Despite the wide agreement that Hamas was behind the rocket that hit the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza and not Israel, as was initially reported, major media outlets like The New York Times still won't admit to the cause of the strike, the New York Post says in an editorial.
"Even last week, the Times was reporting the horror's cause as 'contested,'" the Post's editorial board said Monday while slamming the rival newspaper. "Does it just not want to admit its colossal error?"
The piece comes after Human Rights Watch, "an outfit deeply hostile to Israel," admitted that the bomb that hit the hospital on Oct. 17, in the early days of the war, "resulted from an apparent rocket-propelled munition, such as those commonly used by Palestinian armed groups," The Post notes.
"Armed groups — i.e., terror cadres like Islamic Jihad, the group Hamas operatives blamed in an audio clip intercepted and published by Israel," the editorial says.
Human Rights Watch, while calling for further investigation into the rocket strike, also questioned the death and casualty totals provided by Hamas, saying it "displays an unusually high killed-to-injured ratio" that is "out of proportion" with the damage that was done, but that the evidence points to a misfired rocket.
"The admission comes more than a month after the hospital tragedy itself — and the subsequent agitprop push by Hamas that was uncritically repeated by major media outlets like The New York Times," the Post said in its editorial. "This is the latest in a long series of independent investigations that have confirmed again and again that Israel did not fire that rocket."
Still, the board said that there is "no amount of evidence" that will satisfy the "American wing of Hamas apologists" such as Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., "who has descended into full-on 'trutherism' over the attack," but the Human Rights Watch findings leave "no moral cover" for "Tlaib and the antisemites who hang out with her on Facebook."
Hamas' "useful idiots in the media" won't admit they are wrong, either, as they have been "compromised for far too long," the Post noted, pointing to former Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman who says the organization's coverage of Gaza was "shaped by Hamas" when it let the terrorists censor its stringers without readers being notified.
Friedman also said that Hamas has wired Gaza "like a suicide bomber — they've created a military landscape that is indistinguishable from the civilian landscape — and that means necessarily that when war breaks out, it's going to be a civilian disaster," but "the big Western press organizations" are "largely happy to ignore it," according to the editorial.
The board also noted that major organizations are using words like "militants" or "fighters" to describe the "blood-soaked killers of children and the elderly."
"It's critical, as Israel continues its hostage exchange with Hamas, to remember that the Jewish state is battling murderers and war criminals, not righteous freedom fighters, no matter how hard elite institutions seek to suppress that fact," the Post's editorial concludes.