From Start to Finish, Major Media Got the Tragic al-Ahli Hospital Blast Exactly Right. It Now Looks Like the Munition That Hit the Hospital in Gaza— Causing a Massacre—Indeed Came From Israel.

Media critics and mea culpas from some outlets aside, a journalistic analysis of how media reported the tragedy at the al-Ahli reveals lessons—not errors—as well as the likely truth of what happened.

Oct 29, 2023

{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.}

🔤 Words: 34,000
📗 Sources: 100+
📷 Images and Videos: 45+
⏰ Reading Time: 2+ hours
🌎 Media Outlets (nations of origin): 🇦🇺 🇨🇦 🇩🇪 🇪🇬 🇪🇸 🇫🇷 🇬🇧 🇮🇱 🇮🇳 🇵🇸 🇶🇦 🇹🇷 🇺🇸

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:

Photo by Seth Abramson on October 17, 2023. May be an image of text.

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.

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.

**ABOVE**: From Israeli major-media publication *Haaretz* in May of this year.

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:

It informs its readers of all the things it wants to know but does not yet know;
it informs readers of what it’s doing to answer currently unanswered questions;
it gives readers a sense of what topics it’s most focused on at the moment;
it gives readers some sense of when they might next hear an update from it;
it cites other outlets while noting it hasn’t independently confirmed their work;
it issues real-time, even instant corrections or addendums, as necessary;
it is not afraid to let readers glimpse its internal procedures and protocols;
it summarizes major issues of concern, even if they cannot yet be addressed;
it itemizes urgent questions, even those unlikely to be answerable near-term; and
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.

Photo by Seth Abramson on October 16, 2023. May be a Twitter screenshot of text.

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.}

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.

Photo by Seth Abramson on October 17, 2023. May be a Twitter screenshot of 1 person and text that says '5 hours ago Aaron Boxerman Reporting from Jerusalem G Daoud Shehab, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad, denied the Israeli military's claim that an errant rocket fired by the militant group could have caused the deadly explosion at the Gaza City hospital. "There were no operations by the 1-Quds Brigades in the area at all," Shehab said in a phone call, referring to the group's armed wing.'.

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:

A broken Qassam (Hamas) or al-Quds (PIJ) rocket accidentally hitting al-Ahli.
An errant Tamir Interceptor (IDF) accidentally hitting the hospital.
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:

BBC: analysis
The Middle East Eye (UK): analysis
The Archbishop of Canterbury: statement*
Channel 4 (UK): analysis
CNN: analysis**
Mother Jones: commentary
The Bulwark: commentary
Al Jazeera: analysis
Al Jazeera: further analysis
The Guardian: audio and video
France24: analysis
Australian Broadcasting Network: analysis
The Times of Israel: audio***
BBC: further analysis
Channel 4 (UK): further analysis
Al Jazeera: digital investigation
CNN: further analysis^
The Wall Street Journal: analysis
The New York Times: analysis
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”):

The IDF indeed bombed or shelled the al-Ahli Hospital on Saturday, October 14.
That bombing or shelling indeed had caused casualties (four wounded).
Following that IDF bombing or shelling, the IDF made three calls to the al-Ahli.
Those calls admitted that the October 14 event had been a “warning.”
The IDF ordered all doctors, nurses, and administrators at al-Ahli to evacuate.
Staff refused to do this because it would have condemned their patients to death.
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).
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.
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.
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:

Photo by Seth Abramson on October 19, 2023. May be an image of text.

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.

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.

Photo by Seth Abramson on October 18, 2023. May be an image of text that says 'Oct. 17, 2023 lyad Abuhweila à Dr. Muhammad Abu Salima, the director of Al Shifa, the Gaza hospital where many of those injured at Ahli Arab hospital were taken, said that the death toll remained difficult to estimate because of the extent of the damage at the blast site, but that he could confirm that more than 500 had been wounded or killed. "The shreds of the bodies have overlapped," he said in a phone call.'.

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)

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

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)

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

Photo by Seth Abramson on October 20, 2023. May be a graphic of map, poster, steam engine and text that says 'Israel's Iron Dome Tamir interceptor missile Orojecile projectile Incoming Radar system unit Detects incoming projectile Control center Decides if projectile poses a security threat Missile firing unit Destroys threat before itreaches inhabited areas'.

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:

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.
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:

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.
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).
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).
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)

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

Photo by Seth Abramson on October 21, 2023. May be an image of tripod.

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.

The Shocking Twist: The Artillery Theory

ABOVE: Impact crater sizes for **105mm**, **122mm**, **152mm**, and **155mm** howitzer shells, as published by the **Defense Technical Information Center**. The impact crater at al-Ahli Hospital had an approximate 1.0m diameter and 0.75m depth.

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:

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

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.
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.
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

**ABOVE**: Photos of **Beit Hanoun**, in northeast Gaza, before and after IDF airstrikes.

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.

Photo by Seth Abramson on October 22, 2023. May be a Twitter screenshot of 2 people, newspaper, magazine and text.

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):

Photo by Seth Abramson on October 20, 2023. May be a Twitter screenshot of 2 people, tinsel and text.

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.

Photo by Seth Abramson on October 21, 2023. May be a Twitter screenshot of text that says 'ALJAZEERA News BREAKING Israel-Gaza war Israel-Palestine conflict Features A simple guide Economy Opinion 20 trucks carrying food and medicine but no fuel finally enter Gaza Live tracker Video Military analysis Mapping the war Photos A family's story US vetoes UN resolution calling for humanitarian pause in Israel-Hamas war US ambassador says draft resolution did not do enough to underscore Israel's right to self-defence.'.

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.

Photo by Seth Abramson on October 23, 2023. May be an image of 2 people and text that says 'CNN WarmingGraphicContenit raphicConter Content Wamning Graph Live TV คโต๋ VIDEO Children in Gaza are dying as Israel's airstrikes on Hamas intensify'.

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:

Photo by Seth Abramson on October 23, 2023. May be an image of text.

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”):

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Concurrent with all of the foregoing, Hamas must release all 229 hostages known to currently be in its custody.
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.
The IDF should declare that, at the conclusion of the ceasefire period, all armed men in Gaza will be considered combatants.
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).
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.)

Robert Hull

Thank you, Seth! This was amazing (albeit a bit long, but that's your method and style). I was able to find the necessary nuggets to understand the situation more fully. Please keep up the great work that you are doing! I think, overall, from Al Jazeera to BBC, journalists are doing a decent job right now. It's very challenging. Not to be a bummer, though, I really do believe that, no matter how accurate and right-thinking the journalists are, the tides of history have turned and that we are headed towards global warfare on a grand scale. In terms of the United States, this may or may not help Biden, but frankly, I am not hopeful. Nevertheless, there's a chance that the serious press, good journalism, and intrepid historians will set us free in the long run.

Expand full comment

1 reply by Seth Abramson

Valerie Agnew

KWL. What I know before the first read of your phenomenal article is to seek truth from passionate and forthright independent journalists and educators. I want to know why so many people choose to be only subjective. I learned that “partisanship is not objective.” For that reason, I am formally declaring my party affiliation to independent.

Thank you for sharing your hard and spellbinding research. We cannot build trust without truth, without seeking truth. We cannot build trust without saying I am sorry and will you forgive me. Honest leaders know that.

22 more comments...

From Start to Finish, Major Media Got the Tragic al-Ahli Hospital Blast Exactly Right. It Now Looks Like the Munition That Hit the Hospital in Gaza— Causing a Massacre—Indeed Came From Israel.

Media critics and mea culpas from some outlets aside, a journalistic analysis of how media reported the tragedy at the al-Ahli reveals lessons—not errors—as well as the likely truth of what happened.

Summary

Introduction

An Aside: Al-Shifa Hospital

Further Breaking Down the Early al-Ahli Coverage

Arguable Media Mistakes Consistently Favored the IDF

What Happened at al-Ahli Before the Explosion

The al-Ahli Explosion As Captured by Proof

Tracking Major Media Reporting on the Explosion

Compiling Reliable Major-Media Sources on the Blast

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

Essays at the Threads Feed Linked to This Publication

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

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

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

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

The Shocking Twist: The Artillery Theory

Conclusion

Appendix A: A Note to Readers

Appendix B: A Proposal for a Temporary Humanitarian Ceasefire

Discussion about this post