Governments and International Organizations Leave the Record Uncorrected

In the immediate aftermath of an explosion at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza last week, the New York Times issued a story under the headline “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.” As more information became available, the Times updated the headline to “At Least 500 Dead in Strike on Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say,” which softened the implication of Israel’s culpability but still used the word “strike,” which denotes an intentional attack of some sort. Later on, the Times updated the headline once again to remove the word “strike” instead writing, “At Least 500 Dead in Blast at Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say.”

On Oct. 23, the New York Times published an editor’s note that reads:

The Times’s initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials, and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast. However, the early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — 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’s post ends with an admission that its editors “should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified.” 

The press has received a lot of criticism for its initial coverage of the explosion, which reported uncritically statements by Hamas blaming Israel for the carnage. Some of that criticism, as the Times’s frank admission of error indicates, is clearly warranted.

Largely lost in the mass of press criticism has been the reaction of governments and international organizations—which was actually much worse than the press’s reaction and which mostly has not seen the kind of correction that the iterative nature of press coverage tends to produce over time.

Before getting into who said what, let’s start with the facts as we know them. 

On Oct. 17 at 6:59 p.m. local time, a large explosion rocked the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza. According to Gaza’s health ministry, “hundreds” of civilians—including many children—died in the blast. Media outlets were not able to confirm independently the death toll, but horrifying images, videos, and witness accounts attested to its being high. 

Hamas was quick to blame Israel for the strike. The Palestinian Health Ministry, which in Gaza is part of the Hamas-run government, reported that the hospital had taken a “direct hit from an Israeli airstrike.” In a statement, Hamas reiterated the claim that the explosion was the direct result of a targeted Israeli attack, calling the alleged airstrike “a horrific massacre” and a “crime of genocide.” Palestinian hospital workers—including Archbishop Hosam Naum, who oversees the Baptist hospital's operations—also attested to the blast being of Israeli origin. The Israeli military, he said, had contacted hospital staff “at least three times” in the days before the explosion, encouraging hospital personnel and patients to evacuate the hospital compound as soon as possible. Naum said he suspected that Israel’s attempts to get in touch with the hospital staff were specifically aimed at evacuating civilians from the hospital, not part of Israel’s broader push to convince residents to leave Gaza City and head further south. “There were specific warnings to get out of the building,” he said.

The story turned out to be a lot more complicated than that. Israel quickly denied Hamas’s claims that the explosion was the result of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) airstrike. Within a few hours of the explosion, rather, Israel claimed that the explosion at the hospital was caused by a misfired rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In support of this claim, the IDF released videos and images purportedly showing a “missile” launched from the Gaza strip. It also released a recording that allegedly featured audio of two Hamas operatives discussing the explosion. “But God bless, it couldn’t have found another place to explode?” reportedly said Operative 1. “They shot it coming from the cemetery behind [the hospital] and it misfired and fell on them,” Operative 2 responded. The IDF, citing aerial images taken from military drones, said there was no evidence of a crater on hospital grounds, which, according to the Israeli military, would have indicated an Israeli airstrike. (It’s important to note, however, that Israel’s claims did contribute to some initial confusion about the events.)

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad—which took part in the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel—denied the IDF’s allegation. According to the New York Times, a spokesperson for the group said that “the capacity of their weapons supply was ‘primitive’” and that destruction of the area demonstrated that the blast had been caused by an Israeli airstrike.

But the United States released an initial intelligence assessment that backed the Israeli account. Shortly after the explosion, President Joe Biden released a statement in which he expressed his outrage and sadness about the tragedy, and in which he said that he had instructed his national security team “to continue gathering information about what exactly happened.” The next day, while in Israel, Biden announced that based on intelligence gathered by the United States, the blast at the hospital in Gaza “appears [to be] the result of an errant rocket fired by a terrorist group in Gaza.”

National Security Council Spokeswoman Adrienne Watson later specified—with the caveat that the U.S. was still collecting information—that according to “available reporting, including intelligence, missile activity and open-source video and images of the incident,” the U.S. government had assessed that “Israel was not responsible for an explosion that killed hundreds of civilians yesterday.” Watson later added that U.S. intelligence indicates that some Palestinian militants in Gaza believed that “the explosion was likely caused by an errant rocket or missile launch carried out by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”

According to the Times, various anonymous American intelligence officials said that early intelligence—including infrared satellite imagery—shows the launch of a “rocket or missile from Palestinian fighter positions within Gaza.” In short, early U.S. intelligence seems to corroborate Israel's claim that the explosion was the result of a misfired rocket launched by Palestinian forces. 

As additional information came in, it seemed to cast even more doubt on Hamas’s initial account. An analysis of verified images and videos showed that the explosion likely occurred in the hospital’s parking lot (which was also described by some news outlets as its courtyard), not in the hospital itself. What’s more, Hamas has claimed that there are no remnants of the Israeli missile that allegedly struck the hospital. A senior Hamas official told a New York Times reporter in a phone interview, “The missile has dissolved like salt in the water. It’s vaporized. Nothing is left.”

There was also some confusion about the blast’s death toll, which seemed to decrease as more information became available. Gaza authorities have reported death tolls ranging from 833 to 500. Authorities now claim the death toll is 471. The United States, in turn, claims it has intelligence indicating that the death toll is actually between 100 and 300 people.  

In the days since the explosion, various media outlets have analyzed open-source images and videos to attempt to determine what exactly happened. A video analysis conducted by the Wall Street Journal confidently backs Israel’s claim that the blast was the result of a failed rocket launched from inside Gaza. Investigations of television footage by the Associated Press and CNN also support this claim. 

Not all organizations have reached this same conclusion. An investigation by Forensic Analysis, an “independent university-based research agency undertaking media and spatial research into state and corporate violence,” found that the source of the explosion was most likely not a Palestinian fired rocket traveling east but, instead, was a munition traveling from the Israeli-controlled side of the Gaza perimeter. In another video investigation, Al Jazeera found that the cause of the explosion was a Palestinian rocket that was struck down by an Israeli missile. In the absence of independent verification, a short video from U.K.-based Channel 4 News cast doubt on claims made by both Hamas and the IDF.

In any active war situation, it is exceedingly difficult to gather objective, accurate, or authoritative information quickly. This is especially true in the aftermath of an event as deadly and tragic as the explosion at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, when allegations of responsibility are flying back and forth and the individual observer has limited ability to assess the quality of the information being thrown around. For this reason, governments and international organizations have a particular role in not letting themselves become vectors of disinformation and in not getting ahead of the facts.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of the explosion at the hospital in Gaza, governments and organizations reacted quickly. Many of them shot from the hip and effectively parroted Hamas’s  story. Some governments and organizations avoided assigning blame for the blast in the absence of any clarity on the facts. Others did not exercise the same caution. Almost none has revised the initial statement as the factual landscape has changed. 

UN Secretary-General António Guterres, for example, released a statement just hours after the explosion, in which he condemned the “strike” on the hospital and expressed condolences to the families of the victims as well as those injured. Guterres did not assign responsibility for the “strike.” But by calling it a strike, rather than an explosion, he indicated a certain measure of intentionality about the blast. One would not, after all, call an accidental misfire of a missile that caused an explosion next to a hospital a “strike on [the] hospital.” Guterres has not revised his statement in light of the intelligence suggesting there may have been no “strike” on the hospital at all—and in light of the fact that the evil here may have been on the part of a group firing missiles near a hospital in a fashion that endangered civilians there.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk made a similar statement, calling the explosion “a massive strike.” Again, there has been no follow-up statement.

The World Health Organization (WHO) was even less careful. It made a statement condemning the “attack,” again assuming intentionality. And it all but attributed the “attack” to the Israeli side. It went directly from condemning the attack itself to noting Israel’s earlier calls to evacuate the hospital and other medical facilities in the north of the Gaza strip—thus strongly implying that the explosion followed from the evacuation warnings. The statement reads, “The order for evacuation has been impossible to carry out given the current insecurity, critical condition of many patients, and lack of ambulances, staff, health system bed capacity, and alternative shelter for those displaced.” The WHO concluded its comment on the situation with a reminder that “[i]nternational humanitarian law must be abided by, which means health care must be actively protected and never targeted”—thus again seeming to assume the detonation came from the Israeli side and was an intentional targeting. Like the UN secretary-general, WHO has not updated or supplemented its statement in light of new information.

Of particular importance, given its official role as monitor of the Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was similarly quick out of the gate. The ICRC was far more responsible than others in its statement and was more careful not to imply attribution of the explosion or to describe it as an attack. Rather, it made calls to uphold international humanitarian law, writing that “[w]e are shocked and horrified by reports that Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza was destroyed” and insisting that “[n]o patient should be killed in a hospital bed.” But even here, there were errors that have not been corrected. In fact, the hospital was not destroyed, and the casualties were largely outside of it.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) echoed this sentiment, adding that “hospitals must be sanctuaries for all.” Like the ICRC, the IFRC refrained from using terms such as “attack” or “strike,” instead condemning the “loss of life” at the hospital. IFRC President Francesco Rocca added that “even war has rules!”

Regional organizations were far less responsible. Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the Arab League secretary general, also condemned the attack, writing on X, “What mind from hell would deliberately bomb a hospital with its unarmed patients?" and stating that “our Arab mechanisms document war crimes, and criminals will not get away with their actions.” Gheit also called on the West to “stop this tragedy immediately.” The secretary general, however, stopped just short of accusing the “criminal” in question by name.

The African Union more explicitly assigned blame to the IDF. In a statement, African Union Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat wrote that there were “no words” to express the union’s condemnation of “Israel’s bombing” of the hospital and called on the international community to “act now.”

Neither entity has publicly commented on the subsequent factual developments.

Representatives of individual governments around the world varied a great deal in their interpretations of the situation. 

U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, for example, was careful not to assign blame in his initial statement expressing his devastation about the “destruction” of the hospital and loss of human life. In a post on the platform X, Cleverly pledged that “the UK will work with our allies to find out what has happened and protect innocent civilians in Gaza.” In the days since, Cleverly criticized the world’s reaction to the explosion, writing on X that “[t]oo many jumped to conclusions about the tragic loss of life” at the hospital. He urged U.K. citizens to “wait for the facts,” as “getting this wrong would put even more lives at risk.” On Oct. 23, U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told Parliament that an analysis of intelligence revealed that “the explosion was likely caused by a missile or part of one that was launched from within Gaza towards Israel.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also posted that he was “horrified by the images of the explosion” and said that “it is important that this incident is investigated very carefully.” Scholz has not issued any follow-up statements about the explosion. 

In a separate and quite responsible statement, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reminded EU lawmakers that “facts need to be established” about the explosion and that “all those responsible must be held accountable.”

By contrast, Egypt, a longtime mediator between Hamas and Israel, “in the strongest terms” condemned the “Israeli bombing” of the hospital and called on Israel to “immediately stop its policies of collective punishment against the people of the Gaza strip.”

Saudi Arabia also explicitly placed blame on Israel. A few hours after the explosion at the hospital, the Saudi Foreign Ministry released a statement in which it condemned “in the strongest possible terms the heinous crime committed by the Israeli occupation forces by bombing Al Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza.” In addition, the Saudi Foreign Ministry called upon the international community to “abandon the double standards and selectivity in applying international humanitarian law when it comes to the Israeli criminal practices .... and hold the Israeli forces fully responsible for their continued repeated violations of all international norms and laws.” 

Neither country appears to have acknowledged or responded to the assessment released by the United States.

Somewhat comically, Russia, unlike the organizations and countries mentioned above, did not place blame on Israel or Islamic Jihad. Rather, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev identified an alternative offender: the United States.

In a post on Telegram, Medvedev wrote that the “final responsibility” for the attack “lies with those who cynically make money from wars in different countries and on different continents. Who thoughtlessly distributes colossal amounts of money for weapons, loading up their military-industrial complex. Who falsely proclaims their global mission to protect democratic values. USA.” 

It is, perhaps, not surprising that governments reacted to the facts as they wished them to be, rather than to the underdeveloped facts as they were—and as they changed. What is remarkable is that international organizations that are supposed to act as impartial arbiters of certain values leapt to barely tenable, or in some cases untenable, conclusions and then didn’t back off of those conclusions as they became ever-more-obviously untenable. The Israelis have long harbored a deep cynicism about the United Nations and other international organizations, which they regard as deeply hostile entities keen to make every incremental judgment against Israel and to focus on it obsessively. This is a picturesque example of where this cynicism comes from. Faced with an explosion and an allegation from Hamas—an organization that is currently engaged in a gleeful spree of war crimes—a lot of knees jerked. And they have not unjerked in the days since.