The Times gets lost in a very small tunnel

INDIGNITY VOL. 4, NO. 29

THE WORST THING WE READ™

This satellite image showing, according to the U.S. State Department, an Iraqi chemical ammunition depot at Taji, Iraq before and after Iraqi scientists moved evidence of chemical production, was released by the U.S. Department of State on February 5, 2003 at the United Nations Security Council in New York City. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented this audiotape to the United Nations Security Council as evidence that Iraq was hiding material from the U.N. weapons inspectors. (Photo by U.S. Department of State/Getty Images)

Israel Can't Dig Up a Reason for Attacking Al-Shifa Hospital 

IN THE MIDDLE of a war, with disinformation and explosives flying, it can be nearly impossible to establish the undisputed truth. Identifying an obvious falsehood, though, can be a lot easier. In October, the Israel Defense Forces declared that there was an underground complex below Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, and that it was "the center for Hamas terrorism in Gaza." On that basis, Israeli forces besieged and then overran the hospital in November, destroying a major medical center and causing suffering and death among civilians, including the deaths of premature babies. 

Al-Shifa Hospital, it has since become clear, was not the center for Hamas terrorism in Gaza. 

What to do with this information? The IDF has responded, through the intervening weeks and months, by trying to supply other, loosely related information about the hospital complex. This morning's New York Times, drawing on Israeli military and intelligence sources, revisited Al-Shifa under the headline "How a Tunnel Under a Hospital May Have Been Used by Hamas." Under four reporters' bylines, accompanied by a 3-D rendering of a simple bending tube, the Times wrote: 

Al-Shifa Hospital has taken on particular significance because it is Gaza’s largest medical facility, and because of Israel’s high-profile claims that Hamas leaders operated a command-and-control center beneath it. Hamas and the hospital’s staff, meanwhile, insisted it was only a medical center.

Al-Shifa’s value as a military target was not immediately clear in the days after the Nov. 15 raid, even after the Israeli military released the tunnel video that was used to create the 3-D model seen here.

But evidence examined by The New York Times suggests Hamas used the hospital for cover, stored weapons inside it and maintained a hardened tunnel beneath the complex that was supplied with water, power and air-conditioning.

The word "But," as a transition between those last two paragraphs, conveyed that the "evidence examined by the New York Times" had helped establish the hospital's "value as a military target." It hadn't. Or if it had, that value was approximately zero.