Last week I took a look at the Wall Street Journal’s principal story on the October 18 hospital shot heard ’round the world: “Blast at Gaza Hospital Kills More Than 500, Palestinian Officials Say.” The original headline on the Journal’s online version of the story asserted: “Israeli Airstrike on Gaza Hospital Kills More Than 500, Palestinian Officials Say.”
Israel’s responsibility for the “shot” constituted the implicit premise of the story, even as cleaned up. Clayton Fox included the Journal’s performance in the dishonor roll of his Tablet column column “Anatomy of a blood libel.” Fox quotes from the investigation conducted by independent journalist Davis Zweig regarding the more than 500 people allegedly killed:
“In all, I contacted a dozen reporters or communications departments at news outlets, including the Times, the AP, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, The Guardian, and Al Jazeera,” Zweig writes of his efforts to get to the bottom of how the false death statistic was spread. “Not one reporter from any of these outlets replied to my queries. This was their reporting, on perhaps the most contentious news story in the world at the moment. And none of them would respond with the source behind what they had written.”
Seeking a little clean up on aisle 500, the Journal published a retrospective on October 19 under the headline “What We Know About the Gaza Hospital Blast.” According to the Journal, we don’t know much. We are gripped by metaphysical uncertainty. We are left in the land of he said/she said.
I limited my comments on the story to the opening paragraphs of the printed version that ran on page one. With three reporters on the byline and six more credited by name for contributing to the article, I found the story to be pitifully wanting.
Turning from page one of the printed story to its continuation on page A9, one found this photograph by Abed Khaled/Associated Press covering the top seven of the ten inches above the fold.
The cutline on the photo in the Journal stated: “Wounded Palestinians huddled at Al Shifa Hospital on Tuesday. The medical center, already overflowing, was receiving casualties from the deadly strike on Al-Ahi Arab Hospital.” The Journal might have added that Hamas buries its Gaza headquarters underneath the hospital — according to Israeli authorities, who have pretty good intelligence about such matters.
I doubt the legitimacy of the photograph that the Journal ran. Again, the implicit premise of the photograph was the suffering inflicted by the IDF on innocent Palestinians. This is a key component of the information war conducted by Hamas. Referring to the “shot” as “the deadly strike on Al-Ahi Arab Hospital,” the cutline only made sense if Israel was responsible. And by the way, the “deadly strike” was not on the hospital, but rather on the hospital parking lot.
Is Abed Khaled’s photograph for real? It looks beautifully composed, like the Madonna with the baby Jesus in medieval iconography. The mother is grimacing over the child’s apparent injury, but the kid is looking up quizzically at the mother. Why are you wailing, mommy?
It put me in mind of the AP and Reuters photographers who dutifully passed on the staged post-9/11 photographs of Yasser Arafat at Al-Shifa Hospital that I wrote about in “He didn’t give at the office.” Like those photographers, Abed works in Gaza on the sufferance of the Gaza authorities, i.e., in this case, Hamas. If Hamas didn’t like what he was putting out, including the assertions of fact that accompany his photographs, he wouldn’t be working in Gaza for long. I have been unable to find public information about Abed’s personal or professional background, but he seems to specialize in such composed photos from Gaza.
In this case, however the the Associated Press published a “fact check” by Philip Marcelo finding a specific attack on the photo to be false: “Old story about the Gaza film industry misrepresented as proof Palestinian war victims are ‘crisis actors.'” I turned to Marcelo’s “fact check” hoping to find something about Abed’s bona fides or the legitimacy of the photo as verified by the AP. However, the AP “fact check” lacks a single fact defending the legitimacy of the photo per se.
More could be said, but I leave it at this. I infer that the Khaled photo featured in the Journal’s page-one story of October 18 represents a return to Pallywood.