Since October 7, American outlets have rushed to promote Hamas claims. And they keep getting it wrong.
Since the start of the conflict in Gaza, major media outlets have been forced to issue corrections after jumping to report Hamas’s version of events.
While the Israel–Hamas War has created a difficult information environment given the dearth of reliable on-the-ground reporting, America’s leading newspapers, broadcasters, and cable news outlets have consistently made errors that cut in the same direction, elevating Hamas’s claims about a given attack over the word of Israel.
The scenario played out just last week, when the Washington Post and other outlets were forced to correct their stories after they cited Hamas officials claiming Israeli troops killed more than 30 civilians near an aid site in Gaza.
“Israeli troops kill over 30 near U.S. aid site in Gaza, health officials say,” the outlet’s original headline read. It was later corrected to read, “More than 30 killed by gunfire near U.S. aid site in Gaza.”
The updates occurred without the outlet appending an editor’s note to the story.
Other outlets, including CNN, CBS, and ABC also uncritically amplified Hamas’s claims.
According to officials from the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, at least 31 people were killed and 170 wounded on Sunday when Israeli forces opened fire on civilians massing near an aid site run by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Israel immediately denied it was behind the attack and released drone footage of unidentified masked men shooting unarmed civilians near the aid center.
“Findings from an initial inquiry indicate that the IDF did not fire at civilians while they were near or within the humanitarian aid distribution site and that reports to this effect are false,” the IDF said in a statement.
“The IDF is cooperating with the GHF and international aid organizations in order to enable the distribution of aid to the Gazan residents — and not to Hamas.”
The IDF did acknowledge firing warning shots in an effort to maintain order at the aid site, but says no one was hit.
Curiously, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the organization running the distribution center, insists nothing happened at all, releasing a statement Sunday saying that food had been “distributed today without incident.”
“We are aware of rumors being actively fomented by Hamas suggesting deaths and injuries today. They are untrue and fabricated,” the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said.
In what may have been a repeat attack, Hamas gunmen opened fire on a group of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation workers Wednesday night, killing five, the foundation said.
The Gaza aid story was just one of many corrections — both stealth and overt — made by media outlets since the start of the conflict. In fact, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis has prompted 351 corrections in leading media outlets around the world from just January to the end of May.
Al-Ahli Arab Hospital Blast
Perhaps the most memorable correction outlets were forced to make since the start of the war was regarding the coverage of an explosion outside a Gaza hospital, al-Ahli Arab hospital. The New York Times and other outlets were quick to run with the Hamas-backed Gaza Health Ministry’s claims that the blast was caused by an Israeli air strike that killed hundreds.
The New York Times published an editor’s note acknowledging that its editors “should have taken more care with the initial presentation” of the story after then-President Biden made clear that Israel was not to blame for the blast, which U.S. officials said killed between 100 and 300 people. The Israel Defense Forces have said the explosion was caused by a rocket misfire launched by Islamic Jihad, a conclusion that’s since been confirmed by video analyses conducted by the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN.
No, NPR, Israel Never ‘Targeted’ Civilians
Israeli forces have been falsely accused of targeting or injuring civilians several times throughout the conflict, including in October 2024 when NPR was forced to correct a headline that claimed Israeli strikes on Hezbollah “targeted” civilians.
“Some Lebanese people express anger at Hezbollah as Israel strikes at civilian targets,” the original headline read.
“Israel makes clear that its strikes are on military targets, even if those are embedded in civilian infrastructure,” CAMERA wrote at the time. “We reminded the editors, too, that it’s not only Israel making such a claim, but also the Lebanese civilians heard on NPR decrying that Hezbollah hides weapons in civilian communities.”
After CAMERA reached out to NPR, the outlet updated its headline to read: “Lebanese trapped in a war not of their own making express anger at Israel and Hezbollah.”
ABC Claimed Israel Violated Cease-Fire Before It Even Took Effect
The corrections began nearly as soon as the conflict did.
In November 2023, ABC corrected a piece that wrongly suggested Israel was in violation of a cease-fire agreement that had not yet begun.
“IDF continues to bombard Gaza despite reaching deal on truce, hostages,” a headline read.
“Despite reaching an agreement with Hamas on a temporary cease-fire in exchange for the release of dozens of hostages, the Israeli military continued to bombard the Gaza Strip on Wednesday morning,” the story claimed.
But at the time of ABC’s writing, the cease-fire was not set to begin until the following day.
The story also acknowledged lower down that, “Meanwhile, rockets launched by militants continued to be fired toward Israel on Wednesday.”
The headline, after outreach from CAMERA, was later amended to read, “Hostilities continue before deal on hostages, temporary truce goes into effect.”
ABC’s Faulty Timeline
Meanwhile, ABC News crafted a timeline early on in the conflict that included several errors, including incorrect information about the impact of Hamas rockets.
The timeline said, “Hamas claims at least 5,000 rockets were fired, all landing in southern and central Israel.”
However, Israel’s Iron Dome intercepted most of the rockets Hamas fired toward southern and central Israel. Furthermore, CAMERA noted the claim “fails to reflect that a significant percent of rockets that it fired malfunctioned and landed in the Gaza Strip, killing Palestinian civilians there.”
CNN Shares False Info on 2,000-Pound Bombs
In December 2023, a CNN article incorrectly claimed that the 2,000-pound bombs that Israel had used in Gaza were “four times heavier than the largest bombs in the United States dropped on ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, during the war against the extremist group there.” The article further claimed “the US dropped a 2,000-pound bomb only once during its fight against ISIS — the most recent Western war on a militant group in the Middle East. It fell on the so-called caliphate’s self-declared capital of Raqqa in Syria.”
But later, on CNN’s own The Lead with Jake Tapper, military expert John Spencer said that reporting is “not factual” and “has led to some type of vilification of a very commonly used tool, like the 2,000 pound bomb, that we did use in Mosul. And we used tens of thousands in Iraq, to include in the invasion that I took part in where we dropped over 5,000, four on one building where we thought Saddam might be staying and he wasn’t, in urban areas.”
“What most people don’t report on the 2,000 pound bomb is that one of the reasons you need a bigger bomb is to penetrate the ground to an enemy who is in bunkers and tunnels, which is very well known of where Hamas has protected itself underneath its civilians,” he added.
The article was later sort of corrected and now says that 2,000-pound bombs “are four times heavier than the vast majority of the largest bombs the United States dropped on ISIS during the war against the extremist group in Syria and Iraq.”
“Clarification: A previous version of this story stated that only one 2,000-pound bomb had been used by the US in the war on ISIS. This has been corrected.”
Israel Did Not Cut Electricity to a Wastewater Treatment Plant
And just this past March, the New York Times was forced to issue a correction after it incorrectly reported that Israel’s decision to cut electricity to the Gaza Strip impacted a wastewater treatment plant, when in fact, the only facility that was impacted was a desalination plant.
“The move, which will mainly affect a single wastewater treatment plant, appeared intended to put pressure on Hamas,” a subheading read.
The Times was forced to issue a correction after CAMERA pointed out the difference.
“A correction was made on March 14, 2025: An earlier version of this article, relying on information from a source at the Israeli electric company, misstated the type of service affected by the electricity shut-off in Gaza. It was a desalination plant, not a wastewater treatment plant.”
AP Inflates Civilian Death Toll in Gaza
Last August, the Associated Press was forced to issue a correction, which appeared in more than 80 media outlets, after it incorrectly reported that the civilian death toll in the Gaza Strip exceeded 40,000. CAMERA prompted the correction, noting to AP editors that “not even Hamas has alleged that more than 40,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been killed in the war,” as the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza reported 40,000 total deaths among Gaza’s residents, a figure that does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. Israeli estimates at the time indicated that 17,000 of those killed were Hamas combatants.
The AP revised its story to read: “More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the territory’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry says, but how many are civilians is unknown. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its count. Israel says it has killed more than 17,000 militants in the war.”
BBC Documentary Profiles Son of a Hamas Member
And just this past February the BBC removed its documentary on the war in Gaza from its online streaming service, after an investigative journalist found the film unwittingly profiled the son of a Hamas member.
The controversy arose after investigative journalist David Collier found the 13-year-old subject of the BBC’s new film, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, was in fact the son of Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture.
The BBC defended the concept behind the project, which was to feature “important stories we think should be told — those of the experiences of children in Gaza,” but said it would remove the film from its iPlayer while it conducts an investigation.
Collier connected the dots through Facebook searches, which the BBC no doubt had the ability — but apparently not the desire — to do.
It was far from the outlet’s first misstep; in fact, the outlet’s Arabic outfit was forced to correct articles on average every 48 hours during the height of the conflict, including copy that referred to Hamas as the “resistance.”
It also shared a Hamas propaganda line that Gaza had become a “polio epidemic zone” and claimed 69 “journalists” had been killed in the conflict, though evidence from their social-media posts suggested 55 of those killed either supported Hamas or worked for the terror group.