Where the Israel/Palestine issue is concerned, emotions appear to run uncommonly high across the world. That is understandable: It is actually commendable on one level to take the view of many, which is that a dead child is a dead child regardless of whether it was Israeli or Palestinian, and that therefore arguments about precisely why said children are dead are morally bankrupt regardless of who makes them. Both sides, sadly, have enough dead children to go around. And at times, arguments between the opposing sides can feel as if they’re based simply on whose children deserved death more. It’s one of those issues where few minds get changed, and atrocities can feel almost pornographic.
But such an environment makes the duty of the press to verify its facts even more solemn. When your news reporting has the potential to get international peace summits cancelled, or spark the storming of embassies across the Arab world, or lead to thousands of emails going to elected TDs, then that reporting had better be right.
And in Ireland this week, as in much of the west, it simply was not.
At the time of writing, about 2pm on Wednesday, RTE news still has a report on its website claiming that bodies are still being pulled from the rubble and wreckage of the Al-Ahli Baptist hospital. The Irish Times still sports the same claim. The only problem is that photos taken in the daylight, in the aftermath of the blast at the hospital, show no rubble.
The buildings are still standing. There is no rubble or wreckage of the hospital from which bodies can be pulled.
Daylight. The Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza still stands. Local footage shows all buildings intact. There are no rescue workers pulling bodies from rubble. There are no bodies. There is no rubble.
A tragedy happened. Innocents died. But it wasn't as reported yesterday. pic.twitter.com/5EEoLV4q5X
— Arieh Kovler (@ariehkovler) October 18, 2023
To understand why this claim about bodies being pulled from rubble was published, I wrote to the RTE Press Office and asked where it came from, and why it was still online even when the evidence contradicted it. The response from RTE was as follows:
The short update was included on the RTÉ News website tracker, which accompanied the main article giving full details on what was known and being claimed about the attack. The update was taken from a wire service, which attributed the quote to a Palestinian Health Ministry spokesperson. The attribution was inadvertently left out of the tracker update during the editing process. This should not have happened. The text has now been updated with full attribution of the source.
In other words, RTE took a claim about bodies being pulled from rubble directly from the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Health Ministry. One wonders whether that will make RTE more cautious about publishing as fact claims from that source in future. Notably, the response does not address why the claim remains online, even after photographic evidence has proved it to be false.
As to the responsibility for the attack, this is where the media must shoulder the most shameful blame. As initial reports came through, the Irish media stated as fact that Israel was responsible. The Journal’s initial headline read “500 dead in Israeli Air Strike on Gaza City Hospital, health Ministry says”. That headline was seen 20,000 times in just 11 minutes.
The Examiner lead its story with the following statement: “An Israeli Air Strike has hit a Gaza City Hospital, packed with wounded and other Palestinians seeking shelter, killing hundreds”. The Irish Times said “At least 500” were dead after an “air strike” on a Gaza hospital.
Cumulatively, these stories were seen by perhaps hundreds of thousands of Irish people. Hundreds of thousands more will have heard them on radio, or on television news.
These stories, presented as fact, were all sourced from a single source: The “Palestinian Health Ministry”, which is of course an arm of the Hamas terror group which rules Gaza. It simply did not occur to any Irish journalist – many of whom never tire of accusing the rest of us of “misinformation” and “disinformation” – to wonder if such a body might have an incentive to mislead. Presumably this is also where the claims of workers sifting through rubble came from.
One might compare the scepticism with which they treat comments by Donald Trump, or Nigel Farage, for example, to the utter and wide-eyed credulity they give to claims made by a PR department of a recognised terrorist group in Gaza.
It is readily apparent that people died at the Hospital – there was a large explosion in the car park and light-of-day images show many cars burned out. It is possible that people were sheltering in the car park when it was hit. But that is about as much as can be said.
The press said a lot more.
In the intervening hours, US President Joe Biden was the most prominent of those to accept that the attack had not been carried out by the Israelis at all, but was the result of a presumably accidental misfire of a Palestinian missile intended for Israel. The destruction that unfolded at the hospital in Gaza was, most likely, intended to be destruction in an Israeli town, where, undoubtedly, it would have received much less attention.
Even if one is inclined, against the evidence, to believe that this was still some act of madness by the Israelis, the press had no reason at all to be so inclined. They are supposed to be objective, after all.
Irish readers should recognise this behaviour. It is the same media conduct that gave us the ludicrous story about an “attack” on a migrant camp in Ashtown in January, when the press closed ranks around a story that had more holes than the Irish soccer team’s defence. It is the same conduct that gave us the calumnies against teachers in a Carlow School, and days of moral panic based on a now admitted lie.
In all three cases, journalists reported as fact things that aligned with their prejudices and biases, but not the evidence. In this case, the Irish media – and much of their global equivalents – have a very clear view about the war in the middle east. They have a very clear take on who the goodies and the baddies are. And when the baddies are claimed to have done something bad, well? Who needs evidence.
This is how they operate. And it is what Gript Media exists, in part, to counter.