Yet Another Epic Fail: Corporate Media Mishandles Gaza Hospital Blast

Do We Really Know What Happened At Al Ahli Hospital?

Let us be clear on one thing: the carnage in Israel and Gaza since the Hamas attack on October 7 is appalling. People are dying. That is not good. That is not okay. Some way, somehow, the killing must stop on all sides.

Yet this carnage is real. Sadly, it is real news and it must receive real coverage. If the world does not look, if the world chooses not to see, then the world chooses to allow the violence to endure, and this we must not do.

Alas, real coverage does not always happen. After the recent blast at Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, corporate media once again flubbed it, turning an epic news story into yet another corporate media epic fail. Consider how the Los Angeles Times first reported the story:

An explosion killed hundreds of people Tuesday night at a Gaza City hospital, with each side in the Israel-Hamas war offering a different version of what happened.

The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza says an Israeli airstrike caused the blast, and that it killed some 500 people, many of whom had sought shelter from an ongoing Israeli offensive.

The Israeli military, however, said it had no involvement in the explosion and that Palestinian militants had fired a barrage of rockets near the hospital at the time.

Photos from Al-Ahli Hospital showed fire engulfing the hospital halls, shattered glass and body parts scattered across the area. Those photos could not be independently verified.

Despite lack of independent verification or even a firm grasp on what had actually happened, the paper ran a story long on speculation and short on verified facts.

Sadly, this was not an outlier. More than a few outlets jumped on the story and ahead of the facts.

Even before we consider other media accounts, including social media accounts, of the Al Ahli Hospital blast, we must look closely at the LA Times article, for its internal construction itself reveals multiple narrative weaknesses and flaws.

The banner image at the head of the story is the first egregious flaw.

This is, of course, a shocking display of the horrors of war. We should be shocked and troubled and disturbed by such images. Yet what is most disturbing about this image is that, even per the caption, it is not a picture of the Al Ahli Hospital after the blast.

The caption for the image reads: “ Residents evacuate a survivor Tuesday from a house destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis.”

How does this happen? Ostensibly, purely by “coincidence”. The LA Times article is one that has been substantively rewritten multiple times, with the Internet Archive having at least 12 separate snapshots of the same web page. Looking at the various versions, we see numerous changes in headlines and even lede paragraphs.

This is the oldest headline on this article:

The lede paragraphs read as follows:

Israel on Tuesday bombed areas of southern Gaza where it had told Palestinians to flee to ahead of an expected invasion, killing dozens of people. Meanwhile, mediators struggled to break a deadlock over delivering aid to millions of increasingly desperate civilians in the territory, which has been under both siege and assault by Israel since a brutal cross-border attack by Hamas militants.

Flaring violence along Israel’s border with Lebanon also led to concerns over a widening regional conflict that diplomats were working to prevent.

In Gaza, people wounded in the airstrikes were rushed to the hospital after heavy attacks outside the southern Gaza cities of Rafah and Khan Younis, residents reported. Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official and former health minister, said that 27 people were killed in Rafah and 30 in Khan Younis.

This was the article updated as of 17 October 2023 at 4:29AM Pacific Time.

A few hours later, the article’s headline changed:

The lede paragraphs also changed.

Israel bombed areas of southern Gaza where it had told Palestinians to flee ahead of an expected invasion, killing dozens of people Tuesday in retaliatory attacks it says are targeted at Hamas militants who rule the besieged territory.

With no water, fuel or food being delivered to Gaza since Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel last week, mediators struggled to break a deadlock over delivering supplies to increasingly desperate civilians, aid groups and hospitals.

This article does not become about the hospital blast until 1:34PM.

The lede paragraphs now reflect the new headline.

An explosion killed hundreds of people Tuesday night at a Gaza City hospital, with each side in the Israel-Hamas war offering a different version of what happened.

The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza says an Israeli airstrike caused the blast, and that it killed some 500 people, many of whom had sought shelter from an ongoing Israeli offensive.

The Israeli military, however, said it had no involvement in the explosion and that Palestinian militants had fired a barrage of rockets near the hospital at the time.

Photos from Al-Ahli Hospital showed fire engulfing the hospital halls, shattered glass and body parts scattered across the area. Those photos could not be independently verified.

Each version of this article is, by itself, presumably objectively reported (more on that to follow). However, the problem is we are looking at different versions of the same article, the same link, the same URL to the same web page on the same website. And the banner graphic is the same across all versions.

Thus the first image the LA Times presents about the Al Ahli blast is, by its own admission, not at all related to the Al Ahli blast. It is merely one scene of death and destruction pulled out from somewhere and stuck at the top of the article without regard to the article’s content.

When we dive into the version of the article which is about the Al Ahli hospital blast, we find another troubling issue: crucial images do not appear to be there. Specifically, even though the article speaks of photos showing fire engulfing the hospital halls, with “shattered glass” and body parts, that version of the LA Times article does not even have a photo showing the hospital on fire.

The closest we get to an image that could be an image from Al Ahli Hospital is an almost generic image of a blast within a dense urban area.

The caption on the photo reads: “Smoke rises above the Gaza Strip on Tuesday following an Israeli airstrike.”

We are told the hospital was in flames and there were presumably gory images of shattered and even dismembered bodies, yet we do not even have an image of the hospital in flames. While I would not fault the LA Times for not showing disturbing images of the casualties themselves—at a certain point showing such images ceases to be journalism and becomes degenerate gore porn—images of the hospital itself on fire is something that corporate media has shown more than once before.

The LA Times did not show such images this time, even though the story claimed such images existed.

Such omissions do not immediately render the story “fake news”, but it does reveal a certain propagandistic sleight-of-hand which encourages the reader’s imagination to supply the images.

Engaging the imagination in this manner can be powerful writing. What it cannot be is factual reporting.

When we look at some of the social media images purporting to be of the attack/blast itself, we have to consider there may be a reason the LA Times did not show images of a hospital in flames: the hospital itself may not have actually been in flames.

Media outlet “Middle East Eye”—which has a blue-checked account and is presumably a “legit” news source—shared video of what it claimed was an Israeli air strike targeting the hospital.

As X/Twitter still does not allow embedding of Tweets in Substack articles, here is the complete video.

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The sound does seem to be that of a rocket or missile landing and then exploding, followed by the understandable cries of witnesses and people caught up in the blast.

However, as the screenshots above show, the fire is not engulfing a building, but what appears to be a parking lot or vacant space next to the hospital. This is significant, as it makes the explosion a good deal smaller than the initial reporting by the LA Times indicated. If this video is of the blast as Middle East Eye claims, then it is absolutely certain that the hospital building itself was not hit, neither by Hamas rocket nor by Israeli missile. If the video is what it claims to be, it calls into question the corporate media reporting proffered by the LA Times.

“Open Source Intelligence Monitor” provides this video, identified as a rocket launch from Gaza, with the rocket either malfunctioning or being shot down and then crashing near Al Ahli Hospital.

The full video is included here.

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If we take this video at face value, then we have to conclude that the blast was not caused by an Israeli attack at all, but by a rocket launched by Hamas or one of the other militant terrorist groups operating in Gaza.

In the most recent version of the LA Times article, which was updated at 5:45PM Pacific Time on October 17, the lede paragraphs still carry the description of hospital being in flames.

A massive blast rocked a Gaza City hospital packed with wounded and other Palestinians seeking shelter Tuesday, killing hundreds of people, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said. Hamas blamed an Israeli airstrike, while the Israeli military said the hospital was hit by a rocket misfired by Palestinian militants.

The Gaza Health Ministry said at least 500 people were killed. Video that the Associated Press confirmed was from the hospital showed fire engulfing the building and the hospital’s grounds strewn with torn bodies, many of them young children. Around them in the grass were blankets, school backpacks and other belongings.

This is a problem for the article, because the videos shared via X/Twitter do not show a building being engulfed in flame, but a parking lot. This update to the article occurred several hours after the videos were posted on line.

How did the LA Times report that particular detail? By dismissing it as a claim of the IDF:

In a briefing with reporters, Israel’s chief army spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said the army determined there were no air force, ground or naval attacks in the area at the time of the blast. He said radar detected outgoing rocket fire at the same moment, and intercepted communications between militant groups indicating that Islamic Jihad fired the rockets.

Hagari also shared aerial footage collected by a military drone that showed a blast that he said was inconsistent with Israeli weaponry. He said the explosion occurred in the building’s parking lot.

Based on the videos available online, this is the correct depiction of the blast, not the LA Times version of a hospital engulfed in flames. At this point the LA Times is passing pure propaganda.

Further review of other news outlets’ reporting show the “Israeli airstrike” narrative began to unravel almost as soon as it was put out by corporate media.

The Associated Press, of course, initially ran the lede paragraphs describing the scene as a hospital on fire with massive wreckage and bodies “scattered” everywhere.

The Health Ministry run by Hamas said an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday hit a Gaza City hospital packed with wounded and other Palestinians seeking shelter, killing hundreds. If confirmed, the attack would be by far the deadliest Israeli airstrike in five wars fought since 2008.

The health ministry, which is run by Hamas, said at least 500 people had been killed. Photos purportedly from al-Ahli Hospital shared widely on social video showed fire engulfing the building, widespread damage and bodies scattered in the wreckage. The photos could not be independently verified.

However, the AP article, as with the LA Times article, included no such images. Moreover, within hours the Associated Press shifted to describing the incident as “a massive blast”:

A massive blast rocked a Gaza City hospital packed with wounded and other Palestinians seeking shelter Tuesday, killing hundreds of people, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said. Hamas blamed an Israeli airstrike, while the Israeli military said the hospital was hit by a rocket misfired by Palestinian militants. The Gaza Health Ministry said at least 500 people were killed.

Note that, as with the LA Times article, we are discussing updates to the exact same news story at the exact same URL.

NPR’s reporting—which was contemporaneous with the LA Times—was already distancing itself from the narrative, simply referring to it as “an explosion”.

Palestinian health officials say hundreds of people have been killed in an explosion at a crowded Gaza hospital. The cause of the explosion has not yet been confirmed, with Palestinian authorities accusing Israel and Israel saying a Palestinian militant group was responsible.

It comes as Israel and Hamas trade airstrikes and rocket fire and mediators press for an agreement to allow aid to enter the Gaza Strip and refugees with foreign passports to leave the enclave.

By the early hours of October 18, Reuters was focusing on Israel’s “denial” that it attacked the hospital, while including video—some of which appears to be identical to the Middle East Eye Tweet video shown above—which, if viewed objectively, does appear to support the Israeli view of events.

Israel’s military published on Wednesday what it described as evidence that a misfired Palestinian rocket, rather than one of its own munitions, caused an overnight explosion at a Gaza hospital in which hundreds of people died.

For its part, New York Magazine’s “Intelligencer” column began its coverage of the event by reporting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas cancelled a meeting with President Biden over the incident. While not explicitly accusing Israel, the column does regurgitate tweets at least indicating that others do accuse Israel.

To its credit, the Intelligencer column did relatively quickly—within a couple of hours—update its reporting that there was video footage which appeared to exonerate Israel.

However, the ulimate effect of this shifting reporting is the same: corporate media began with a presumption that Israel had bombed a hospital, and probably did so deliberately. When the actual facts became known, corporate media had to quickly edit itself, because the facts simply do not support that narrative.

In the final analysis, this is not a question of who fired what rocket or which missile at whichever target. This is not even a question of who is more culpable in the explosion at Al Ahli Hospital.

Rather, this is a question of corporate media once again not doing their jobs and measuring up to their responsibility to report events as accurately as possible, sticking to the facts as they are known and not getting ahead of the story.

With dynamic ongoing events like the current round of conflict between Hamas and Israel, the available details are highly fluid and constantly subject to change. That is the nature of such events. I myself have to be mindful of this as I evaluate the news stories with an eye towards teasing out what is fact and what is narrative. It was for this reason I broached the possibility of Iranian involvement in the initial Hamas attack in a highly circumspect fashion.

Hamas v Israel: Who Will Get It Right?

Yet even at that, it was almost immediately apparent that Iran had “some” level of involvement in the attack, and the questions were more the degree of involvement and would Israeli retaliation become politically necessary.

Hamas v Israel: The Iranian Connection

Facts change and situations unfold, and both direct reporting and follow-up analysis has to unfold with them. For this reason, honest assessments of any situation have to be fairly fluid and tightly bound to the facts which are available at the time of any writing.

Corporate media yet again did not follow this principle. As we have seen time and again, corporate media allows their reporting to get ahead of the facts to promote a pre-determined narrative. Very often this appears to further a propaganda purpose—corporate media is not merely attempting to shape a narrative but to regulate how people even think about various topics.

There was an explosion at Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza. Damage was done and at least some people were killed. This much has been reasonably confirmed by multiple media sources (including some corporate media ones). Claims that it was an Israeli air strike are highly dubious. Far more likely is an errant Hamas/Palestinian terrorist rocket which malfunctioned and crashed near the hospital. This has only been grudginly reported by the corporate media.

What is certain is that there is carnage taking place in Gaza, just as there has been carnage in Israel. Innocent men, women, and children are being killed. Some way, somehow, this killing must stop. The violence must end. There must be peace.

We will not get there with corporate media pushing propaganda and narrative at the expense of facts. All propaganda ever promotes is more violence. I want to promote more peace.