User:Scharb/sandbox

Al Ahli hospital blast coverage:

All POVs: Israeli airstrike Palestinian misfired rocket Rocket in AJ video originated in Israel Rocket in AJ video unrelated to blast Israeli artillery/mortar Interception AJ video unrelated Must be other rocket, unseen on video Hamas withholding evidence Hamas made false claims IDF made false claims

Timeline: 6:59 explosion 7:30 Hamas blames Israel Media runs with Hamas' story 12:39 Israel releases report

Source list:

2023.10.17 JTA: Israeli military says Palestinian rocket struck Gaza hospital where hundreds were reportedly killed

2023.10.17 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/world/middleeast/the-gaza-hospital-where-hundreds-were-reported-killed-is-a-mainstay-for-palestinians.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/world/middleeast/islamic-jihad-gaza-hospital-israel.html "In the past, rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups, including Islamic Jihad, have occasionally malfunctioned and hit civilian neighborhoods."

https://www.newsweek.com/devastating-gaza-hospital-blastwhat-we-know-1835576

BBC retraction: 23/10/2023 amended with apology https://www.bbc.co.uk/helpandfeedback/corrections_clarifications/archive-2023 We have reviewed our coverage of the immediate aftermath of an explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday night. During this our correspondent was giving instant analysis on the ground from Jerusalem in what was a confusing and difficult story. The programme repeatedly made it clear that it had yet to verify who was behind the blast, including in the questioning by the presenter. The correspondent said that the Israelis had been contacted and were investigating, adding “It’s hard to see what else this could be really given the size of the explosion other than an Israeli air strike or several air strikes”. He then explained that in his experience as a reporter in Gaza that he had never seen explosions of this scale caused by rockets being fired out of the territory. He again stressed that the pictures had yet to be verified. We accept that even in this fast-moving situation it was wrong to speculate in this way about the possible causes and we apologise for this, although he did not at any point report that it was an Israeli strike. This doesn’t represent the entirety of the BBC’s output and anyone watching, listening to or reading our coverage can see we have set out both sides’ competing claims about the explosion, clearly showing who is saying them, and what we do or don’t know.

2023.10.18:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/world/middleeast/biden-israel-gaza-hospital.html

2023.10.19

2023.10.23 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/23/podcasts/headlines-gaza-hospital-coverage.html

"On Oct. 17, The New York Times published news of an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City, leading its coverage with claims by Hamas government officials that an Israeli airstrike was the cause and that hundreds of people were dead or injured. The report included a large headline at the top of The Times’s website." "The Times’s initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials, and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast. However, the early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified. The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was." "Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/23/pageoneplus/editors-note-gaza-hospital-coverage.html

2023.10.23

TOI: "The following morning, footage of the site quickly led many observers to note that the lack of a large crater and the lack of structural damage to nearby buildings made it highly unlikely it had been an airstrike."

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/bbc-admits-mistakes-in-coverage-of-gaza-hospital-blast-still-wont-call-hamas-terrorists/

2023.10.24: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/us/politics/intel-rocket-gaza-hospital-blast.html

"A widely-cited missile video does not shed light on what happened"

2023.10.26 BBC https://web.archive.org/web/20241004061310/https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67216929 "Hamas told the New York Times that the missile had disintegrated beyond recognition. 'The missile has dissolved like salt in the water. It's vaporised. Nothing is left,' said Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official. Experts have said it is extremely unusual for a blast site such as this not to yield debris of this kind."

"Open-source analysts including Oliver Alexander and Aric Toler and his team at the New York Times have cast doubt on whether the explosion in the sky shown in the Al Jazeera clip is related to the blast at the hospital."

"The hospital's car park contained more than a dozen burned-out cars, including one that had been overturned. There were damaged tiles, broken windows and shrapnel marks on surrounding hospital buildings but no visible structural damage."

Gaza hospital blast: what does new analysis tell us?

2023.11.03 NYT: "This episode doesn’t mean that Gazan officials always mislead or that Israeli officials always tell the truth. Even in this case, for example, Israeli officials have cited video evidence that Times reporting suggests does not support their argument. Both sides deserve continued scrutiny. But the hospital explosion offers reason to apply particular skepticism to Hamas’s claims about civilian deaths — which are an undeniable problem in this war. Hamas’s record on the war’s most closely watched incident does not look good."

2023.11.22 https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-hospital-rocket-gaza-8bc239d2efe0cff3998b2154d9220a83 New AP analysis of last month’s deadly Gaza hospital explosion rules out widely cited video "EDITOR’S NOTE: The Associated Press is publishing an updated visual analysis of the Oct. 17 explosion at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital. The AP initially assessed that the explosion was likely caused by a rocket launched from within Gaza that misfired, and that assessment has not changed. However, new images that emerged after AP’s story was published show that a key video used in the initial analysis is no longer tied to the hospital explosion."

"An updated Associated Press visual analysis of last month’s deadly Gaza hospital explosion has ruled out a widely cited Al Jazeera news channel video that initially appeared to show a rocket fired from the Palestinian territory that broke up in the air and crashed to the ground. But even without that footage, additional videos of rocket fire in the direction of the hospital, photos from the explosion site and other evidence leave unchanged AP’s original assessment that a rocket launched from Gaza the night of Oct. 17 most likely went astray and hit the medical center’s courtyard. Though AP reached its analysis independently, U.S. and French intelligence agencies have shared the same conclusion." When paired with other videos, the Bat Yam footage shows what appears to be a missile launched near the Israeli kibbutz of Alumim, about 2.5 miles (4 km) east of the Gaza border. 

AP’s analysis of the new video was backed by a range of experts in geolocation and open-source intelligence, who noted that evolving visual evidence is not uncommon in active conflicts like the Israeli-Hamas war, which make it difficult if not impossible to gather definitive forensic proof on the ground.

“The video from the camera in Bat Yam suggests that the rocket seen in the Al Jazeera video was not close enough to Al-Ahli Hospital to be responsible for the explosion that occurred at the hospital,” said Andrea Richardson, a lawyer and war crimes investigator who is a consultant with the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. 

2023.11.26 Jpost: "International editor of the BBC Jeremy Bowen was interviewed for one of the corporation's news programs and admitted that he made a mistake in the coverage surrounding the incident in which an explosion occurred at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza which he directly blamed Israel. However, the veteran journalist stated that he does not regret it. (...) "That was my conclusion from looking at the pictures and I was wrong, but I don't feel bad in particular, this was only the conclusion I drew."

2023.11.25

2024.02.29 https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-789617 "Hamas immediately blamed the blast, without evidence, on Israel, and it was in turn blamed on Israel by many media outlets, before overwhelming evidence emerged that a misfired Palestinian rocket was responsible."

1. FA's analysis should be accurately characterized. The source does not claim that Israel is responsible for the blast. 2. FA's analysis, which directly states it corroborates the analyses of NYT and WaPo, should not be given undue weight as though it is a fresh and different perspective. Currently, all other RS' analyses are pithily summarized in a single sentence, and FA's analysis was (before I got here) given two peacocking sentences. 3. FA currently occupies much valuable real estate at the end of the lede, as though it is the "final word." 3a. Why is the interview with the doctor being emphasized? 4. FA should not be given great weight or treated as a "high quality RS." I note that previous consensuses for 'include' depended on votes who noted it was a biased source. 4a. The organization's profile in [1] notes that FA is not a scientific but an artistic, post-modern attempt to pursue truth; and warns, since it is unaccountable, its field poses a risk to become fake news. RS have mentioned FA's releases in passing without commenting on FA's credibility. 4b. All the February contributors have their degrees in Architectural Design and Fine Arts, not engineering and physics, for what is truly an engineering/physics subject matter. 4c. The members are all Antizionist activists, some quite extreme, and the organization's donors are explicitly pro-Palestine; every single FA analysis in the "Palestine" section has been a foregone conclusion it would side against Israel, otherwise they would likely lose donors. Unlike a news source, whose obligation is to objective truth, Forensic Architecture is a partisan NGO seeking to advance its cause and please its donors. This bias should be taken into account. It is certainly not a "high-quality RS" and that characterization doesn't match the discussions I was told to dig up.

Conclusion: The language about should be corrected to match FA's claim. Then FA's claim should be given proper weight and pared down to match the pithily summarized RS. The part about the doctor, which is puffery in the lede, would make proper substance down in the body under the Analysis heading.

The article layout is largely non-chronological and needs reorganization. There is a whole discussion of casualty counts in the lede which really is proper material for the body. The lede, especially, poorly fits RS, at least the most up-to-date summaries by RS. For example, the last piece in the New York Times coverage describe the sequence of events. Hamas accused Israel, news organizations uncritically ran with Hamas' accusation, Israel responded with its own explanation, Hamas failed to produce evidence from the blast site, news organizations were dissatisfied with Hamas' occlusion, news organizations analyzed the videos and concluded it wasn't an Israeli attack, the NYT and BBC ran rare retractions. Major, highly notable facts are excluded from the lede and buried in the body, such as the rare NYT editor's note and BBC retraction with apology. (Especially the previous version, which inaccurately described numerous RS simply reporting without comment the publication FA's February analysis, as "citing" it, was a clear example of puffery, giving a false impression that these RS had changed their analyses in light of FA's findings.) It is impossible to discern what the IDF's claims were. It's going to be a long haul to edit this article up to an A, but that is my intention over the next month or so. That will not be possible if I bury alternate viewpoints, that would just make this article a different kind of C.

Forensic Architecture: "Most FA members are trained in architecture, but really, what they produce is video art, insofar as they are constantly showing moving image works in museums" "In a 2017 Artforum essay titled “Real Fictions: Alternatives to Alternative Facts,” Hal Foster mentions FA (...) responds “to the near monopoly, on the part of corporations and governments, over what counts as real.” (...) Foster argued that, rather than positioning themselves as deconstructionists who merely challenge meanings once thought secure, these artists reconstruct significant facts: they combine artifice with documentary in order to dredge up truths that have been occluded." https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/forensic-architecture-fake-news-1234661013/

Changes to al ahli article: 1. FA's analysis should be accurately characterized. The source does not claim that Israel is responsible for the blast. 2. FA's analysis, which directly states it corroborates the analyses of NYT and WaPo, should not be given undue weight as though it is a fresh and different perspective. Currently, all other RS' analyses are pithily summarized in a single sentence, and FA's analysis was (before I got here) given two peacocking sentences. 3. FA currently occupies much valuable real estate at the end of the lede, as though it is the "final word." 3a. Why is the interview with the doctor being emphasized? 4. FA should not be given great weight or treated as a "high quality RS." I note that previous consensuses for 'include' depended on votes who noted it was a biased source. 4a. The organization's profile in [2] notes that FA is not a scientific but an artistic, post-modern attempt to pursue truth; and warns, since it is unaccountable, it poses a risk to become fake news. RS have mentioned FA's releases in passing without commenting on FA's credibility. The writer negatively compares Forensic Architecture to Fox News for its handling of evidence. 4b. All the February contributors have their degrees in Architectural Design and Fine Arts, not engineering and physics, for what is truly an engineering/physics subject matter. 4c. The members are all Antizionist activists, some quite extreme, and the organization's donors are explicitly pro-Palestine; every single FA analysis in the "Palestine" section has been a foregone conclusion it would side against Israel, otherwise they would likely lose donors. Unlike a news source, whose obligation is to objective truth, Forensic Architecture is a partisan NGO seeking to advance its cause and please its donors. This bias should be taken into account. It is certainly not a "high-quality RS" and that characterization doesn't match the discussions I was told to dig up.

Conclusion: The language about should be corrected to match FA's claim. Then FA's claim should be given proper weight and pared down to match the pithily summarized RS. The part about the doctor, which is puffery in the lede, would make proper substance down in the body under the Analysis heading.

The article layout is largely non-chronological and needs reorganization. There is a whole discussion of casualty counts in the lede which really is proper material for the body. The lede, especially, poorly fits RS, at least the most up-to-date summaries by RS. For example, the last piece in the New York Times coverage describe the sequence of events. Hamas accused Israel, news organizations uncritically ran with Hamas' accusation, Israel responded with its own explanation, Hamas failed to produce evidence from the blast site, news organizations were dissatisfied with Hamas' explanation the evidence all disintegrated, news organizations analyzed the videos and concluded it wasn't an Israeli attack, the NYT and BBC ran rare retractions, it was found one of the videos prominently used didn't show the missile that caused the explosion, after all, nobody ran a retraction of the retraction because the rest of the evidence was also in Israel's favor. Major, highly notable facts are excluded from the lede and buried in the body, such as the rare NYT editor's note and BBC retraction with apology. (Especially the previous version, which inaccurately described numerous RS simply reporting without comment the publication FA's February analysis, as "citing" it, was a clear example of puffery, giving a false impression that these RS had changed their analyses in light of FA's findings.) It is impossible to discern what the IDF's claims were. It's going to be a long haul to edit this article up to an A, but that is my intention over the next month or so. That will not be possible if I bury alternate viewpoints, that would just make this article a different kind of C.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/world/middleeast/gaza-war-death-toll-lancet.html

"In an interview, Mr. Spagat cited other reasons to be cautious when discussing excess deaths in Gaza. He said that fears of major outbreaks of infectious diseases such as cholera have yet to materialize and that, although humanitarian agencies are warning of catastrophic levels of hunger, there is little evidence of widespread deaths because of starvation.

Still, Mr. Spagat said that it was “fair to call attention to the fact that not all of the deaths are going to be direct violent ones.”