Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at misleading coverage of the Israeli mission to rescue four hostages in Gaza and cover more media misses.
Media Shows Anti-Israel Bias in Reports on Hostage Recovery Mission
After 246 days in Hamas captivity, four Israeli hostages finally returned home from Gaza on Saturday thanks to a “daring operation in the light of day,” as an IDF spokesman put it, by Israeli security forces.
Among the hostages rescued from central Nuseirat was Noa Argamani, whose kidnapping was captured on camera and shared widely online. A ten-second clip of the kidnapping showed Argamani screaming as she was taken away on the back of a motorcycle.
The hostages, who were kidnapped from a music festival in Israel during the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks and held hostage for eight months, were identified as Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 21, Andrei Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 40.
Just seven hostages have been rescued alive since the start of the Hamas–Israel War.
Israelis rejoiced at the news. Photos circulated online showed the hostages joyfully reuniting with their families. But the Washington Post struck a different tone in its coverage of the rescue: “More than 200 Palestinians killed in Israeli hostage raid in Gaza.”
That figure comes from two hospitals in the area, al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital and al-Awda Hospital — and the Post fails to mention that the two hospitals, like the Gaza Health Ministry, are under Hamas control.
Meanwhile, the IDF counted a much lower death toll. “We know about under 100 [Palestinian] casualties. I don’t know how many of them are terrorists,” IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters.
As the Associated Press previously reported, the proportion of Palestinian women and children being killed in the Israel–Hamas war appears to have “declined sharply” — despite what the Gaza Health Ministry has reported.
The drop is “definitely due to a change in the way the IDF is acting right now,” Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at the Washington Institute for Near East policy, told the AP.
Abraham Wyner, a statistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, also previously fact-checked the Gaza Health Ministry’s figures, finding that the casualty numbers produced by Hamas have not been independently verified and show clear signs of manipulation. The daily casualty figures released by the terror group could not occur naturally, nor could their breakdowns of the number of women and children killed and injured each day, Wyner said.
The agency’s own numbers give this away: The regularity in the day-to-day death tolls is “almost surely not real,” Wyner explains.
Nonetheless, WaPo calls the mission a “brazen operation” that “left unimaginable devastation in its wake.”
“Residential blocks were destroyed, tanks menaced the streets and grievously wounded Palestinians, some without limbs, writhed in pain on the dusty roads of the camp’s central market, according to videos and images of the raid. Many of them never reached local hospitals, health officials said. But even then, medical facilities decimated by the war often have little ability to treat injured patients,” the paper reports.
Interestingly, the paper took a slightly different approach to headline writing in its print edition: “Israel Rescues Four Hostages in Bloody Raid.”
Meanwhile, the Palestine Chronicle reported that Gaza-based contributor Abdallah Aljamal “was one of the 210 Palestinians killed in the Nuseirat massacre on Saturday.”
What the outlet fails to report, however, is that he was housing three of the Israeli hostages in his home on behalf of Hamas, all while writing for the U.S.-based 501(c)3 non-profit, which counts Noam Chomsky among its board members.
Ramy Abdu, the founder and chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, similarly painted Aljamal as an innocent civilian caught in the crossfire.
“In an initial testimony documenting the killings committed by the Israeli army in the Nuseirat camp today, the @EuroMedHR reported that the Israeli army used a ladder to enter the home of Dr. Ahmed Al-Jamal,” Abdu wrote in a post on X. “The army immediately executed 36-year-old Fatima Al-Jamal upon encountering her on the staircase. The forces then stormed the house and executed her husband, journalist Abdullah Al-Jamal, 36, and his father, Dr. Ahmed, 74, in front of his grandchildren.”
And over on the BBC, anchor Helena Humphrey apparently couldn’t understand why Israel didn’t warn Gazans ahead of the rescue mission.
In an exchange that quickly went viral online, Humphrey asked former IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus, “Would there have been a warning to those civilians [Gazans] for them to get out on time?”
“Of course, we can’t anticipate Israel to be warning ahead of a raid to extract or to save hostages because then what the terrorists would do is to kill the hostages, and that would defeat the purpose,” Conricus replied.
As the Times of Israel reported, the hostages were held in two multistory buildings about 200 meters apart; Israeli forces entered both buildings simultaneously to ensure Hamas could not murder the hostages in other building after identifying the rescue operation at the opposite location.
Argamani was held separately from the other three hostages. While her rescue was “relatively smooth,” according to Israeli military officials, a “major gun battle” erupted at the Aljamal home where Meir Jan, Kozlov, and Ziv were held.
Yamam officer chief inspector Arnon Zmora, the commander of the rescue team at the second building, was fatally wounded by Hamas fire.
Afterward, the vehicle carrying Zmora and the three hostages came under fire, leading other forces to carry out a rescue mission to bring them safely to a makeshift helipad, where they were then airlifted to Tel Hashomer Hospital in central Israel.
As rescue forces faced a “massive amount of gunfire and RPG fire,” according to the report, ground troops and the Israeli Air Force carried out major strikes in the area in an effort to protect the rescue forces and the hostages, the IDF said.
The Washington Post and the BBC weren’t the only ones that embarrassed themselves in their coverage of the rescue.
CNN guest Ian Bremmer called out the network’s news chyron for falsely labeling the hostage rescue mission as a “hostage release,” suggesting that Hamas had willingly chosen to release the hostages.
“Disappointed to see @cnn chyron of hostage “release” during my interview today when hamas did no such thing,” Bremmer wrote Saturday in a post on X.
Bremmer said the chyron was “quickly corrected on air” by CNN anchor Victor Blackwell but called the mistake, which has been repeated by UN officials, “maddening.”
Ariel Gold, the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the former national co-director of CODEPINK, suggested if you are “celebrating the release of 4 Israeli Jews but not simultaneously horrified at the killing of 210 (and counting) Palestinians, many of them children, killed in the process, you just might be a racist.”
And Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, accused Israel of using the hostages “to legitimise killing, injuring, maiming, starving and traumatising Palestinians in Gaza. And while intensifying violence against Palestinians in the rest of the occupied territory and Israel.”
Headline Fail of the Week
CNN can find a racial angle in anything, apparently. This week, its racial lens came for Red Lobster, as the restaurant chain closed around 100 U.S. restaurants: “The forgotten racial history of Red Lobster.”
“Red Lobster’s decline is particularly a loss for many Black diners, who formed a loyal base for the brand and still account for a higher share of customers than other major casual chain restaurants, according to historians, customers, and former Red Lobster executives,” CNN reports.
“In a 2015 presentation to investors, Red Lobster said 16 percent of customers were Black, two percentage points higher than the Black share of the US population,” it adds.
Media Misses