In May 2021 I wrote a lot about the protestations of the Associated Press when the IDF destroyed the 11-story Gaza City office building in which it was holed up with tenants including Hamas. No one was injured in the blast. Among other precautions, the Israeli military telephoned the AP occupants of the office with a warning to evacuate an hour in advance of the strike.
The AP declared the strike “shocking and horrifying.” By contrast, the AP expressed no shock or horror to find itself housed with Hamas. The AP asserted that it knew nothing about the presence of Hamas.
“The AP goes Sgt. Schultz” was only the first of several posts I devoted to the strike. AP executives demanded information supporting the IDF’s targeting of the building. The IDF subsequently issued a statement explaining its action. I found the statement persuasive and the incident as a whole revealing. Here is video of the impressively precise strike that leveled the office building.
The New York Post now returns to that incident in the editorial “If AP really didn’t know it shared space with Hamas, why trust its reporting?” Well, we don’t trust the AP’s reporting. We haven’t trusted it for a long time. This is nevertheless a good time to revisit the 2021 incident, as the Post does:
If it’s true that AP was so unaware — and the evidence suggests it’s unlikely — how can anyone trust its reporting in the region?
The Israeli military ordered the 12-story al-Jalaa Tower, which hosts AP and Al Jazeera offices, evacuated an hour before the strike, saying it was being used by Hamas military intelligence. For a week, tensions between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that controls Gaza, have been at their highest since their 2014 conflict, with Hamas raining thousands of rockets into residential areas of the Jewish state.
Israel later shared some intelligence with the United States. “We showed them the smoking gun proving Hamas worked out of that building,” a source close to Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi told the Jerusalem Post. “I understand they found the explanation satisfactory.”
Of course, we’ve known for years that, as the Israel Defense Forces put it, Hamas “intentionally locates its military assets in the hearts of civil populations,” even “hiding behind” media outlets and “using them as human shields.”
And AP knew that well, according to one account. “When Hamas’ leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby — and the AP wouldn’t report it,” says a 2014 Atlantic piece by Matti Friedman. Hamas militants would regularly “burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff — and the AP wouldn’t report it.”
It seems that what AP doesn’t know — and doesn’t report — always favors Hamas over those the group terrorizes.
Some things never change.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.