How many times are we going to do this? That was my immediate reaction when American news outlets began to report that an Israeli airstrike had demolished an Orthodox church in Gaza. 

Just days earlier, one of the biggest press failures in modern history occurred as nearly every mainstream news outlet in the country rushed to take the word of Hamas officials about a hospital supposedly being bombed. Within 12 hours, essentially everything that had been reported had been debunked. The hospital was not struck, the reported death toll was completely improbable, and it turned out to be a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short, not an IAF bombing. 

CNN, The Washington Post, NBC News, The New York Times, MSNBC, and a litany of other outlets all suffered major embarrassment, leaving many to ask if any lessons would be learned. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that way because the same news organizations all rushed to bolster another Hamas propaganda operation.

Here was how the Post and other press outlets reported the story.

Just as with the misreported hospital parking lot explosion, the sun coming up provided far more context to what actually happened. Namely, that the church itself was not even hit. Rather, it suffered minor damage due to an airstrike on a Hamas command center located in a building next door. 

Palestinian authorities, who have long made up death tolls out of whole cloth for propaganda reasons, claimed that 50-150 died in the bombing. While there is no official count to report, once again, the speed at which those claims were made makes them completely improbable. 

This is not the first time that Hamas has falsely claimed a historic church was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike during the current conflict. Shortly after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, killing 1,400 people and taking hundreds hostage, a claim was spread that a medieval-era church in Gaza was bombed. That simply didn't happen. 

How long are we expected to assume these instances of propaganda being reported as hard news are all just mistakes? That's a question plenty of people are going to be asking at this point.