When a hospital in the Gaza Strip blew up on Tuesday night, many of the U.S. and international news media uncritically reported Hamas terrorists’ claims of an Israeli massacre. The White House and Israel have since refuted that account, citing imagery, intercepts, and open-source information.

As President Joe Biden put it in Tel Aviv during a Wednesday visit to support Israel’s war effort against Hamas: “Based on the information we’ve seen to date, [the deadly explosion] appears the result of an errant rocket fired by a terrorist group in Gaza.”

The journalistic fiasco was an example of the media’s tendency to adopt the Palestinians’ narrative about the conflict with Israel, even when that narrative is unsupported by the facts. In this case, the media bias had geopolitical consequences: U.S. Democratic lawmakers and Arab leaders condemned Israel for the bombing, Jordan canceled a planned summit with Biden, and riots broke out in the West Bank and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Immediately after the hospital blast, which occurred around 7:30 p.m. local time, news outlets reported that Israel has bombed the facility, killing hundreds of Palestinians. The reports generally referred to their source—the Hamas terrorist group that governs Gaza—as “Palestinian officials” or “health authorities.”

Journalists on X also promoted Hamas’s version of events without proof. Then, as evidence began to emerge suggesting that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Hamas affiliate in Gaza, bombed the hospital, many of those same journalists fought to prevent the media coverage from shifting.

Washington Post reporter Evan Hill, Post columnist Karen Attiah, and Los Angeles Times reporter Adam Elmahrek were among those who last week nitpicked evidence that Hamas gunmen beheaded the Israeli babies they killed in the Oct. 7 terrorist attack that sparked the Gaza war.

The media gradually backtracked on blaming Israel for the hospital explosion—albeit without admitting they were wrong in the first place.

And even some of Israel’s critics on X posted updates.

Still, the media were not deterred from relying on Hamas for information. On Thursday, they continued to cite the terrorist group’s improbable claims about the numbers of dead and injured. NBC News on Wednesday broadcast a report from a Gazan journalist who said that “according to the experts,” 900 people were killed in the hospital blast, and only “the Israeli occupation” could be responsible for such a large death toll.

The post WATCH: Here Are the Media Outlets That Uncritically Regurgitated Hamas Propaganda appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.