New York Times Reporting From Gaza Should Carry a Warning Label: ‘Restricted by Hamas’

The New York Times appears to be yielding to immense outside pressure to tilt its Gaza war coverage even further against Israel.

Last week “more than 100” anti-Israel protesters were arrested after protests at the Times‘ printing plant and Times Square headquarters, according to an account on the CommonDreams.org website, which is sympathetic to the protesters. The group Writers Against the War in Gaza, which includes former New York Times “staff writers” who left to protest what they saw as the paper’s pro-Israel tilt, went so far as to publish a parody newspaper, designed like the Times, called the New York War Crimes. It advised readers concerned about the “current Zionist genocide against Gaza” that “if you still subscribe to The Times, unsubscribe. If you read The Times, stop.”

As that pressure was building, the Times swung to emphasize the “starving Gazans” story that seems to be replacing the “hospitals” story as the narrative that Hamas and its allies want to highlight. After a long span without much of its own firsthand reporting from inside Gaza (aside from brief visits by reporters accompanied by Israeli military spokespeople), the New York Times published a piece that appeared in print under the headline, “In Rafah, Survival Is a Daily Grind: ‘Everything Is Difficult.'”

Online, it carries the byline of Bilal Shbair and the explanation, “Bilal Shbair reported from Rafah, Gaza.”

If the Times has its own reporter operating in Rafah, you might think the editors would assign him to try to ask and answer readers-want-to-know sort of questions such as, “How much of the aid is Hamas stealing?” or “Where are the kidnapped Israelis?” or “Who would the people there like to run the place after Israel destroys Hamas?” or “Does Hamas still control the place enough that it would kill anyone who wrote anything negative about them?”

Instead, the Times coverage emphasizes hunger, hunger, hunger, which seems to be the new Hamas-approved line. Back in November, the paper’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, publicly acknowledged, “Hamas restricts journalists in Gaza.” Israel says Hamas still has four battalions of fighters in Rafah. Is Bilal Shbair’s work subject to the Hamas restrictions that Kingsley mentions? If so, how? What is he allowed to write about, what isn’t he allowed to write about, and what would be the punishment to him if he wrote about what Hamas doesn’t want him to write about or if he deviates from writing what Hamas does want him to write about?

The text of this particular piece, alas, doesn’t inspire much confidence in Shbair’s freedom to tell the truth. For example, he writes, “Israel has accused Hamas of using civilian buildings like schools and mosques for terrorist activities, a charge Hamas denies.” Why frame that as “accused” and “denies” when Israel has provided vast amounts of video and photographic proof, along with tours for Times journalists, demonstrating that it is true, as Gazans would have to be willfully blind not to know.

Another passage in the Times article reports, “On Wednesday, Israeli forces hit an aid warehouse in Rafah that killed a UN worker, according to UNRWA, the largest aid group on the ground in Gaza.”

If you look at another Times story, it says that strike killed a Hamas commander, identified as Muhammad Abu Hasna. But this story says nothing about that — it just mentions the UN worker who was killed.

The Times hasn’t totally abandoned the “hospitals” story for the “hunger” story. Shbair’s account from Rafah says, “In an interview, Marwan al-Hams, the director of Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital, Rafah’s largest, listed the services it could no longer provide: intensive care, complex surgeries, CT scans or MRIs, and cancer treatments. The doctors lack painkillers and medicines for diabetes and high blood pressure. Their ability to provide dialysis is so reduced that patients with kidney diseases have died.”

A natural question might be” “Is Hamas using the hospital as a base like it did many of the other hospitals in Gaza?” Yet that question goes unasked by the Times.

Basically, Hamas doesn’t permit genuinely independent reporting from any Hamas-controlled area, which is part of why the Times has been reluctant to publish such coverage up till now. Yet this latest article suggests that the Times seems to have decided the dateline and the hunger details are somehow worth the tradeoff of independence.

Other coverage from within Gaza by the Times misleads readers about how much aid is going in.

For example, one article claims, “An average of just six commercial trucks carrying food and other supplies have been allowed to enter Gaza each day since early December.”

Earlier the Times said it was 96 trucks a day.

Perhaps there is some distinction between “commercial” and UN or nonprofit relief organizations trucks, but without clarifying that distinction or providing the larger number alongside, the number is misleading. I’m not saying Gazans aren’t hungry, especially in the north where people did not follow Israeli warnings to leave. But the remaining Hamas fighters in their tunnels in Rafah almost certainly are eating pretty well, especially in comparison to the non-fighters not in the tunnels. Any coverage from Gaza that fails to illuminate that contrast falls short of telling readers the full truth of what is happening there. Perhaps Kingsley’s statement that “Hamas restricts journalists in Gaza” should be attached as a warning in large red letters before and after anything the Times prints from a journalist operating in any part of Gaza that is, like Rafah, still under Hamas control.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

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