A close look at how the New York Times (NYT) has been reporting on Israel’s current conflict with Hamas reveals a troubling pattern of omissions, missing balance and context, and an emphasis that inevitably enhances reader sympathy for Gazan misery, underreports Israeli suffering, and implies that Israel, rather than Hamas, is to blame.
Below are some striking examples.
On Nov. 11, 2023, the NYT published a 37-minute story (on its podcast "The Daily") that featured three Gazan doctors talking about how overwhelmed they are by all of the injuries and death and inadequate supplies of this war. The segment includes very dramatic and emotive testimony, including from a physician reporting about a child dying in the course of the interview. One of the doctors urgently calls for a ceasefire, but no interviewee is seriously challenged about the role that Hamas has played in producing the humanitarian crisis at hand. When the reporter briefly inquires about Hamas's responsibility, the doctors either deny any knowledge or criticize the question, and there is zero follow up after that. After the interviews, the reporter also fails to provide any of the crucial context about Hamas’ role in causing the calamity described by the Gazan doctors. Nor does the journalist mention that doctors in Gaza (like everyone else there) are controlled by and/or terrified of Hamas and therefore are not a reliable source.
There was no similar, emotive NYT coverage showing the perspective of Israeli doctors overwhelmed by the mass casualty events of October 7. As the Jerusalem Post reported on October 8: "Dr. Tal Bergman hasn’t slept much since the tragedy yesterday that unfolded on the border of Gaza. With the need to care for hundreds of casualties from the Hamas terror attack, the hospital staff at the Barzilai Medical Center has been working around the clock." On October 10, the Times of Israel reported that "medical, nursing and health profession students who have not been called up for IDF reserve duty may be called to serve in the medical system for a limited time" because of the expected surge in demand.
A second example of anti-Israel bias appears on 11-10-23, when the NYT reported:
The precarity of the hospitals was made clear early on Friday when projectiles struck inside the Al Shifa complex, Gaza’s largest hospital...The chief of Al Shifa Hospital said it was struck four times on Friday, killing seven people, with several others wounded. The sources of the strikes and the extent of the damage were not immediately known.
But the NYT assertion misleadingly omits information that crucially would place the blame on Hamas for those strikes. Avichay Adraee, an IDF spokesman, stated in an Arabic post to his X account that the rocket that hit Al Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip was caused by "a failed launch by the terrorist organizations that tried to fire at Israel...According to IDF systems, rocket-propelled grenades hit the hospital," he wrote. Such details are critical to a fair moral judgment of the events in question and were reported by various media outlets, including the Jerusalem Post and the Economic Times. Why is the NYT – through such omissions – trying to avoid blaming Hamas for rockets hitting Gazan hospitals?
Worse still, in the same article, the NYT doubled down on its flawed coverage of October 17 that seemed to blame Israel for the hospital blast that day (effectively retracting its October 23rd mea culpa for that negligent reporting):
In one of the deadliest incidents of the war, a projectile exploded between buildings at the Ahli Arab Hospital on Oct. 17, possibly killing hundreds of people sheltering there. Hamas blamed Israel, while the Israelis and Western governments said it was a malfunctioning rocket fired by Palestinians at Israel. A video analysis by The New York Times found that evidence cited by Israel was misinterpreted, leaving it unclear what caused the blast.
The NYT video analysis, published on October 24, uses the term "militants" to refer to Hamas combatants (the word "terrorist" appears nowhere in the article) and still concedes that its analysis
"does not answer what actually did cause the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital blast, or who is responsible. The contention by Israeli and American intelligence agencies that a failed Palestinian rocket launch is to blame remains plausible. But the Times analysis does cast doubt on one of the most publicized pieces of evidence that Israeli officials have used to make their case and complicates the straightforward narrative they have put forth."
So this "new" analysis, which contradicts findings by U.S. and Western intelligence agencies, seems intended to muddy the waters about blame for the Ahli Arab Hospital attack, on the basis of only the NYT’s new interpretation of the same video. More importantly, by trying to relitigate such minutiae, the NYT obscures a far more fundamental point: Israel has actually shown unprecedented restraint resulting in barely 1.4 people killed per strike, using the figures cited in the same article (which notes that "Israel has fired more than 8,000 munitions into Gaza" and mentions the deaths of "5,700 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry"). An analysis by Daniel Pomerantz, an expert in international law, forcefully explains just how restrained Israel's military response has been.
The paper’s coverage has also minimized the number of Gazan deaths caused by errant terrorist rockets, a cause that the same “new” analysis eventually acknowledges (halfway into the body of the article): "Palestinian rockets have malfunctioned in the past and one estimate says 15 percent of rockets launched by Gazan militant groups fail."
Anti-Israel bias at “the paper of record” also takes the form of simply pretending that information key to Israel’s defense and Hamas’ culpability doesn’t exist or isn’t worthy of coverage. For example, on 11-8-23, the Times of Israel reported on two morally critical details: Hamas using ambulances to carry out its operations and preventing Gazan civilians from following the IDF’s recommendations to evacuate zones that the IDF intends to target. The article notes how a Hamas commander, Ahmed Siam, was hiding in the Ranteesi Specialist Hospital in Gaza City, and preventing 1,000 displaced people and patients there from evacuating so he could use them as human shields.
But the NYT summary of the Gaza-related news events from 11-8-23 omits all of this information. Why does the NYT consistently avoid details that would effectively exonerate the IDF of war crimes by exposing Hamas' breach of moral and humanitarian norms as the true cause of preventable civilian suffering in Gaza?
Selective coverage by the NYT also apparently places more value on medical facilities damaged in Gaza than in Israel. When Ashkelon's hospital was hit by a Hamas rocket on October 8th, as reported in the Times of Israel, there was zero coverage from the NYT on that day.
The NYT downplayed the level of support for Israel at the November 14 DC rally, reporting that there were just "tens of thousands" present and that many were there to oppose antisemitism rather than to support Israel. By contrast, the Times of Israel reported that there were about 300,000 who attended what Ynet dubbed the "Largest Jewish gathering in Jewish history". Estimating the crowd at 200,000, Haaretz called it "America's Biggest pro-Israel Rally Ever."
The NYT's anti-Israel bias stands out even more when reviewing the paper's coverage of October 7. Searching that date with the word "Gaza" or "Israel" yields about 30 articles. Not a single news headline captures the sheer scale of the atrocity or the unthinkable pain that the October 7 massacre caused to Israelis. Yet incredibly, on a day when the blood hadn't yet dried from over 1,000 murders committed in the single bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, the NYT thought it was appropriate to run an article titled "Gaza Has Suffered Under 16-Year Blockade" and another one titled "Gaza's Hospitals and Morgues Are Crowded."
That kind of slant all but ensures that NYT readers will inadequately empathize with the horrors endured by Israel on October 7, and will soon forget them when rushing to judge Israel for civilian suffering that seems to have been caused by Israel but is in fact the result of Hamas' evil and cynical battlefield tactics.
Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic submarine thriller about Iranian nukes, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
Image: Ajay Suresh, via Flickr // CC BY 2.0
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