monday, Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant announced, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

It doesn’t take a Literary Studies doctorate to see the bait-and-switch here. It may be the case that Hamas—a vile terrorist organization that clearly must be destroyed, at this point, by any means acceptable under international law—does comprise “human animals”, but Minister Gallant hasn’t limited his preannounced war crime to Hamas, but expanded it to the 75 out of every 76 Gazans who have nothing to do with Hamas.

And that matters.

As United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese has told international media,

“If [the cutting off of food from a population] is intentional and in the context of a widespread and systemic attack against a civilian population, it also [in addition to a war crime] constitutes a Crime Against Humanity [a separate and even more serious offense under intentional law].”

Rapporteuer Albanese adds that less than one week into the Israeli offensive in Gaza, “Every rule of international humanitarian law ha[s] been broken” by the Israelis.

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As to food production inside Gaza, according to the United Nations, “The UN World Food Programme (WFP) [is]…together with UNRWA [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency]…deliver[ing] fresh bread from ‘bakeries still able to operate’ and food to over 175,000 displaced people across 88 [Gaza] shelters on Wednesday, with plans to ‘reach over 800,000 people across Palestine.’”

But this heroic effort is nevertheless insufficient, in large part for the most harrowing reason one could possibly imagine—because UN aid workers are being killed at scale.

The UN reports that in the last six days alone, at least a dozen UN aid workers trying to help stave off mass starvation in Gaza have been killed by Israeli airstrikes. And even attempts to relieve and reinforce these aid workers with new bodies are failing; UPI now reports that international aid organizations are desperately trying to get into Gaza with workers bearing food and medical supplies and have been unable to do so.

The horrifying photograph below is from this UPI report.

These civilian deaths notwithstanding, the food shortage in Gaza has now reached and passed catastrophic levels. According to this Reuters report, “food…[is] rapidly running out in Gaza.” What many Westerners may not understand here is that even before the war, a significant percentage of Gazans were on food assistance to survive, assistance that now is dwindling to nothing because there is no means to augment Gaza’s food supplies beyond whatever was on-hand when Hamas invaded Israel—an event that not only was unforeseeable to humanitarian aid workers but unforeseen by the 98.7% of the Gazan population (to be precise about it) that has nothing to do with Hamas and could not possibly have known plans that, as Proof just reported two days ago, it kept hidden from even its top allies in the region. Under such circumstances, how could those already struggling to find food have known it was about to disappear altogether? How could they have prepared themselves through rationing or hoarding?

They could not.

As Reuters explains, “In normal times, the UN…provides direct food assistance to some 350,000 Palestinians [approximately one in six Gazans] monthly, while also offering aid to nearly 1 million [other Gazans] in cooperation with other [non-UN] humanitarian partners via cash transfers [which additional aid thus comprises food assistance to an additional 43% of Gazans].”

The very longest a human can survive without food is 8 to 21 days, and many humans can’t go nearly this long without perishing; indeed, the usual figure given in studies of mass starvation is seven days. This is especially true for the very young and very old, as well as those who are already suffering from serious health conditions such as war injuries. It seems clear from public data that half or more of all Gazans already fall into that category of persons liable to perish within a week without any nourishment.

Water: Human Consumption

The average human will die if they have no water for 72 hours.

The Israeli government has cut off all water supplies to Gaza. Per this report by ABC News, which cites the United Nations World Food Programme, “residents in Gaza are expected to run out of food, potable water, and essential supplies in a matter of weeks.”

This is misleadingly optimistic, however—for the simple reason that by the time a population of 2.3 million has entirely “run out of potable water” there has already been mass death due to water deprivation because not all civilians have equal access to water, not all civilians can go the same period of time without water, and not all uses of water even relate to consumption—for instance, some water must always go to firefighting (see below) and far more to hospitals, for emergency medical procedures—so it’s likely that Gazans will begin dying of thirst before the first week of November.

This short timeframe is particularly harrowing given that the United States, one of the nations most likely to be in a position to both send humanitarian aid to Gaza and help marshal an international coalition to systematically do so, has no functioning legislative branch at the moment.

Until the Republican Party of Donald Trump is able to select a Speaker of the House, which it has now been unable to do for over a week and which American major media reports may not happen for weeks to come—CNN says there’s “no end in sight” to the total (not even partial) paralysis of the legislative branch of our federal government—there is no mechanism for Congress to send aid to Gaza were it even inclined to do so.

And that inclination is in itself unclear, as right now the GOP seems interested only in sending military equipment to the fourteenth-strongest military on Earth rather than food, water, medical supplies, or other humanitarian assistance to 1 million children who are about to run out of all of these essentials for survival.

And the situation is worse than even this.

As ABC News reports (emphasis supplied), “Gaza was facing a food security [and] water crisis before the most recent conflict began.” As the news network explains,

Thousands of years of conflict in the region has degraded the land [of Gaza], leaving “reverberating environmental effects” and making it nearly impossible for Gaza to produce its own food supply. The recurring periods of violence have led to high levels of disruption to infrastructure, particularly water and sanitation, as well as power plants.

So Westerners must understand that the water crisis that has hit Gaza—ABC News says water is already “scarce” as of today—is not striking a community equatable to a suburban enclave in New Jersey, but a semi-blighted landscape that even under the best local conditions imaginable would perpetually struggle to support human life.

As the network’s reporting explains (emphasis supplied, internal citations omitted for clarity),

There is no surface water—lakes or rivers—to draw from in the region. The only resource to extract water from is the groundwater. Therefore, the aquifer supplying water to the territory is over-extracted. Only about 4% of the water extracted from the aquifer is actually potable.

The lack of an adequate supply of clean water has been the focus of the argument on the actual habitability of Gaza for years. Nearly all of the drinking water in the territory is bottled.

About 80% of the population in Gaza was in need of humanitarian aid before the bombings began days ago.

Medical Care

According to this UN report, right now there are 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, with an estimated 166 babies due to be born every day in Gaza for months to come.

The UN reports that these 50,000 births will be “taking place with inadequate access to healthcare or even clean water.”

But the problem of medical care in Gaza goes beyond this unthinkable tragedy, as of course doctors and nurses in Gazan hospitals must worry about being killed at any moment in an Israeli airstrike as they attempt to save the lives of noncombatants through complex emergency surgeries—quite apart from the fact that they also lack water, fuel, antibiotics, pain medication, and even blood for emergency transfusions.

Meanwhile, observers say that Gazan morgues are “overflowing.”

NPR reports that the effect of the now-raging war on Gazan hospitals has been “devastating”, with some hospitals reporting that certain patients must be treated on the floor—because there are no beds for them—and the “smell of blood everywhere.”

What exacerbates all of this is the staggering population density in Gaza. If an Israeli bomb or missile goes astray—or is negligently or recklessly targeted to begin with, or is deliberately targeted at a location thought to be connected to Hamas that actually is not so connected—the likelihood is not just that there will be civilian casualties but mass civilian casualties because the people of Gaza, simply put, live so close together.

Moreover, Israeli attacks are much more likely than one might expect to strike at or near hospitals because, per IDF claims—as NPR details—“Hamas hides weapons and soldiers within and near hospitals and health facilities.” Is this true? It may or may not be, but certainly there’s no confirmation of the claim either way by either Hamas or the Israelis, with the result that the latter can justify any strike at or near a hospital facility by contending that it was a legitimate military target. NPR reports that “As of Thursday, the World Health Organization had documented at least 34 health care-related attacks—attacks involving health workers, facilities and ambulances—and warns that the health system in Gaza is at a breaking point.” NPR notes that at some hospitals the wait time even for emergency surgery is “days”, a macabre revelation that becomes more and more unthinkable the more one ponders it.

In an environment in which every hospital can be declared a potential military target, there’s virtually no chance of providing adequate medical care to pregnant women, children with shrapnel in their bodies, persons who are terminally ill, or the elderly. And all this would be the case even if these hospitals had adequate medical supplies.

But they don’t.

This NBC News headline tells the tale better than Proof can:

Harrowingly, one doctor in Gaza told NBC News that, within 48 hours of the Hamas invasion of Israel, the hospital he was working in “had already run out [of] or [we]re running out of supplies, especially consumables like gauze, antiseptic, sutures, blades and antibiotic ointment, things you need for burns.”

It’s now five days later, and we can safely assume that both this particular hospital and most others on the Gaza Strip no longer have those consumables at all—nor will they will getting more, as Israel is blocking all medical supplies from entering the besieged territory.

Electricity

The sole power station in Gaza stopped working two days ago, according to CNN. So most of the 2.3 million people in Gaza, 98.7% of them noncombatants, are now living in darkness.

But this horror aside—facing hundreds or even thousands of airstrikes from one of the strongest militaries in the world while living in darkness, all because a terrorist group whose militarism you and 70% of your neighbors categorically oppose, which you didn’t democratically elect, committed heinous war crimes in a neighboring administrative state—the lack of electricity in Gaza cannot be discussed without acknowledging that hospitals run on electricity. Sitting in darkness waiting to be bombed is one kind of horror; being a doctor or nurse trying to save the life of a child with shrapnel in his stomach without access to electricity is the stuff of nightmares.

As Haaretz reports, the failure of Gaza’s sole power plant was due to lack of fuel (see below for more).

This illustrates the “cascade effect” in any fast-collapsing human civilization. Fuel is required for electricity to be generated; without electricity, as Haaretz observes, there is a “stoppage of water supply”; without water, people quickly end up hospitalized and too week to produce or seek food; without food, hospitalizations increase further; and yet without fuel and electricity, hospitals cannot function—leading to the now “appalling conditions” in Gazan hospitals that Haaretz reports on here and which will now experience the cascade effect.

All of these life-and-death subnetworks—food, water, fuel, electricity, and medical supplies, not to mention the human resources, such as humanitarian aid workers and doctors and nurses in local hospitals, that act as delivery mechanisms for these goods—are interconnected, meaning that the failure of one can collapse all the others and cause mass death on an unthinkable scale within a matter of weeks or even days (quite apart from the tragedies that unfold in a matter of seconds when a highly advanced military is bombing one of the most densely packed civilian living areas on Earth).

On top of all this, internet connectivity in Gaza is now at less than 20%, according to The Times of Israel—and is expected to end completely throughout Gaza on Saturday, October 14 (quite possibly because Israel plans to launch the first stage of its ground invasion tomorrow). This calls to mind another thing that electricity is often used for worldwide: to power the digital devices allowing a besieged population to tell the world about what’s happening to it as 300,000 heavily armed-and-armored troops are coming toward it in a stage of rage, “released of all restraints” by their government.

Water: Firefighting

Needless to say, buildings are now on fire across the Gaza Strip—including, according to CBS News, civilian buildings like schools, hospitals, and residential towers. There’s no indication that these fires can any longer be put out via firefighting operations.

According to this Thursday MSNBC report, “Israel’s minister of energy has announced that no…fire hydrants will be turned on…until the Israeli hostages captured by Hamas are released.”

The problem with this demand is self-evident: Hamas is an armed militant group that has little concern for who lives or dies in the Gaza Strip at this point, and those who need hydrants and fire trucks are civilians who lack the armaments to force Hamas to do anything. In sum, the people who need the hydrants aren’t holding the hostages.

Observers should assume that fires in Gaza can’t be put out going forward, even as or when they’re burning people alive, creating long-term structural hazards that will kill innocents in the future, or destroying critical nonmilitary infrastructure like hospitals or schools (though it probably should go without saying that no one knows when or if Gazan children will be able to go back to school).

Gazan civilians’ inability to fight fires would be less urgent a concern if they did not live in an area the size of two Washington, DCs that is currently being bombarded with bombs and missiles by one of the twenty strongest militaries on Earth.

Fuel

In a crisis, fuel is needed to keep ambulances and fire engines running; to keep large generators at critical facilities like hospitals and power plants running; to allow any refugees who are unable to flee by foot due to age or infirmity to escape areas about to be bombed; or even—as is commonly the case in the Gaza Strip, now—to let civilian vehicles act as ad hoc ambulances when no properly equipped vehicles are available in the immediate vicinity because they have all been destroyed by missiles and bombs.

Israel’s minister of energy, Israel Katz, has said that not a single fuel truck will be allowed to enter Gaza until all Israeli refugees have been released, a declaration that has led the International Committee of the Red Cross to “plead” with Israel—thus far without any success—to allow fuel into the Gaza Strip for humanitarian reasons.

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Conclusion

Empathy for noncombatant Palestinian civilians and refugees appears to be at its lowest ebb ever in Washington, D.C., where it has been all too easy for Republican demagogues—desperate to turn Americans’ attention from the fact that they can’t form a functioning government—to conflate Hamas and Gaza, which truly ghoulish conflation is further enabled by the fact that the American death toll in the Israel-Hamas War has risen to 27 and the Israeli death toll has surpassed 1,300. In other words, there are new tragic, horrifying, and categorically unacceptable deaths for the party of Donald Trump to cynically exploit.

Meanwhile, a beloved Reuters journalist was just killed on the Israel-Lebanon border and thousands of Americans are now begging the U.S. State Department to help them get out of Israel. So emotions in the region couldn’t possibly be running hotter on all sides.

In the face of Hamas’s war crimes and Crimes Against Humanity—which clearly must result in the decimation of the terrorist group as quickly as possible—it will nevertheless be impossible for the Western world to ignore the war crimes and Crimes Against Humanity that appear to be unfolding inside Gaza at the hands of the IDF and the Netanyahu administration, acts that many Israelis demonstrably oppose.

And we can expect pro-Palestinian protests to increase in number and expand in size around the globe. Unlike the first, risible ones—which sought to express support for the cold-blooded murder of civilian noncombatants by Hamas and even, in several cases, the genocide of the Jews in the Middle East and around the world—the coming protests will be responsible in their conception and just in their aim because that aim will be to stop the indiscriminate murder of innocents in Gaza. It is not so very hard, thankfully, to pull together a mass protest when the topic is saving the lives of infants, children, the elderly, the terminally ill, and adult noncombatants who are not just non-violent by nature but are trying their best to serve their communities: doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, firefighters, humanitarian aid workers, and the other categories of selfless civil servants who seek not to harm but aid each and every neighbor they can.

One worries, now, that such protests will become more and more dangerous—not due to their composition or ambitions, but because many in the West have overcorrected in the face of Hamas’s vile, inexcusable, unthinkable war crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, failing to see that even those who believe in the existence of a Jewish state cannot stand by while children are brutally murdered. Indeed, in France the centrist government has now made all pro-Palestinian protests illegal; this may have seemed a (tenuously) tenable policy when President Emmanuel Macron and his ministers saw the possibility for large-scale antisemitic violence in protests that openly celebrated Hamas, but what will happen when these protests, instead, make their aim to end war crimes in Gaza even as they acknowledge the war crimes Hamas committed in Israel?

Just so, President Joe Biden and the White House have now had to walk back claims that President Biden saw images of children beheaded by Hamas at Kfar Azza. This embarrassment has (entirely wrongly) emboldened pro-Hamas protesters, even as it’s distracted the attention of many from the fact that this distinction doesn’t finally matter. Hamas murdering infants and young children in cold blood at point-blank range and in front of their families is undisputed, making the babies manner of death ultimately a macabre sideshow. Does a murdered baby care if it was decapitated or shot in the head? Those who know better should be avoiding disputes over the precise contours of a war crime to focus on the far more important fact that war crimes unquestionably took place inside Israel—lending righteousness to the current military operation to destroy Hamas—and that war crimes are now being perpetuated inside Gaza by Israel.

What Biden’s gaffe—admittedly, encouraged in bad faith by the Trumpist president of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who’d naturally have little problem with his criminality as a peacetime and/or wartime politician redounding to Biden’s detriment rather than his ally Trump’s—confirms is that, as already noted above, the West is in the midst of a moral overcorrection that will shortly boomerang back against it. Just as the support progressives like myself express for BLM becomes a self-inflicted wound when certain BLM leaders issue antisemitic declarations, progressives’ understandable support for the only democracy in the Middle East—a nation-state that’s almost certainly the last best protection against a second Holocaust, given the history and present and likely future of global antisemitism—becomes an albatross when the Israeli government, largely led by far-right radicals in the Likud Party, engages in conduct that betrays not only core principles of American progressivism but, as importantly to the author of Proof and other American Jews, Judaism itself.

Fortunately, it seems that Biden is indeed now making a necessary pivot, as this CNN report suggests:

American Jews, American progressives, and the Democratic Party need to do what we have always done this century and with well-justified moral indignation: the opposite of whatever Christofascists, MAGAs, and the Republican Party are now doing with an abominable absence of grace, integrity, and empathy. Indeed, a recalibration of how Americans are perceiving events in Israel and Gaza is not just morally warranted but logistically urgent now that major conservative talking heads are advising America to go to war in the Middle East—partly as retribution for American deaths there, and partly to aid (though there is no evidence such aid is requested or desired) an Israeli military that appears to be having no difficulty whatsoever leveling Gaza on its own.

It will be no defense against accusations of war crimes for either Israel’s government or its people to do what their president, Isaac Herzog, has now done, which is try to justify the slaughter of innocent Gazans by insisting that every Gazan—presumably including the nearly 50% who are children, and the significant number who are elderly and well beyond fighting age—should suffer for Hamas’s actions because “they could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza.”

No historian believes this. History shows us that those with the guns (Hamas) make the rules, and this is especially so if, like Hamas, those with the guns are willing to kill the elderly, women, children, and other habitual noncombatants in the Middle East indiscriminately. Indeed, Hamas’s willingness to kill anyone at all without warning in Israel explains precisely why unarmed Gazans without an opportunity to vote for their leadership since 2006 weren’t positioned to rise up against those who, not for nothing, have kept their place as rulers of Gaza not only with their guns but with humanitarian aid that kept alive a significant percentage of the Gazan population.

A “coup” of the sort Isaac Herzog retrospectively insists on would have been a self-extermination. He is doing little more, here, than insisting that the Palestinians do themselves an even more egregious version of the work the IDF now seems ready to do on Netanyahu’s, Herzog’s, and Gallant’s orders.

Americans in particular are in no position to judge the Gazans in this way. Consider that we know precisely which members of Congress helped plot the events of January 6 and precisely which members of the Trump administration aided them. None have gone to jail, and in fact none were even charged with crimes until more than two and a half years after the violent, deadly domestic-terror-attack-cum-coup they and others were responsible for. Even today, with a minuscule number of the ringleaders charged, the bulk of the January 6 plotter class remains uncharged and one—Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)—may be on the verge of becoming the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and second in line for the American presidency. So who are we to lecture a considerably more impoverished, considerably less armed, considerably more fractious, considerably less formally educated or healthy or safe population about taking on a homicidal terrorist bloc funded and armed by Russia and Iran?

And what about Israel, whose prime minister is a known career criminal currently under indictment? Why was it so hard for Israelis to cage him that he had to be put in charge of the country’s very destiny, instead? Facetiousness aside, the point is that overthrowing a violent autocratic regime and bringing it to justice is hard; avoiding war crimes when you have a civilian population entirely at your mercy is not merely comparatively easy but actually so. Yet there’s little indication Israel will take this path.

That Israelis have experienced one of the worst days in their history is clear. That war crimes and Crimes Against Humanity were perpetuated against Israel by Hamas is also clear. That an immediate, forceful, decisive military response to these crimes is needed is beyond question. But inside the United States, what is equally obvious is that a flailing GOP and morally repugnant, Islamophobic MAGA “movement” is now going to use the specter of killing Middle Eastern Muslims en masse to try to reverse is domestic fortunes. This would be a not just repugnant but transparent ploy if D.C. Democrats weren’t so concerned over its success that they have inadvertently begun mirroring it—desperately aiming to ensure they aren’t flanked on an issue of moment by their political adversaries. This sorry state of play leaves innocent noncombatants in Gaza, again about half of whom—we must not forget—are kids, without advocates either abroad or stateside. This can’t be allowed to continue.

Israeli intelligence agencies are among the best in the world. The Israeli Defense Force is among the best armies in the world. Israel has created a unity government. Gaza is besieged, surrounded, in the dark, and running out of fuel, food, medical supplies, and water. The Israelis’ chief cause—obliterating Hamas—has the support of the entire West. Even as bodies are still being recovered by the dozens in Israel-Gaza border towns, the military situation in Israel is relatively stable, skirmishes at the Israel-Lebanon border and a handful of Hamas militants remaining on Israeli soil notwithstanding. Now is precisely the moment for an international pause to (a) ensure the safety of innocents, and (b) carefully deliberate next moves. The Israelis ordering 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to evacuate the region in 24 hours, which CBS News calls “unprecedented” and the United Nations calls “impossible”, is no more temperate than “comedian” Greg Gutfeld calling for American warplanes to assist Israel in striking an already decimated Gaza or urging a violent revolution inside the United States.

The moment to be our best is when circumstances are at their worst. This has always been true, and it remains true today.

{Note: You can read the first free Proof report on the ongoing Israel-Hamas War here. Proof uses curatorial journalism to offer the most comprehensive, incisive account of current events.}

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Introduction

The wholly foreseeable—read on, and at the link above, to see why it was foreseeable—Israel-Hamas War arrives just as Elon Musk has completed his utter destruction of the world’s premiere venue for sharing news about major international breaking news.

As a consequence, the information space with respect to what’s happening right now in Israel is a mess. On Twitter, videos that are fake, misleadingly framed, years old, ripped from video games, or part of a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the enemies of the United States abound, even as breaking news headlines have literally been rendered invisible by Musk’s new user interface (UI) and analyses by professional journalists are buried beneath a veritable avalanche of conjecture, snark, and outright propaganda by fake-“verified” trolls, bots, foreign agents, and MAGA insurrectionists.

My hope is that Proof can be a uniquely helpful resource under the circumstances.

Proof was acknowledged last year by the Government of the Netherlands as one of the world’s chief advocates for—and indeed originators of—curatorial journalism, an emerging journalistic subgenre that sometimes goes by the name metajournalism.

According to officials in the Netherlands, this Substack media outlet participates in

“a form of investigative journalism that seems to be on the rise….curated journalism, or metajournalism. Many separate, sometimes short, messages appear on each subject. A metajournalist tries to follow that huge mass of online messages from different titles on a subject and to create a coherent picture based on that. Such authors are involved in a subject for a long time and become aware of many details. This way of working produces new messages that can reveal a bigger story than the individual messages. That larger story can also become news.”

I didn’t become a curatorial journalist just recently. After starting my career in indie journalism at 17, almost thirty years ago, I turned to curatorial journalism in late 2016 specifically as a way to capture the full story of Donald Trump’s malfeasance at a time when mainstream media seemed incapable of doing so using conventional reporting.

The result was three national bestsellers, totaling 2,500 pages, covering the entirety of the Trump presidency. The fourth book in the Proof series was released here at Proof last year, and tells the untold story of events at the Pentagon before and on January 6.

More recently, Proof has turned its attention, and its curatorial journalism, to Musk—detailing his activities as a clear-and-present but idiosyncratic danger to the world.

Now there’s a war ongoing in Israel that threatens to expand and engulf all of us in its miseries. So this media outlet is pivoting to apply curatorial journalism to yet another story so sprawling, so mired in the morass of social media chaos, and so complex in its innumerable contours that it may be impossible to tell it any other way.

Ten Stunning Major-Media Revelations About the Israel-Hamas War You Might Have Missed

(1) Hamas’s attack was much larger than believed.

Channel 4 (UK) reports that over 1,500 Hamas militants—all of them heavily armed, and many of them heavily armored—stormed into southern Israel on Saturday. Initial estimates had assumed the number of terrorists to be only in the mid-hundreds.

While 1,500 may or may not sound like a lot to some readers here, remember that this force—which equates to somewhere between two and five battalions in Western military parlance (depending on the country involved)—emanated from an area about the size of two Districts of Columbia.

But it’s more than this.

Whereas initial reports from Israeli intelligence said that 2,200 rockets were fired from Gaza as the invasion unfolded, more recent reporting from CBS News now quotes the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as updating this figure to 4,500—more than twice the number previously acknowledged, and almost exactly in line with claims made by Hamas at the time of its initial attack on the tiny Jewish state to Gaza’s east.

Just so, whereas it was widely reported that Israeli territory had been fully cleared of Hamas terrorists by late Sunday, in fact news reports thereafter emerged of fighting continuing inside Israel as late as today (Wednesday), giving the lie to that apparently too-optimistic assessment.

Equally concerning is that just hours after reports emerged highlighting concerns about Hezbollah military incursions along the Israeli-Lebanon border, new reports arrived revealing that fierce gun battles on that border with unknown militants had already begun. The most recent reporting has Hezbollah firing rockets into Israel and fighting occurring on both sides of the historically hotly contested border.

What all this means is that the invasion of Israel was much larger, much broader in scope, much longer in its duration, much more far-reaching in its geopolitical effect, and much fiercer in its minute-to-minute intensity than any news report we received over the weekend suggested.

Even now, Israel can’t confirm that all Hamas militants have been driven from its soil; rockets continue to emanate from Gaza en masse, despite the devastation that Israeli airstrikes have visited upon it; and fighting in northern Israel is getting worse rather than better.

(2) The death toll of the initial attack was significantly worse than previously thought.

CNN reports over 1,200 Israeli dead in just the first 96 hours of the war, which wildly outstrips the earliest reports out of southern Israel—reports that suggested a total death toll nationwide in the low hundreds.

In fact, major-media reports now confirm that a death toll in the low hundreds was reached solely at the Nova Music Festival near the Be’eri kibbutz (not far from the old Karni border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel, which was closed in 2011).

The Nova death toll is already “over 260”, and given that more than a hundred concert-goers are still missing could reach over 360. While some of these hundred civilians may have been kidnapped, there has by now been enough video of—and telephonic contact with—some of the abductees that there’s good reason to fear that among the unaccounted-for hundred innocent noncombatants are some who were killed by Hamas in, as noted, a surprise attack more vicious by exponents than initially known.

It’s always dangerous to try to extrapolate or metaphorize the scope of a tragedy using mathematics; Israel isn’t America, and vice versa. Nevertheless, one can’t ignore that Israel is a nation with a population of under 9.4 million people—thus, approximately the same size, population-wise, as New Jersey. If 1,200 New Jersey residents died from a terrorist attack tomorrow, we’d immediately account it another September 11th, and the truth of the matter is that by all appearances the death toll Israel is now reporting will soon rise substantially. When we add to this fact that Israel is not, of course, New Jersey—the analogy fails unless we imagine New Jersey as the entirety of America—it can be understood that the toll from Hamas’s terroristic invasion of the only democracy in the Middle East is so great that it will be etched in Israelis’ memories for generations.

(3) The initial Israeli response to the attack was considerably more feeble than realized.

As the New York Times now reports, Israel’s border fence—use of which as a defense mechanism has been touted not just by Benjamin Netanyahu but his friend and leading American ally Donald Trump—turned out to be useless. Even meaningless.

With no difficulty at all, Hamas militants (a) used basic drones to take out the fence’s machine-gun emplacements and the cell towers controlling them; (b) bulldozed the fence to allow invaders to traverse it en masse; (c) used low-tech hang-gliders to sail over it with ease; (d) cut holes in certain sections of the fence, and even (e) used at least one motorboat to simply go around it. As the Times summarizes, “the barrier turned out to be easier to break through than Israeli officials had expected.” This discovery gives the lie to Trumpist and Likud Party claims that border fences, even remotely monitored ones, are a significant defense against foreign incursions. In fact, initial Israeli intelligence reviews suggest that the presence of a border fence bred overconfidence, complacency, and poor organization and discipline in Israeli forces.

It turns out that the closing of entryways into the Gaza Strip—that is, the elongation of the border fence to offer fewer points of entry for people and/or goods traveling between Israel and Gaza—may paradoxically have reduced Israeli national security.

As the Times and other major-media outlets have now reported, with only one (of an original nine) border crossings still open for human traffic between Israel and Gaza, the IDF began concentrating all of its forces in a single location at the border. The result was that Hamas was able to take out almost the entirety of Israel’s command-and-control structure at the border simply by killing almost everyone in a single IDF outpost. In one fell swoop, there were virtually no IDF commanders left to organize a resistance to Hamas’s initial incursion.

Just so, the cutting off of surveillance facilities at a single location made it possible for 1,500 militants to get up to 15 miles inside Israel without anyone in the IDF knowing where they were or even from which points of border-fence breach they had emanated.

(4) Iran may not have been involved in Hamas’s invasion of Israel. But it now looks like Russia was.

Not only have Republican Party politicians across America accused Iran of funding, orchestrating, and overseeing Hamas terrorists’ cold-blooded murder of hundreds or even thousands of Israelis over the weekend, they’ve gone so far as to assure American voters that the money Iran used to do so came from $6 billion in “taxpayer” funds given to Iran by the Biden administration.

All of this is false. Worse, it’s disinformation spread by Republican officials who well know the truth: the $6 billion in question is frozen funds from completed Iranian oil sales; in return for significant value for U.S. foreign policy, the Biden administration agreed to transfer these funds to a Qatari bank, where they are now overseen by U.S. officials in such a way that they can only be used to purchase food, medicine, or other humanitarian essentials for the Iranian people. In other words, not only can this old money never be used to fund a terrorist enterprise, but the Iranian government has no access to the funds at all. Moreover, Israeli intelligence apprehended from the start of the Hamas invasion that it had to have been in the works for months and months (see much more on this below), making it impossible for it to have had anything to do with an Administration money transfer. The invasion plot significantly predates the transfer.

But somehow this all gets much, much worse than Republican politicians deliberately spreading disinformation that weakens American national security during a war in the Middle East that America has already tacitly been drawn into by virtue of Israel being one of our biggest allies. While the work of Republican disinformation brokers would already have bordered on open treachery against the United States in a time of war, we know that in fact Iran may not even have been involved in any of this at all.

As CNN now reports, “Initial U.S. intelligence suggests Iran was surprised by the Hamas attack on Israel.” This report is based on “multiple” sources and “specific” intelligence received by the USIC (United States Intelligence Community). The USIC now expresses its significant “doubt…that Iran was directly involved in the planning, resourcing, or approving of the [Hamas] operation [in Israel].” Worse still, there now seems to be every possibility that some of the Republican officials who falsely blamed the United States—and “taxpayer” dollars—for Hamas’s atrocities actually had seen or heard of the intel before renewing their credentials in the Blame America First crowd.

In a shocking update to this ongoing reporting late Wednesday, CNN revealed that (emphasis supplied) “A senior Hamas official based in Lebanon said militants had been preparing for the attack on Israel for two years”—meaning since October 2021, just eight months into the Biden administration, four months before Russia invaded Ukraine for the second time (but, critically, during the period of time MAGA allies in Moscow had begun plotting a followup ground offensive in the European nation they first invaded in 2014), and a stunning 23 months before the one-off deal with Iran that MAGA Republicans now falsely insist made the Hamas invasion of Israel possible.

But it gets worse.

According to the senior Hamas official quoted by CNN, Ali Baraka, from October 2021 to just before the Hamas invasion the Islamist terrorists were “manufacturing [Kalashnikov] bullets with permission from the Russians” (emphasis supplied). The same Russians whose military-industrial complex the MAGA “movement” has since opted to support over America’s European allies in Ukraine and NATO? Yes, the very same.

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Moreover, Baraka confirms that Iran was not involved in the planning of the attack.

According to Baraka, “None of our factions, even our allies did not know about the ‘zero hour’ [of the invasion]…[in order to] preserve the secrecy of the battle [plan].”

He adds that thirty minutes post-invasion, “the Palestinian resistance factions [in the West Bank and Gaza unaffiliated with Hamas] were contacted, in addition to our allies Hezbollah and Iran [and Turkey].” While Baraka acknowledges what has long been known—that Iran generally speaking supplies Hamas with most of its “money and weapons”—CNN reports that he “made no mention of any outside involvement in the planning of the attack.”

But what about outside involvement in the invasion as it occurred? Here, we find new evidence of Kremlin involvement—the same Kremlin the Republican Party base has, increasingly, vocally backed instead of NATO, the Pentagon, or the European Union.

As CNN explains (emphasis supplied):

Russia inquired about the attack [on Israel] after[ ] [the initial attack], Baraka said. “They were updated about our situation and the goals of the battle”, he said.

He also said Moscow was happy for the United States to be distracted by the Israel-Hamas conflict instead of the war in Ukraine.

“Even Russia sympathizes with us. Even the Russians sent us messages Saturday morning [immediately after the attack began]. There is sympathy. [Russia] is happy for America to be embroiled in Palestine. It lessens the pressure on it in Ukraine. One battle eases the other battle. So therefore we are not alone in the battlefield.”

For a senior Hamas official to say that Hamas is “not alone in the battlefield” because it has the unambiguous backchannel support of Republican Party allies in Moscow—which party is at this moment trying to convince American voters that it’s Democratic politicians who’ve provided aid and comfort to Hamas and its closest allies—should be major breaking news across the United States. Indeed, it situates Hamas’s invasion of Israel as a hand-in-glove operation with Russian operations in Ukraine that are broadly supported by the Republicans’ voting base. Proof notes, as well, that the only nation Baraka makes clear knew of its preparations for war in both 2021 and 2022 was Russia. Given that Baraka now acknowledges that the Kremlin sees Hamas’s invasion as a mutually beneficial strategy to help it win in Ukraine, we must ask the following: Wouldn’t Putin have believed the very same thing when he was giving “permission” for Hamas to generate Russian ammunition using Russian molds? Must we now deem the invasion of Israel a new front in the Russo-Ukrainian War the Republican Party sides with the Russians in? Does that mean the GOP is formally allied with Hamas?

These are questions working journalists must begin to ask, given this new reporting.

{Note: None of this changes the fact that Iran is the primary sponsor, funder, and supplier of Hamas—and may well have green-lit an operation it did not in the first instance orchestrate or oversee. Certain Republican members of Congress are dismissing this new CNN report on Iran’s lack of awareness of the Hamas invasion by mischaracterizing it, suggesting that it says Iran had zero knowledge whatsoever of the attack—which is beyond improbable. What in fact the extant intelligence, and this new reporting, suggests is that even if Iran had knowledge of a coming attack it apparently did not know the timing of it. It will be important for Americans to stay on top of this developing subnarrative, particularly as the Netanyahu administration is now insisting that Iran was intimately involved in the invasion, and may in the future parlay that apparently unwarranted insistence into military action against Iran. Such military action could lead to a U.S.-Iran war on the order of the one Trump came within minutes of lying the United States into following his assassination of popular Iranian general Qasam Soliemani.}

(5) Israel is taking steps—wise or not, justified or not, necessary or not—that are likely to create the biggest humanitarian crisis since World War II.

Per this Haaretz report (see also here and below), Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has now told the 300,000 Israel troops massing at the Gaza border that the Netanyahu administration has officially “released all restraints” on their conduct in Gaza. This opens the door—by definition—to the commission of war crimes by the IDF upon its mass incursion on a land area the size of just two District of Columbias.

And we must remember, here, that almost 50% of the local population in Gaza is mere children. (As of this writing, Insider reports that 260 children have already been killed by the Israelis without even a single IDF member entering Gaza on foot.)

According to the Associated Press, the IDF has already directly bombed one United Nations shelter in Gaza and has damaged five others—making clear to innocent Gazans, whether or not there was any premeditation behind these Israeli airstrikes, that nowhere in Gaza is safe. Reports from scores of NGOs and media outlets confirm that UN shelters in Gaza are at or over capacity. Israel has also repeatedly bombed the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Israel to ensure that no Gazans can escape, though in a sense this hardly matters: Egypt is refusing to take Palestinian refugees.

All water and electricity into Gaza have been stopped, and the Strip is now officially out of power. Water shortages are so severe that mass civilian deaths from insufficient water intake, including the deaths of children and the elderly, are likely to begin in a matter of hours rather than days.

The IDF has dropped its years-long commitment to using phone calls or pre-strike “roof knocks” to warn civilians to evacuate a building that is about to be bombed, thus ensuring mass civilian casualties with almost every strike it makes (and there have already been hundreds, one of which hit a marketplace and killed dozens of innocents).

While Israel’s determination to permanently destroy Hamas is understandable and just, the foreseeability of a humanitarian crisis that kills hundreds of thousands of additional infants, children, and elderly; individuals who are disabled, bedridden, dependent on medication, or terminally ill; or noncombatants who don’t support (or even have actively opposed) Hamas cannot be doubted. The world will now see mass death within Gaza from thirst, starvation, immolation, explosion, the mass collapse of buildings and outbuildings, heat stroke, insufficiency (or lack of access to) medication and medical treatment, and countless other causes. Remember, again, as you read this, that almost half of the two million people in Gaza are children who cannot, whatever one’s view of the morass in Israel, be held responsible for the actions of Gaza’s adults.

The video below gives some indication of what is happening inside Gaza right now.

As if the above weren’t enough, journalists are not being allowed inside the Gaza Strip by the IDF, which raises significantly the likelihood of isolated or mass war crimes therein that won’t be objectively documented. Yet there’ll be no plausible deniability for either the Israeli government or the American government once this humanitarian crisis bursts into full view of the world; both governments will be rightly accused of having done little to avoid human collateral damage on a scale the world hasn’t seen for decades. One CNN analyst recently estimated that “hundreds of thousands” of innocent civilians could die in Gaza as so-called “collateral damage”, a tragedy of a magnitude our species hasn’t seen in years and certainly not in such a short duration.

Proof has been directing those who want to donate funds to help Gazan refugees to Doctors Without Borders (see here) or any of the agencies identified by CNN (a list that also includes Doctors Without Borders). Doctors Without Borders—often called MSF, due to its name in French—has written about what it is seeing in Gaza here.

(6) Joe Biden is the President of the United States America needs at this pivotal moment.

As President Biden’s likely 2024 GOP opponent, Donald Trump—the man who both infamously and even heretically declared himself “King of Israel” not so long after divulging highly classified Israeli intelligence to Iran’s Russian allies in the Oval Office—rails on Truth Social about his ability to permanently end hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians despite failing to do so as president (and indeed exhibiting no interest in doing so), the current president is working to establish a humanitarian corridor between Gaza and Egypt and has already coordinated a condemnation of Hamas’s invasion of Israel by the Quint—the five Western allies with nuclear arms.

Biden has also called Netanyahu to urge him to do all within his power to minimize civilian casualties in Israel. While this may sound esoteric, there can be little doubt that during his call with Netanyahu Biden made clear that Israel’s presently righteous cause would lose support in America generally and the White House specifically if it results in Israel killing Palestinian indiscriminately. That’s simply not a consequence the Israelis can afford.

Meanwhile, what can be said about a career criminal, confirmed rapist, and bigoted twice-impeached one-term former president who insists, on his soon-to-be-bankrupt propaganda site, and in all capital letters like an underclassman hallucinating on PCP, that no one else in the world intends to keep Israel safe, no one else in the world has the ability to do so, and no one else in the world is even familiar with the key parties in the region?

But Trump’s bloviating isn’t the major concern here, nor is the fact that—as a man who illegally conspired with Netanyahu’s office to try to steal the 2016 presidential election—he must be seen as beholden to the embattled, under-indictment Netanyahu (who could at any time reveal Trump’s past crimes regarding election interference) rather than someone in a position to direct or channel his Israeli ally’s (mis)conduct.

No—the real concern here is that Donald Trump has infamously spoken out in favor of war crimes, particularly the killing of innocent relatives of militant extremists. That isn’t just an international war crime, but is punishable by death within the United States.

And Trump has acted on his penchant for war-criming, for instance by pardoning a Navy Seal war criminal whose own comrades called him “freaking evil” and who the military apparatus of the United States urged the then-president not to consort with, apologize for, or forgive. Instead, he did all three.

All of which gives us a good sense of what Trump would be telling Netanyahu now.

So why does this matter, beyond the obvious moral component? Because the question of whether or not the Israel-Hamas War balloons into World War III is dependent on how many civilians Netanyahu’s administration kills in Gaza and how unambiguously he’s seen as trying to minimize such deaths. Were Trump president now, his infamous bloodlust would do as much to provoke a world war as anything Netanyahu or the IDF is doing.

Instead, we have a president who, according to the latest reporting from CNN, is now shepherding talks that not only involve Egypt but also—critically—Israel regarding the above-referenced “humanitarian corridor” (quoting Secretary of State Anthony Blinken):

(7) Republicans’ only interest right now is in scoring political points—and this is true to a degree beyond what even the cynics among us expected.

Yesterday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)—America’s first two Muslim women in Congress—trended on Twitter due to calls from many far-right MAGAs for them to be summarily “expelled” from Congress (a call that arrived online with such force and ubiquity that the word “expelled” even briefly trended on Twitter).

Had either woman engaged in any sort of misconduct? Are they, for instance, facing 23 federal felonies, like Rep. George Santos (R-NY), who MAGAs want to remain in the House?

No.

Rather, each representative had given a statement to the press on the Israel-Hamas War that the new version of the Republican Party deemed politically incorrect and therefore grounds for overturning the democratic election of these two women by their constituents.

Omar’s statement—which is difficult to find, even in any major-media report decrying it or describing other people decrying it (nor is it on her website, which causes one to wonder how those now decrying it could possibly have read it)—begins by calling for all Americans to “honor the humanity of the hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians and nine Americans who were killed this weekend.”

Yet according to thousands of Trumpists on Twitter, Omar must now be removed from office because she also (emphasis supplied) said that we all must “honor the humanity of the innocent Palestinian civilians who have been killed”—a sentiment Proof endorses and that frankly no person of conscience could gainsay. Omar also advised the U.S. not to give “unconditional” aid to Israel, a position that’s strategic and smart given the leverage we currently have in trying to prevent needless civilian deaths there. Few would expect Biden not to seek at least some informal concessions from Netanyahu in light of the possibility of mass civilian casualties and the extent of America’s present influence on Israeli public policy.

As for Rep. Tlaib, her speech-crime, in view of MAGA and Elongelical “free-speech absolutists”, was to say that she “grieve[s] the…Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day.” The “problem”: she went on to say that she also grieves for “Palestinian lives lost”, though candidly this is something all of us should do so long as we are not speaking of Hamas militants. (At the time of Rep. Tlaib’s statement, the death toll among innocent Palestinian civilians was approaching 1,000 in just over 72 hours.)

So was Tlaib speaking of militants? Likely not, though her language, which made reference to the inevitability of “resistance” to “apartheid” and the “heartbreaking cycle of violence” apartheid inevitably causes, certainly led some to view Tlaib as being sympathetic to dead Palestinian militants. The problem with this reading, of course, is that Tlaib is Palestinian-American—which understandably makes it difficult to issue explicit condemnation of a terrorist group that, regrettably, also happens to be the primary distributor of humanitarian aid in the location where Tlaib’s friends, acquaintances, and relatives (as well as the friends, acquaintances, and relatives of many of her constituents) live. Condemning Hamas is a significantly more fraught proposition for Tlaib than it is for the rest of us, and not because she supports murder.

In fact, we have ample evidence that Tlaib opposes violence in all its forms. While she has significant questions—as do many—about the contours of U.S.-Israeli policy and the past conduct of the War on Terror, every September 11 the Democratic Michigan representative publicly reaffirms her commitment to peace on Earth.

In 2023, she wrote that all of us must “push[ ] for a more peaceful world every day.”

In 2022, she wrote that everyone around the world must “[ ]commit to a creating a world and society that is safe for every single person.”

In 2021, she called on Americans to “take action in honor” of the innocent victims of both September 11 and the now universally-acknowledged-as-flawed (cf. Iraqi WMDs) War on Terror, specifically focusing her urging of “action” on providing additional healthcare assistance to the first responders on September 11 who “are still suffering adverse health effects” from the violence of that day.

In 2020 she urged every American to “reject[ ]…the hate and terror” of the Muslim extremist attacks of September 11 and encouraged “solidarity….in the face of hate.”

So while I and many other American Jews may strongly disagree with Rep. Tlaib on many matters concerning Israel, the notion that she is “pro-terrorism” based on her statements as an elected official is preposterous.

Just so, it’s worth noting that on June 7, 2021, Rep. Omar took to Twitter to write about the “unthinkable atrocities” committed by—among others—Hamas.

So claims that Omar refuses to condemn that organization are preposterous, however problematic her past statements on Israel may have been (most of which she has since apologized for; tellingly, Omar’s is one of many prospective “wokeist” cancellations that the supposedly anti-“cancel culture” MAGA camp wants to see made permanent).

Many MAGA Republicans in fact appeared to call for Tlaib’s expulsion from Congress exclusively for her refusal to talk to a Fox News reporter who confronted her with then-unconfirmed reports of mass decapitations of infants by Hamas. The other allegations made by the Fox News journalist, namely that Israeli kids had been burned alive and that Israeli women are being raped in the streets, appear to lack any substantiation.

Notice the Fox News tagline, above: “Rashida Tlaib refuses to answer for Palestine support.” There is, of course, nothing wrong with a Muslim politician supporting a “two-state solution”, or any politician supporting a two-state solution, and in fact this is the explicit ambition of the whole Democratic Party and most Western diplomats.

So what are these women to be thrown out of Congress for, in the view of MAGAs?

Being Muslim, it seems.

By the same token, we might ask now why the MAGAs are calling President Biden a “national security risk” over his unfreezing of $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue when those funds are held in Qatar under American supervision and can only be used for humanitarian purposes (and only entered Qatar, as already noted, long after Hamas’s operation had secured its funding). The answer seems clear enough: because Biden is a Democrat, and because the MAGAs are comfortable calling for an end to (and willy-nilly rejecting) democratic election results they dislike ever since January 6 of 2021.

Who else rejects democracy? Well, Hamas—the very entity MAGAs claim to oppose.

As ABC News reports, Hamas “seized” power in Gaza during a period of time it was in “violent conflict with the competing Fatah political group”, making its “election wins” definitionally suspect. ABC News further notes that Hamas has enjoyed only “variable levels of support” in Gaza, despite the fact that it’s now ruled the Gaza Strip with an iron fist for over seventeen years.

There used to be a maxim in U.S. politics that “politics ends at the water’s edge”, but ever since the GOP took a hard turn toward Trumpist Christofascism, it has honored the prefix of its political ideology (“Christo-”) by demanding that all non-Christians be expelled from government—this would include Jews, by the way, not just the two Muslim women MAGAs are now pretextually targeting—and its suffix (“-fascism”) by spreading disinformation originating from a fascist regime (that of Vladimir Putin) to encourage the removal of a democratically elected American president.

In short, while many American Jews are upset about what’s happening in Israel to the point that they are falling for MAGAs’ misdirection with respect to Reps. Omar and Tlaib, the fact remains that no Democrats—including Reps. Omar and Tlaib—support the killing of civilians by Hamas, while the MAGA “movement” chillingly mirrors Islamofascism with intimate fidelity. The primary difference is that MAGAs replace Islam with a far-right interpretation of Christianity that most Americans don’t share (including the two-thirds of us who want Christian churches out of American politics).

(8a) The danger in covering this war is greater than many expected.

CNN reports that seven journalists have already been killed in Israel and Gaza just since Saturday.

Horrified CNN viewers also watched in real time as the cable news outlet’s chief international correspondent, Clarissa Ward, was forced to dive into a ditch with her camera crew while filming a live hit.

By way of comparison to the seven journalists killed in the last 96 hours, over the last 22 years the IDF is held to have killed—in only one case intentionally—20 journalists.

(8b) The effect of Hamas’s invasion of Israel on American politics will be much greater than anyone could have imagined.

Proof supports the Black Lives Matter movement and understands that it’s a diffuse movement—in some respects a first principle as much as a movement—with no single spokesperson or central office. BLM factions around America, some large and some so small they may comprise just a handful of people, run social media accounts that are in many instances run by a person operating without any oversight by others even in their own chapter, let alone any notional national BLM organization.

For this reason, social media posts by accounts claiming to represent a local BLM chapter can’t, under any circumstances, be treated as representative of, let alone be seen as speaking for, the Black Lives Matter “movement”—whose focus, justly so, is on police brutality in the United States and not American foreign policy writ large.

But American politics being what it is, and social media being what it is, and Twitter now being a platform dedicated to the advancement of neo-Nazism, any postings by BLM chapters will be treated not merely as a national declaration by some notional, formally constituted BLM entity, but even as illustrative of how all Black Americans see events unfolding in the United States and around the world.

As a result, the following three social media posts from BLM chapters in California, Illinois, and Indiana are causing chaos within the American political sphere.

On Wednesday, the first of these posts was retracted and apologized for. The second post was, of course, not a post but a repost—yet was inarguably odious for seeming to refer to what was going on in Israel at the time as “heroic…resistance” (though even so, in being a post about the “right” of Palestinians to heroically resist “occupation”, one could argue it was a general statement of principle and not a specific commentary on Hamas; indeed, the reposted image reads “I Stand With Palestine”, not “I Stand with Hamas”—thereby seemingly resolving the chief problem with the BLM Chicago post, which explicitly made visual reference to Hamas’s hang-glider-heavy invasion).

Just so, the BLM Los Angeles Instagram post above self-identifies as a statement of “solidarity with the Palestinian people”, not Hamas, and begins by declaring that “we all desire and pray for a world of peace.” It has come under understandable rhetorical fire, however, for seeming to conflate peaceful or simply nonlethal popular Palestinian resistance to the IDF with the murder of noncombatants by a terrorist organization. The following vague phrasing is particularly troubling: “their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.”

Nothing in the slaughter of unarmed civilians establishes any case for self-defense, either in the United States or any other system of law utilized worldwide. So this statement—the worst of the three, if we take into account the first’s retraction—is certainly shameful in its back-breaking attempt to focus only on those moments in Hamas’s invasion when it faced the IDF (moments that aren’t morally unconscionable because, whatever one’s view of the situation in Israel, we must recognize that armed conflict between openly declared combatants in the region is by now an inevitability).

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But these nuances mean nothing in the face of a Christofascist MAGA “movement” that, in addition to its obsession with uniparty rule and pristine Christian supremacy, has white-supremacist commitments that cause it to seek the demolition of the most successful Black-led social justice movement in America of the last half-century.

In other words, as part of their dedication to the idea that every foreign crisis must be used as a weapon to brutalize fellow Americans, the MAGAs are now using a war they enabled by supporting Putin’s war-crime-filled adventurism in Europe as a means to take out what they perceive as a domestic enemy. Indeed, MAGAs’ calls for BLM to be designated a “domestic terror organization” due to just three social media posts have been more the focus of Twitter these last 96 hours than the possibility of thousands of innocent Palestinian children being blown apart by bombs over the next 24 hours.

Perhaps this white supremacist, Christofascist bid for an anti-police-brutality push to be quashed by the FBI in the same way the FBI tried to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. sixty years ago would have died a quiet death if only Israelis, Germans, Brits, and Nepalese had died in the initial Hamas attack. But in fact, early whispers that some Americans may have been caught in the crossfire have now blossomed into confirmed reports that there are 22 American dead and 17 Americans missing—some or most of the latter now presumed to be deceased (as John F. Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, says “less than a handful” of Americans remain in the kidnappers’ clutches as of tonight).

For this reason, BLM statements from three social media feeds that may represent the opinion of just three people have now left the appearance—in the eyes of Republicans, many independents, and perhaps even some Jewish Democrats—of BLM supporting a foreign terrorist attack that killed a significant number of Americans. This is a different matter altogether, especially since September 11 of 2001.

So as noted above, what we are now seeing on Twitter are calls—or rather refreshed calls, as MAGAs have in fact been making such calls since Summer 2020—for BLM to be designated a domestic terror organization and hunted down by the FBI at a time MAGAs also say their top political issue is the weaponization of the FBI on partisan grounds. While obviously BLM isn’t going to be designated a terror operation, and while it’s monstrous to even suggest the possibility, the fact remains that should more BLM chapters come out in support of a terrorist attack that killed up to 40 Americans it will put American progressives well behind the eight ball in trying to defend BLM against persistent far-right allegations of it having endemic terroristic sympathies.

For this reason, the Israel-Hamas War—apart from the fact that America is already involved in it because of our movement of a carrier closer to the fighting and our shipment of military equipment to the Israelis; or, less cynically, our involvement in efforts to open a humanitarian corridor between Gaza City and Egypt and our effort to bring European allies into public opposition to the Hamas invasion—should be seen as a potential sea change in U.S. politics in the midst of the 2024 election cycle.

Open white supremacists like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and other MAGA leaders will now have significantly more rhetorical ammunition for their fetid claims that at least some BLM members in public-facing positions support the murder of fellow Americans. This could have a significant influence on the course of the 2024 presidential race, a harrowing thought in light of the fact that the Republican Party is planning to nominate a career criminal, rapist, active insurrectionist and traitor to his country—a man who aims to destroy our democracy and erect in its place a tyrannical autocracy with him at its head.

We can only hope that, in light of the news that American casualties in Israel may be far more significant than originally thought, BLM chapters around the country will make clear that they and their members oppose the killing of civilians in all instances and have no difficulty denouncing the murder of American, Israeli, and other foreign non-combatants in Israel.

(9) American involvement in this war will be much more direct than anticipated.

Putting aside carrier groups and arms shipments, diplomatic cables and three-party humanitarian negotiations, the fact that Hamas is currently holding many, many more hostages than originally believed—and is threatening to execute them in a way that would shortly be seen by people around the world—makes this something much more than a war like the one in Ukraine. While Russia has at times jailed U.S. nationals, it hasn’t snatched them as non-combatants on Ukrainian soil and then threatened to televise their gruesome executions. We can imagine what would be happening right now, and how additionally tense U.S.-Russian relations would be, were this happening.

Initial reports suggested that Hamas had abducted perhaps thirty Israelis and foreign nationals, but that number has since quintupled to 150. Worse still, because some of the abductees came from kibbutzim near the Israel-Gaza border that were emptied out during the invasion—by the murder, flight, or kidnapping of their residents—it’s hard for the IDF to determine how many are actually still missing from those locations.

This means that the 150-abductee figure we’re looking at now is almost certainly low.

The U.S. State Department saying that seventeen Americans are unaccounted for—a notice that State would only issue if it had reason to believe someone who should be accounted for has not been, suggesting death or abduction—means that even as it stands now, somewhere between 10% and 20% of Hamas’s hostages are U.S. citizens.

Should we discover that more Americans are missing than was previously thought, or simply that many more abductees are in tunnels below Gaza than anyone suspects—which could turn an ancillary narrative in the current war into a central one—the possibility that this situation in Israel echoes the 1980 Hostage Crisis that most historians agree cost Democratic president Jimmy Carter a second term will move to the forefront of Americans’ collective consciousness. What happens to President Biden’s already unfairly, even unaccountably low approval ratings if actions outside his control—i.e., decisions made by top Trump ally Benjamin Netanyahu—cause the already deeply painful American death toll in Israel and Gaza to double or even triple?

Separate from this, what if Hamas carries out its current threat and begins executing Americans on videos disseminated internationally? Though it is the Republican Party that is backing Hamas’s new sponsors at the Kremlin, and the Republican Party that has sought armed conflict with Iran and its proxies for years now—to the point that the United States Armed Forces were almost certain Mr. Trump was going to launch a pretextual war with Tehran in December 2020—it could, perversely, be a Democratic president who gets blame for a sequence of events he couldn’t have had less to do with.

(10) Putin has now publicly blamed Trump for the Hamas invasion—and it matters.

For years, Vladimir Putin has been simultaneously cultivating close ties with two purported “friends,” Trump and Netanyahu. It is a partnership that made possible the seven-nation “grand bargain” to foment illegal election interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election (see, generally, Proof of Conspiracy, Macmillan, 2019). But now, the New York Times reports,

amid the worst attack on Israel in fifty years, the high regard that Putin has shown for Israel in the past appears remarkably absent. More than three days after the start of the incursion by Hamas, there has been no message of condolence from the Kremlin, even though Putin previously published such notes of sympathy in the wake of terrorist attacks in Israel. And he has not yet called Netanyahu, even though he spoke with Israeli leaders at least eleven times in 2022 and developed a close relationship with Netanyahu over more than a decade of meetings and phone calls.

But that’s not all. While Putin may now be freezing out Netanyahu, he has a lot to say about his other would-be ally, Trump—though he has avoided naming him directly.

As the Times reports,

In his first brief comments on the [Hamas] attack, Putin took a swipe at the United States, without expressing any sympathy for Israeli suffering.

“This is a clear example of the failure of United States policy in the Middle East”, he said on Tuesday in a televised meeting at the Kremlin with Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the Iraqi prime minister.

Rather than find a compromise amenable to both sides, Putin went on, Washington acted “each time without taking into account the fundamental interests of the Palestinian people.”

While this statement may be brief, its implications are long, as Putin is unmistakably referencing here the Abraham Accords negotiated by Trump and his corrupt son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Kushner, who stood to gain (and did gain) literally billions from the Saudis and Emiratis if he helped them cut a deal with Israel that gave them new cutting-edge surveillance technology—and who saw no commensurate benefit at all in aiding the impoverished Palestinians—helped negotiate a deal that infamously left the Gaza Strip and West Bank to fend for themselves as it enriched and politically benefited Netanyahu and two other men with whom the Trump family’s fortunes (in literal terms) are entwined: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates (MBZ) and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (MBS), both barbarous autocrats with the blood of thousands of dissidents on their hands.

They also happen to have, in their hands, the power to aid or destroy Donald Trump’s several existing and planned golf courses in those two countries.

So with all this in mind, what game is Vladimir Putin playing here, exactly?

Certainly, he is sending a message to Trump that he can be his enemy as easily as he can be his ally, and that if he wishes to he can start hammering away at how Trump may be more responsible for the violence in Israel than anyone this side of Netanyahu—which would, ironically, be one of the first honest things Putin has said about U.S. politics in years. Or, the implication goes, Putin could instead do what Trump and the GOP are presently expecting him to do, apparently, which is attempt to interfere in a presidential election to aid Trump for the third presidential election cycle in a row.

The simple fact is that the Republican Party is somehow on the wrong side of the Israel-Hamas War in four distinct ways: (i) unlike the Democratic Party, it supports the man who even his far-right countrymen now admit is likely to be blamed for this war, Netanyahu; (ii) unlike the Democratic Party, it supports the war criminals in Russia who may well be found to have had advance knowledge of this invasion (and certainly now seek to use it to help them destroy NATO, the EU, Ukraine, and even American power and authority abroad); (iii) unlike the Democratic Party, the GOP has repeatedly taken steps that risk a globe-spanning hot war with Iran, now considered the most devastatingly undesirable outcome of the situation in Israel; and (iv) unlike the Democratic Party, the Republican Party’s leader engaged in vile self-dealing in the Middle East that nearly every expert around the world told Trump and his son-in-law would provoke a massive conflagration there.

So perhaps it is no wonder that MAGAs want to talk about three tweets, two Muslim politicians, and one prisoner swap that have nothing to do with anything happening right now.

Seen clearly, this current disaster is first and foremost the fault of the killers who executed it—Hamas—but secondarily all the men who were featured on the front cover of the second and third books of the Proof trilogy: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mohammed bin Salman, Mohammed bin Zayed, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (the Turkish president, who was alerted by Hamas in mid-invasion and responded with a suspiciously quick move to commit additional war crimes in Syria, as though he, like Putin, was prepared to capitalize politically and militarily on events he only pretended to be surprised by).

We could add to this list, of course, all those who sought to engage in clandestine “diplomacy” on Trump’s behalf over the last six years, from Kushner to Rudy Giuliani (who is also on the cover of Proof of Corruption), from Erik Prince to the grab-bag of petty crooks whose names littered the many government reports that followed hard upon the Trump-Ukraine scandal, Trump-Russia scandal, and Khashoggi Scandal.

Conclusion

In the fog of war, truth is always the first casualty. Misinformation and disinformation have been so rampant on Twitter that the EU is considering leveling a fine on Elon Musk that could bankrupt his company if—as anticipated—its finances are far worse than he’s publicly admitted. The Republican Party is not a “loyal opposition”; it is an active national security threat whose sole interest at the moment is weakening the United States. As of this writing, the GOP can’t even agree on a Speaker of the House, making it impossible for any funds to be released to either Israel or Ukraine. As many Americans display antisemitism with pride—celebrating Hamas’s genocidal invasion as though history tells them oppressed peoples definitionally decapitate babies to secure their rights—Israelis are living in fear and so, too, albeit in a very different way and for different reasons, are American Jews. Few doubt that Donald Trump, possibly the most dangerous figure in American politics since Jefferson Davis, will soon suss out exactly what Vladimir Putin and his other autocratic allies want to see him do stateside to ensure their illicit support for his seemingly ill-fated 2024 candidacy.

And through it all, many Americans believe that what is happening in Israel actually has little impact on their lives: it is a tragedy, to be sure, but a distant and hazy one with little consequence to their own daily struggles. But all the evidence underscores that this is untrue, and affirms that what’s happening in Israel now—and what seems sure to continue happening in Israel for some time—is already at America’s doorstep.

{Note: Full access to the hundreds of fully sourced investigative reports at Proof—one of the top-ranked substacks in the world—is just $5. Click below to subscribe, and cancel anytime.}

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Update: Tuesday, October 10, 1:56 PM ET

A reader directed Proof to this Washington Post report from yesterday that confirms that key far-right Israeli politicians and figures in the media have inexplicably been downplaying the danger from Hamas for months in order to focus voters’ attention, for political reasons, on the plight of far-right settlers in the West Bank, instead:

Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants had been training for weeks near the Israeli border [in Gaza]—drilling in rocket launches, kidnapping soldiers and “storming settlements”, Gazan media reported. Yet the assessment from the Israeli military was that Hamas had no appetite for another conflict, a line repeated by trusted media figures. “The good news in the context of the Gaza Strip is that neither Israel nor Hamas want to see hostilities escalate, each for its own reasons”, columnist Yoav Limor wrote last month in the right-wing newspaper Israel Hayom.

As for those “assessment[s] from the Israeli military”, the Post makes clear that these were also heavily affected by Netanyahu’s nakedly political maneuvers:

Netanyahu, [analysts] contend, allowed military preparedness to erode alongside Palestinian militant escalation as he pursued a contentious plan to weaken Israel’s judiciary—setting off months of furious protests that delighted the country’s adversaries.

Indeed, it’s clear that Netanyahu’s autocratic domestic plot has so divided the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that Netanyahu and supporters like Limor have begun to only listen to those “assessments from the Israeli military” that dovetail with their political aims. Per the Post (emphasis supplied),

The IDF issued rare public statements in recent months, warning that military deterrence was deteriorating. Netanyahu and radical members of his cabinet derided the officials as part of the protest movement, and the protesters as “anarchists”, asserting that the status quo with the Palestinians would hold.

All of the foregoing bolsters the claims by multiple Egyptian government officials (see below) that Netanyahu was warned about the Gaza attack and ignored the warnings for political reasons—in the same way he ignored warnings from his own IDF officers for political reasons.

IDF Reserve Major General Itzhak Brik has been even more bold in decrying this dynamic, telling Reshet Bet Radio yesterday that (as paraphrased by the Post),

“He has met with Netanyahu and other top leaders for years, and more frequently in recent months, urging them to formulate a long-term strategy for dealing with Palestinian terrorism. ‘The [political] chaos that has been going on in the past year [under Netanyahu] has created a situation that we’re in now, of putting out fires. A terror attack here, a terror attack there. They’re not dealing with building the army.’”

The result was, according to one former Israeli intelligence officer, fully foreseeable:

The Gaza border, it soon became clear [as Hamas invaded Israel on Saturday], was minimally manned. It took hours to redirect units stationed in the West Bank, which has been the main area of focus for the military this year….Some in Netanyahu’s far-right government had called to annex the West Bank. Gaza, by contrast, appeared stable.

“There was a need for more soldiers [in the West Bank], so where did they take them from? From the Gaza border, where they thought it was calm”, said Aharon Zeevi Farkash, the former IDF military intelligence chief. “Not surprising that Hamas and Islamic Jihad noticed the low staffing at the border.”

Netanyahu’s West Bank adventurism, aimed at bolstering growing far-right communities of settlers on contested land there, pulled forces from Gaza during the very months Israeli intelligence should have been picking up on increased terrorist activity there. When Netanyahu was warned generally of a deterioration in military deterrence by the IDF and specifically of a coming attack from the woefully undermanned Gaza border by Israel’s Egyptian allies, he balked at pulling back from his politically radical designs in eastern Israel and—now—has publicly called some of his nation’s closest foreign allies liars, possibly damaging a critical intelligence partnership in western Israel. And as noted in the update just below this one, throughout all of this Netanyahu had convinced himself that Hamas was unsophisticated, ignorant, and fully under his thumb—a folly likely attributable to his infamous bigotry toward Muslims (see more on this below).

Update: Monday, October 9, 11:36 PM ET

A reader directed Proof to this Haaretz article from earlier today (Haaretz is a leading Israeli outlet, discussed more below, that follows the Twitter feed linked to Proof):

Per the article, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking of both Hamas and Hezbollah in a closed 2019 Likud Party meeting, said that he “send[s] them messages all the time” with the belief that his interactions can “mislead them [and] destabilize them” and in this way “control the height of the flames [of violence].”

This was in addition to saying his “strategy” has long been to “bolster” Hamas and so ensure the impossibility of a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian Crisis.

Given that Israel is in a state of open armed conflict with Hamas—and given that Netanyahu and his government have now formally declared war on the terrorist organization—the political strategy Netanyahu here describes would, in the context of American jurisprudence and criminal law, flirt with Treason. It may be seen differently in Israel, however.

Still, it raises a new question: whether Netanyahu’s bizarre, bigotry-tinged arrogance regarding the intelligence of Muslim militants caused him to ignore the warnings of a Gaza attack discussed below because his contacts in Hamas had outmaneuvered him—convincing him that no attack was forthcoming, and he could thus continue to focus his political and military plans on enabling the recklessness of far-right Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

This is undoubtedly a possibility that Mossad and Shin Bet will consider as the two agencies investigate any role Netanyahu may have had in negligently—or deliberately—allowing the Gaza attack to occur.

Original Story: Introduction

For those who don’t already know, close Trump Family friend Benjamin Netanyahu is confirmed by many years of reliable major-media reports as a career white-collar criminal, war criminal, and unrepentant racist who also appears to have illegally aided Donald Trump’s efforts to steal the 2016 presidential election—a criminal conspiracy exhaustively detailed and sourced in 2019 New York Times bestseller Proof of Conspiracy.

No one versed in American or Israeli politics doubts that the Israeli prime minister would do almost anything to remain in power—including what he was doing in the months leading up to Hamas’s historic invasion of Israel, namely trying to end Israel’s democracy and institute a brutal autocracy with him at its head (a conspiracy Israeli media outlets have referred to as an attempted “constitutional coup”). His actions, which call to mind those of his friend Trump, led to the largest domestic protests in Israeli history. Indeed, like Trump, Netanyahu seeks to end his nation’s democracy in part to evade a sprawling network of significant criminal investigations into his use of government power to enrich himself and advance his personal political ambitions.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that Haaretz—along with The Times of Israel, the New York Times-and-Washington Post combo of Israeli major media—just published an editorial entitled, “Netanyahu Bears Responsibility for This Israel-Gaza War.”

To be clear, this is in no way an exculpation of Hamas for what was unquestionably a vile terrorist attack and war crime. At the Nova Music Festival alone—a celebration of love and peace being held near the Gaza border wall—Hamas militants killed as many as 360 multinational concert-goers, all of them civilians, in cold blood. There is no doubt (except at my law school alma mater, Harvard University, unfortunately) that Hamas bears primary responsibility for the carnage we’re seeing in Israel and Gaza, which has left 700+ Israelis and 370+ Palestinians dead and at least 130 Israelis (many of them civilians) and other foreign nationals held as hostages in tunnels under Gaza.

So how did the most advanced, competent, experienced, aggressive, famously alert intelligence services in the world—Mossad and Shin Bet—miss the planning for an all-out, Iran-funded, seven-point invasion of Israel that all parties agree would have taken months to plan? And why are all fingers now pointing at Israel’s prime minister?

The “Intelligence Failure” That Wasn’t

As first reported by The Middle East Eye (MEE), a British media outlet that focuses on the Middle East and was founded by a former Guardian editor—and was a key source for information contained in Proof of Conspiracy, along with hundreds of other major media outlets (to the point that this author has been in contact with their investigative reporters by phone)—the “Egyptian Intelligence Minister called Netanyahu ten days before [the] Hamas attack and warned him of ‘something unusual, a terrible operation’ that was about to take place from Gaza.”

Even more stunning than Netanyahu’s alleged foreknowledge of the attack, however, is how he responded to that foreknowledge. MEE reports that the “Egyptians were ‘surprised by the indifference shown by Netanyahu’ [to the coming attack from Gaza].” MEE’s report has since been confirmed in all particulars by The Times of Israel.

So if there wasn’t an intelligence failure—but rather a decision by the Prime Minister of Israel to ignore ample (ten-day) warning of a major attack whose point-of-origin he was clearly told of—what could possibly explain Netanyahu choosing a course of action (indifference) that could lead to tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip and Israel and a protracted war that threatens to erupt into a regional conflagration?

The Perverse Incentives of Far-Right Israeli Politics

It will surprise no one reading this to learn that the far-right Likud Party in Israel—of which Netanyahu is the current chairman and leader—does better in elections when the nation of Israel is under imminent threat of coordinated, sprawling external attack.

Just as Netanyahu ally Donald Trump’s MAGA Party plays off fears of “rapist” illegal immigrants, “terrorists” crossing the southern border en masse, and—as Trump is sure to mention in nearly every post on his failing Truth Social disinformation instrument—America being overrun by leftist “Communists”, “Marxists”, “fascists”, “socialists”, “thugs”, “criminals”, and “crazies” (never mind that all those words mean different things, and that Trump understands none of them at the level of a dictionary, or that there’s no evidence of any of the threats he warns of), Likud uses both fear and bigotry to animate its prospective voters.

But Netanyahu’s “constitutional coup” has created a situation in which fear alone is going to be insufficient for Likud to maintain its tenuous, coalition-bred hold over Israeli politics. Even disinterested observers would have been able to clearly see, in the days preceding the Hamas invasion, that—starting at least few months ago—what Netanyahu and Likud really needed was a “hot” war.

And so it is that The Times of Israel now reports the following:

[An Egyptian intelligence official aware of direct, pre-invasion telephonic contact between the Egyptian intelligence minister and Netanyahu] said [the Netanyahu administration told the Egyptians that] Israeli officials were focused on the West Bank and played down the threat from Gaza.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is made up of supporters of West Bank settlers who have demanded a security crackdown there in the face of a rising tide of violence over the last eighteen months.

We focus here on the second sentence above, which establishes that Likud needed its voters and Israeli independents to focus on “a rising tide of violence” in the West Bank—arguably a tide of violence precipitated by ultra-nationalist Israeli settlers seeking to stoke conflict with the Palestinians (this being a subject for another report)—to continue distracting them from the nation’s harrowing slide into autocracy. It is demonstrably easier, history has shown us, for autocrats to scare voters in a healthy democracy into permitting the collapse of that democracy when an external threat is close. But can this alone explain Netanyahu’s indifference to the coming Gaza threat?

After all, wouldn’t violence in Gaza be as politically useful to Likud as violence in the West Bank?

Here’s more from the Egyptian intelligence official who spoke to The Times of Israel:

“We ha[d] warned them [that] an explosion of the situation [was] coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings”, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the content of sensitive intelligence discussions with the media, told The Associated Press.

In one of the said warnings, Egyptian Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel personally called Netanyahu only ten days before the massive attack [to tell him] that the Gazans were likely to do “something unusual, a terrible operation”, according to the Ynet news site.

So now we have (1) multiple warnings to Netanyahu, which (2) identified the origin of the attack, and (3) said it was coming “very soon.” These multiple, reasonably specific warnings also (4) discussed the scope of the attack, saying that it would be “unusual”, “big”, and “terrible”—meaning, quite clearly, that it would (a) involve tactics Israeli intel had not encountered before, (b) involve a war theater much larger than earlier Hamas incursions, and (c) target civilians rather than exclusively military personnel.

All of those warnings turned out to be 100% accurate.

In sum, one would say that Netanyahu knew quite a lot about this attack in advance, but still chose to do nothing—indeed, displayed little interest in the intelligence at all.

For instance, we know that the ten-day warning the Egyptians provided Netanyahu was enough for an emergency redeployment of IDF ground forces and air assets so that they wouldn’t all be clustered in the West Bank—where Netanyahu’s political funders and political base wanted them to be—and we know this because this exact redeployment is happening right now and is taking only about 48 to 72 hours to finish.

Likewise, in intel terms, “very soon” would have meant as little as a matter of hours to Israeli intelligence; “terrible” would suggest not only a mass-casualty event but one attributable to terrorism—thus, one ensuring civilian casualties—rather than a purely military maneuver; “unusual” would have signaled to the Netanyahu administration that it was already dangerously behind the ball, as what it faced was something the State of Israel had never seen before (and that’s really saying something if you know Israeli history at all, as the Egyptians most certainly do); and Egyptian intelligence telling Netanyahu that the attack would emanate from a comparatively small space—keep in mind that the Gaza Strip is equal to just two Districts of Columbia—was more than enough in terms of specifics for Netanyahu to be getting on with. His menu of options was long, and choosing from among that menu was unambiguously a matter of uncommon urgency; indeed, he would have believed, from what he’d been told, that he perhaps had only a matter of hours rather than days or weeks to act.

And instead, he did… nothing. Absolutely nothing. This striking fact bears thinking about right now, as there can be no doubt that criminal investigators and national security personnel in Israel will be thinking about it quite clearly once the dust of the Israel-Hamas War has settled.

A Harrowing Truth

According to the Egyptians, the one thing Netanyahu told them by way of explanation (we now know) for him doing nothing at all with the dire warning he’d just gotten was that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were “submerged” in actions in the West Bank—though perhaps this was just his acknowledgment that he might not actually be able to call up enough IDF reservists to deal with a fast-arriving situation in Gaza due to large numbers of such reservists saying they’d refuse any callup in light of his nascent coup.

In other words, we have the following sequence of events:

1. Netanyahu faces countless felony charges for which he is universally expected to be found guilty, and therefore he

2. announces a constitutional coup designed to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, end Israel’s democracy, and protect himself from consequences for his many crimes, which coup understandably, predictably, and justly results in

3. hundreds or even thousands of IDF reservists refusing to be called up in support of a would-be dictator’s autocratic ambitions, which refusals conspicuously caused

4. a diminishment of Israel’s combat readiness in a way Netanyahu knew would be exposed—and to his own political detriment—if he acknowledged the coming threat in Gaza and attempted unsuccessfully to mobilize the IDF to prepare for it.

The Times of Israel confirms that it may well be wrong to denominate any of the above a mere “intelligence failure”:

For Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s eyes are [in fact] never very far away. Surveillance drones buzz constantly in the skies. The highly secured border is awash with security cameras and soldiers on guard. Intelligence agencies work sources and cyber capabilities to draw out information.

….

Even after Hamas overran Gaza in 2007, Israel appeared to maintain its [surveillance] edge, using technological and human intelligence.

It claimed to know the precise locations of Hamas leadership and appeared to prove it through the targeted killing of terror leaders in surgical strikes, sometimes while they slept in their bedrooms. Israel has known where to strike underground tunnels used by Hamas to ferry around fighters and arms, destroying miles of the concealed passageways.

….

[So] some say it is too early to pin the blame solely on an intelligence failure. They point to a wave of low-level violence in the West Bank that shifted some military resources there and the political chaos roiling the country over steps by Netanyahu’s far-right government to overhaul the judiciary. The controversial plan has threatened the cohesion of the IDF, seen as the people’s army.

While The Times of Israel does note that Hamas has of late begun downsizing its use of high-tech equipment to evade intelligence collection, and Israel’s government—as to both major parties—has presumed Hamas to be more interested in governing than violence in recent years, it also (quoting well-known Israeli defense commentator Amos Harel) expresses astonishment that “Hundreds if not thousands of Hamas men were preparing for a surprise attack for months, without that having leaked.”

None of the above alternative explanations for this coming attack not being prepared for explain how the planning of thousands of terrorists went unnoticed—and the recent revelations from Israel’s allies in Egypt now suggest that they did not go unnoticed at all.

So what evidence do we have that Benjamin Netanyahu wanted this attack to unfold?

Well, putting aside his criminal history; his willingness—as a war criminal—to let innocents die; his well-known bigotry against the Palestinians, which might cause him to thirst for an excuse to kill large numbers of them; the obvious political advantage to Likud if such an attack came off more or less successfully, at least in its first 24 hours; the obvious political disadvantage to Likud if Netanyahu unsuccessfully tried to call up IDF forces and failed to do so due to just protests against him (which exigency could end his political career, as if a leader fails to call up his troops he can hardly remain a leader); there’s the fact that the attack—despite being anticipated in advance—being allowed to unfold immediately led to the following results:

1. Netanyahu successfully executing (per CNN) the “quickest” and “largest” IDF call-up in Israeli history (300,000 reservists) without any protests whatsoever;

2. Netanyahu having good reason to call for—and good reason to expect the creation of—a “unity government” with “no preconditions” (meaning that not only will he stay in power despite being in the midst of a constitutional coup, but the ability of any minority party joining his unity government to curb his authority approaches zero);

3. Netanyahu being able to declare that his unity government will have to exist for a “long” time in order to deal with this threat (which elongation of his hold on power is a direct result of him not pre-undermining Hamas’s plans, and thereby not pre-limiting the scope of the threat it now poses to Israel);

4. Netanyahu being able to declare that the goal of the coming “long” war will be to (a) eradicate Hamas completely, long a goal of his, and (b) reassert absolute Israeli control over the millions of Gazans in the Gaza Strip, a scope for his military call-up that never would have been deemed politically or logistically permissible if so many Israelis hadn’t died or been wounded at the hands of Hamas first; and

5. Netanyahu accomplishing all of the above with “only” the following drawbacks for his people: (a) having to call Israel’s second-closest regional allies (the Egyptians) liars in public, (b) allowing thousands of Israelis to be needlessly killed, wounded, or kidnapped; (c) allowing scores of foreign nationals to likewise be killed, wounded, or kidnapped, including (that we know of so far) Americans, Brits, Germans, and Nepalese; (d) risking a regional war that would expand outside Netanyahu’s control if the much-better-armed-than-Hamas Hezbollah forces operating in Lebanon invade Israel from the north, as increasingly seems likely now that the IDF has initiated military operations on the Israel-Lebanon border; (e) requiring American aid at a time when the United States has no Speaker of the House and therefore can’t pass any legislation intended to send such aid; (f) creating a situation in which, per CNN reporting, the world could see the most “collateral damage” in a war “since WWII”, including as many as “hundreds of thousands of civilian dead”; and (g) ironically, requiring that IDF attention be moved away from the West Bank now that the events in Gaza have spiraled out of Netanyahu’s control.

Even American sources—normally inclined toward absolute neutrality on the matter of Israeli politics in times of crisis for the Middle Eastern democracy—are issuing statements that can only be read as blaming Netanyahu’s political ambition for what is now happening in Gaza:

Martin Indyk, who served as a special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the Obama administration, said internal divisions over the legal changes [sought by Netanyahu] was an aggravating factor that contributed to the Israelis being caught off guard. “That roiled the IDF in a way that was, I think, we discovered was a huge distraction”, he said.

Is it fair to suppose that a demonstrated war criminal did more war-criming simply because every political and personal calculation we know he would have made would have inclined him toward doing so even if his bigotry, callousness, and immorality weren’t enough in themselves? No. But it is reasonable for the investigation that will ultimately be conducted as to how this war was allowed to happen to start from the presumption that Netanyahu lied about his foreknowledge of this attack for a reason— and that he had ample cause to know that his constitutional coup was weakening his nation’s national security in precisely the way that would’ve left it open to a massacre.

Conclusion

Just hours ago, Al Jazeera published a report with this headline and sub-headline: “Netanyahu is Drawing the United States Into War With Iran; the Israeli Prime Minister’s Persistent Obsession With the Islamic Republic May Finally Drag the United States into Another Disastrous Regional War.”

Those of you who read the “Trump-Iran” chapter of my 2020 national bestseller Proof of Corruption (Macmillan) will recall that in January of 2020 then-president Donald Trump used repeated public lies to justify his assassination of popular Iranian general Qasem Soleimani—an admittedly monstrous man whose killing nevertheless came not for any of the reasons Trump provided to American voters and which, per scores of major-media reports, brought America to within minutes of a hot war with Iran.

Why did Trump almost lie America into an unthinkably bloody war—a war that quite easily could have expanded into World War III—as he faced his first impeachment (as part of the Trump-Ukraine Scandal) and had just entered the year of the 2020 U.S. presidential election?

That question seems to answer itself, doesn’t it?

Trump saw great political advantage in using an avoidable foreign crisis to evade significant consequences for his crimes, and didn’t care how many people had to die for him to avoid those consequences—especially as the benefit he felt he stood to gain in being seen as a domestic hero was a continuation of his presidential powers.

And what would we say of Trump’s friend (and 2016 coconspirator in an election theft plot)? Well, we would say that Netanyahu saw great political advantage in using an avoidable foreign crisis to evade significant consequences for his crimes, and didn’t care how many people had to die for him to avoid those consequences—especially as the benefit he felt he stood to gain in being seen as a domestic hero was a continuation of his presidential powers.

{Note: Recall that, after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, the gravest fear at the Pentagon was that Trump would launch a pretextual war against Iran to say in power.}

There’s a reason Trump, Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin are all on the cover of Proof of Conspiracy—there’s a commonality to how sociopathic career criminals think (as I know from many years of being a public defender) just as there is to how would-be autocrats think (as I know from many years of being a Donald Trump biographer).

There’s always a consequence for not justly but expeditiously incarcerating criminals like Trump and Netanyahu, and that consequence is never one paid by the criminals themselves. It is paid by innocent men, women, and children who do not get half of the protections of the law—perhaps not even a quarter—that rich, famous, powerful, influential far-right sociopathic criminals like Trump and Netanyahu do. While we in America have due cause to feel shocked by what we’re seeing on our televisions today, we cannot pretend it was unforeseeable; both Trump and Netanyahu want a war with Iran because it satisfies their own political and legal needs, and even the deep-seated bigotry both men feel toward nonwhite Muslims.

What is unfolding in Israel is a tragedy for Israel and Gaza. Soon it will also become a tragedy for the West Bank and the Golan Heights. And then possibly for both Egypt and Lebanon. And then possibly for Syria, Jordan, and any nation suddenly facing the prospect of trying to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees from Gaza—where reliable major-media reports indicate the water and electricity have been turned off.

And soon enough the tragedy may spread to Iran and the United States and beyond.

And whether Netanyahu plotted out this war in advance, negligently or recklessly or deliberately allowed it to happen, or is simply the victim of his own highly illegal constitutional coup, what can be said for certain is two things: (1) Hamas retains the primary responsibility for all the suffering that may emanate from this war, and (2) had Netanyahu and Trump both been prosecuted to the full extent of their nations’ laws in a timely fashion, much of the suffering that is coming in the days ahead would never have arrived, and the even greater suffering that could come with a wider regional war would be outside the realm of possibility entirely.

I’ll add to the two points above the following question: with so many millions of lives at stake, can we continue to afford to give a career white-collar criminal, war criminal, and unrepentant racist who illegally aided Donald Trump’s efforts to steal the 2016 U.S. election the benefit of the doubt and assume that he did not act, in this instance, consistent with his lifetime of sociopathy, cruelty, bigotry, and demagoguery? Or is it too late in the history of human civilization for us to keep being so stubbornly naive about the persistence, predictability, and perniciousness of evil?

{Note: This rapidly expanding meme library is a work in progress. It will continue to grow until every Russian soldier has departed every inch of Ukrainian soil, and all Ukraine is securely in the hands of the Ukrainian government and its loyal citizens. Note also that all meme images have a number beneath them, so you can direct other social media users to the images you believe are most effective and keep a tally yourself of which you like to use. To use a meme, either retweet any Twitter video/GIF here or right-click to download an image. Slava Ukraini!}

Introduction

Memes don’t move military conflicts. But they can influence public perception of how a conflict is unfolding—and that, in turn, can alter the appetite a nation and its allies have for the continuation of that conflict. Memes can even, at the margins, hearten (or dishearten) some soldiers.

At this point in the horrifically bloody war in Europe, a “war of choice” (also known as “unilateral aggression” or a “war crime”) initiated by Donald Trump’s erstwhile political ally Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin—a war Ukraine neither asked for nor in any way deserved; a war marked by systematic war crimes by Russia—it’s clear that the once-respected Russian army is demoralized, under-supplied, poorly led, and, in a word, losing.

This is attributable to Ukrainian bravery, tactics, and skill on the field of combat—and to a lesser degree, but still importantly, to equipment supplied to Ukrainian forces by their allies in Europe and North America.

There is also some evidence to suggest that Ukrainian resolve has been bolstered not only by its successes on the battlefield but its obvious—and, it must be said, equally numerous and stunning—victories in the public relations war that’s run concurrent to the military conflict itself. This daily public relations tilt comprises public interviews with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, formal messaging by the Ukrainian government and military and their allies, and, yes, to some extent at least, by memes.

For this reason, Proof has begun building an archive of the best pro-Ukraine memes.

Is this meme library or meme bank merely for a lark? Absolutely not. The idea here is that these memes are very powerful pro-Ukraine messaging which, taken in sum, can transform public perception by correctly positioning Ukraine’s defenders as David-like heroes and Putin and his Kremlin sycophants as Goliath-like brutes. (It is more difficult to know how to think about Russian soldiers themselves, as so many have committed war crimes even as others have recorded videos tearfully admitting that they do not want to be in Ukraine and bear the Ukrainians no ill will—confirming that this really is Putin’s war, and was launched on the strength of years of lies told by him to the Russian people, a botched and thoroughly immoral mass mobilization of Russian men with no training or desire to die for Putin’s sociopathic adventurism in Europe, and the utter bewilderment of one of the world’s strongest militaries setting its troops up for mass slaughter through poor planning, provisioning and leadership).

It is never a bad thing—if you love freedom, want the very best for Europe and NATO and the European Union and Western-style democracies—to spread pro-Ukraine memes on social media. So hopefully Proof readers will feel moved to use the memes catalogued below often and enthusiastically. These memes can be particularly effective whenever there is news, as there so often is now, of Ukrainian victories, Russian mass surrenders, and shifts in territorial holdings that advantage and redound to the glory of Ukraine’s increasingly mythos-worthy armed forces.

Needless to say, none of this is aimed at glorifying war. As noted above, no one but Putin wanted this war, unless you count the legions of pro-Kremlin Republicans in the United States who have divested themselves of all they ever believed in or at least claimed to believe in (e.g., freedom, democracy, the West, anti-fascism, and human rights) to kneel at the twin, blood-covered altars of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

How Proof Comes to the Idea of Meme Warfare

As many Proof readers know, I have taught digital culture—including memes—at both University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of New Hampshire, in addition to for years authoring an IndieWire column (“Metamericana”) that dealt in part with memes and having written three national bestsellers that deal significantly with the recent history of Russia and Ukraine: Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018); Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019); and Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020). I’ve also spent much time thinking, writing, and teaching about a sometimes-controversial concept known as “meme magic”.

Meme magic is simply the idea that memes have sufficient authority, influence, and currency in digital culture that they can indirectly effectuate changes in “meatspace” and even—this being the controversial part—mainstream and reify notions that are at present just ideational, theoretical, or even fantastical. As with anything, meme magic can be used responsibly or abused; it can be instrumentalized by the unscrupulous or the just. There can be no doubt that the broader cause of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the current war in Ukraine (2014-present) is a just one (howsoever there will often be malfeasance in wartime that ill reflects the ideals of even those parties whose causes are just, which conduct must be punished at the earliest practicable moment).

All of this is to say that the archive below has been carefully curated by a journalist and professor and cultural theorist with substantial experience with memes. While many of the memes below are necessarily NSFW, no memes will appear here that gratuitously celebrate specific instances of bloodshed, make light of the horrors of war, or seek to in any way dehumanize (in the literal sense of that term) any person or group of people.

I’m of Russian descent—albeit Russian Jewish descent; my forebears were hounded out of Russia following bloody pogroms—and before and during my English doctorate at University of Wisconsin-Madison I was a lover of Russian literature and culture. While I believe many Russians bear responsibility for enabling Putin (in the same way that many Americans bear responsibility for enabling Trump) I believe the Russian people as a whole, like Americans as a whole, are generally a good people who’ve been cynically, persistently, and professionally lied to by their most unscrupulous leaders.

The focus of the memes below is therefore Putin, the Kremlin, Russian warhawks (the so-called “Z” culture of the Russian invaders), pro-invasion Westerners, the Russian military-industrial complex, Kremlin client or vassal states that have collaborated with Russia in its recent war crimes (e.g., Belarus), pro-Putin propagandists, the anti-Democratic (MAGA) bulk of the 2022 Republican Party in America, Russia’s oligarch class (which implicitly and sometimes explicitly helps maintain Putin’s power base), and other similarly sinister forces. Proof doesn’t feel or endorse a generalized animus toward the Russian people.

The Pro-Ukraine Meme Library

Table of Contents

• Part I: Videos

  • Use: click on these to open the tweet in question, which can then be retweeted.

• Part II: Images

  • Use: right-click on these to download them, then post them anywhere on social media.

• Part III: GIFs

  • Use: click on these to open the tweet in question, which can then be retweeted.

Feel free to share any of the memes below wherever you are able to share them. And keep in mind that the rallying cry for Ukraine’s soldiers, which is often useful as an accompaniment to any memes you post on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram, is “Slava Ukraini!” This means “Glory to Ukraine!” Read more about this salute here.

{Note: Many of the memes below contain violent images and strong language. Also, please note that though a few of the memes below are marked as being from the Ukrainian Memes Forces or UMF, which you can find on Twitter at @uamemesforces, Proof doesn’t wholesale recommend this Twitter account because many of the memes found there (a) are particularly focused on a European rather than American audience, (b) require a level of knowledge of the goings-on in Ukraine that most Americans don’t have and are therefore less likely to respond to (particularly as compared to the memes archived here), and (c) vary wildly in quality. Proof has endeavored to bring the very best UMF memes here; all such memes are explicitly marked. Just so, there are a few memes here from the much-discussed NAFO or North Atlantic Fellas Organization; the reason there aren’t more such memes is that these memes generally rely on Shiba Inu iconography, this being an iconography that largely has purchase in crypto circles. Another pro-Ukraine meme-based Twitter account many will have heard of is @SaintJavelin.}

Part I: Videos

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#9

Part II: Images