Ahmad Kahalot, a senior Hamas member and director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza, speaking to Israeli interrogators. Photo: Screenshot

Of all the many egregious embarrassments of the New York Times in its flawed coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, hospitals consistently have been at the forefront.

First the Times fell for a Hamas propaganda stunt blaming Israel for killing hundreds at Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. It subsequently emerged that the damage was from a misfired terrorist missile aimed at Israel. The Times had to publish an editors’ note confessing that editors “should have taken more care.”

Then the Times spent weeks obsessing again and again on the front page about another Gaza City hospital, Shifa Hospital, ritualistically including lines about how “Hamas denies operating within the hospital or under it, as does the hospital director, Mohammad Abu Salmiya.” With that hospital, too, the Times put itself to shame. It never really explained to readers why it passed along the Hamas denials or those of the hospital officials, even though everyone knew they were lying.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it found that one of the hostages, 19-year-old Noa Marciano, had been murdered by Hamas terrorists inside the Shifa hospital. It published video of armed terrorists hustling Nepalese and Thai civilian hostages into the hospital. It found a terrorist tunnel with a blast-proof door and a firing hole. It found a booby-trapped vehicle full of weapons. It found Hamas weapons and uniforms hidden inside the hospital’s MRI area, where security cameras had been covered up.

Now the Times has egg on its face for coverage of a third Gaza hospital, Kamal Adwan Hospital. Yet again, the Times gullibly, or complicitly, has advanced the false Hamas narrative about cruel Israel targeting innocent doctors and patients.

Under the headline, “Israeli forces raid another hospital and detail doctors, Gaza’s health ministry says,” the Times reported, “Israeli forces rounded up civilians and medical staff in the hospital’s courtyard, and five people were injured by gunfire, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run enclave. They also interrogated medical personnel under duress, taking some to an unknown location, it said.”

The Times dispatch, by a reporter named Anushka Patil who was not in Gaza, went on as basically a press release accusing Israel of various atrocities. “Twelve children at the hospital were on life support equipment, raising fears about their survival, the Gaza health ministry said … Like many medical facilities in the enclave, it was struggling to function under severe shortages of medicine, water, food, and fuel even before it was surrounded by Israeli forces in recent days,” the Times reported. “Surgeries at the hospital were already being performed by cellphone flashlight and without anesthesia, the director of the pediatric ward, Dr. Hussam Abu Safyia, told the New York Times last month.”

As it did with coverage of the other hospitals, the Times piled on with more coverage the next day, this time from Matthew Mpoke Bigg, another Times reporter who was not in Gaza. He recycled UN attacks on Israel: “Kamal Adwan Hospital had been under siege by Israeli forces for several days, according to the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who said earlier this week that he was ‘extremely worried’ about Israeli operations there,” the second Times article said. “The United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a report on Thursday that Israeli forces, accompanied by tanks, had raided the hospital for a second successive day ‘with reports of mass arrests and ill treatment of people who they have detained,’ including beatings.”

None of the Times articles said, by the way, who Kamal Adwan was. He was a PLO terrorist who was involved in plotting the kidnapping and murder of the 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It seems like a strange person to name a hospital after.

The Times piled on some more with yet a third story about Kamal Adwan Hospital, this one headlined, “Israeli forces withdraw after besieging Gaza hospital, leaving behind bodies and destruction.” Hamas claims were passed along by the Times at face value: “The Palestinian health ministry said that during the Israeli siege, 12 premature babies had been trapped inside the incubators without access to milk or life support.” Israeli claims, in contrast, were given super-skeptical treatment by the Times, including “scare quotes”: “a statement by the Israel military … that hospital workers ‘confessed’ that incubators for premature babies were being used to store weapons. The Israeli military’s claims could not be independently verified.”

A video released by the Israeli government this week showed the director of the hospital, Ahmad al-Kahlout, or Abu Hassan, acknowledging that he’s the equivalent of a brigadier general in Hamas and that 16 hospital officials — doctors, nurses, clerks — have Hamas military roles. Hamas used the hospital and an ambulance as a hiding place for a kidnapped Israeli soldier, according to the video. The Israeli military also issued a video showing that Hamas used incubators in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of the hospital to hide weapons. The New York Times so far does not appear to have shared news of either video with its readers.

An honest newspaper would make that the headline — “Hamas Terrorists Used Hospital as Hiding Place.” Too much of the New York Times coverage of this war is not honest, however. It is Hamas hype. So instead of honest headlines, Times readers get headlines about “Israeli forces … besieging Gaza hospital, leaving behind bodies and destruction.” The ones destroying Gaza are the Hamas terrorists using hospitals as hiding places. The New York Times is serving as the terrorists’ propagandists.

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.