People inspect the area of Al-Ahli hospital where Palestinians were killed in a blast that Western intelligence has blamed on an errant Palestinian rocket meant for Israel, in Gaza City, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ahmed Zakot

The New York Times has published an “editors’ note” acknowledging that editors “should have taken more care” with “initial” and “early” coverage of an explosion in a parking lot near a Gaza hospital last week.

The “editors’ note” whitewashes the Times‘ carelessness by falsely claiming that it was immediately rectified. “Within two hours, the headline and other text at the top of the website reflected the scope of the explosion and the dispute over responsibility,” the Times editors’ note boasts with the Times’ typical combination of arrogance and inaccuracy.

That ignores how the New York Times published the claim atop a misleading photograph of a bombed building that wasn’t the hospital. It also ignores that the print newspaper carried a banner headline of “Blast Kills Hundreds at Gaza Hospital; Palestinians and Israelis Blame Each Other Ahead of Biden’s Arrival.”

As late as Saturday — not “two hours” after the blast, but fully four days later — my home-delivered print New York Times, on page A6, carried a news article with this paragraph: “The analysis does not yet show the damage to the Ahli Arab Hospital campus in Gaza City, where hundreds of people were killed in an explosion on Tuesday evening that Israeli officials and Palestinian fighters each blamed on the other.”

That article states as fact the unverified and unattributed claim that “hundreds of people were killed,” and it treats and passes along as interchangeable and equally credible the claims by Hamas terrorists and Israeli government officials. Israel had already published evidence showing the hospital explosion was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket meant for the Jewish state, not an Israeli air strike targeting terrorists in Gaza. And US and other Western intelligence had already publicly backed that account — as well as the death toll being hundreds of people lower than Hamas initially claimed.

Even on Monday — the same day it published the editors’ note — the Times was continuing to pass along unverified claims by Hamas terrorists about Gaza death tolls. One screenshotted sentence from the Times said, “The Gaza health ministry said Monday that Israeli airstrikes had killed at least 426 people ‘in the past hours,’ bringing the death toll to more than 5,000 since Oct. 7, when Israel began launching airstrikes in retaliation for an attack by the Hamas militant group that killed 1,400 people.”

The Times, even after the editors’ note, has strange confidence in the almost superhuman ability of the Gaza health ministry — which is controlled by Hamas — to precisely count death tolls amid a territory that the Times elsewhere tells us has been lacking electricity, food, and water owing to an Israeli siege. (Occasionally the Times mentions Gaza shares a border with Egypt, not just Israel.)

Somehow we’re supposed to believe that these starving and thirsty Gazans, without electricity, are able to calculate immediately and communicate precisely accurate death tolls? Given the record of Hamas inflating the death tolls and publishing them with speed and accuracy that casts doubt on their veracity, why are such counts an ongoing staple of Times news coverage?

Nor does the Times editors’ note address the fact that a Times stringer has been participating in the paper’s coverage who was recently re-hired after being dropped for a history of pro-Hitler social media posts.

The Times editors’ note, with its phony claim that the problem was all fixed in a couple of hours, is as preposterously false as a Hamas health ministry hospital death toll.

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