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

A document seized in Gaza and reported by Israel’s Kan public broadcaster exposes a reality that sharply contradicts much of the global coverage of the Israel-Hamas war: Palestinian civilians have long been killed by Palestinian rockets and terrorist leaders knew it, discussed it, and accepted it.

The document records a meeting between Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials held before Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and the war that followed. In it, Hamas representatives confront Islamic Jihad leaders over a deadly and recurring problem: rockets misfiring and landing inside Gaza, killing civilians.

“Your rockets are falling on people’s homes, and this is a recurring issue,” a Hamas official is quoted as saying.

The response from Islamic Jihad is even more damning. “We are at war,” a senior representative of the terrorist group replies. “Even if a thousand people are killed by friendly fire, that is the price of war.”

This is not a battlefield mishap acknowledged after the fact. It is an explicit, pre-war admission that Palestinian terrorist groups were aware their weapons routinely killed civilians and that they viewed those deaths as acceptable.

The document also records Islamic Jihad officials admitting that they knew their rockets were defective. According to the report, the weapons were manufactured using blueprints supplied by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In other words, unreliable rockets were knowingly produced, launched from densely populated areas, and expected to fall short.

Image of the seized document, as presented by Kan Public Broadcaster

This matters because it directly undermines a central assumption that has dominated coverage of Gaza for years and intensified after Oct. 7: that civilian casualties are almost entirely the result of Israeli fire.

Kan’s report does not quantify how many Gazans have been killed by Palestinian rockets. But it does establish something journalists have consistently avoided confronting: terrorist groups themselves acknowledge that their own fire kills civilians and that this has been happening for years.

That reality burst briefly into view 10 days after the war began, when a PIJ rocket exploded in the courtyard of a Gaza hospital, killing hundreds of Palestinians. Israel was immediately blamed across much of the international media. Only later did evidence emerge that the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket.

This newly revealed document shows that the incident was not an anomaly. It was a known risk discussed internally long before Oct. 7.

So, why has this revelation barely registered outside Israel?

Journalists often justify their reliance on casualty figures and on the fog of war. But here, there is no ambiguity. This is a primary source document describing internal discussions between terrorist groups, criticizing each other for weapons failures and explicitly accepting civilian deaths as collateral.

If such a document emerged showing Israeli officials dismissing civilian deaths as “the price of war,” it would dominate headlines worldwide. When terrorist groups say it among themselves, it is met with silence.

This selective attention has consequences. Media outlets routinely report Gaza casualties without asking how many were caused by Palestinian fire. They rarely revisit earlier claims when new evidence emerges. And they almost never scrutinize the conduct of terrorist groups with the same intensity they apply to Israel.

The Kan report exposes not just the recklessness of Palestinian terrorist organizations but the media’s unwillingness to reckon with it. By ignoring evidence that complicates a simplified narrative, journalists deprive audiences of essential context and accountability.

This document does not absolve Israel of scrutiny. But it does demand that journalists stop treating Palestinian armed groups as passive actors whose actions are irrelevant to civilian harm.

Terrorists killing their own civilians is not a footnote. It is a central fact of this conflict. The question is no longer whether the evidence exists.

It is why so many in the media choose not to report it.