The New York Times' latest Gaza shame

This newspaper has indulged Israel's lies, and its latest 'scoop' about the obliteration of Gaza rehashes and waters down what has long been reported.

The role of the New York Times throughout Israel’s genocide has been, let’s put it this way, instructive. It has whitewashed Israel’s atrocities, often simply ignored them, given undue deference to Israel claims and indeed lies, deferred to Israeli narratives, erased Palestinian voices and experiences, well we could go on.

Its all too infrequent investigations into Israel’s atrocities have been detached from the newspaper’s overall narrative of what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people, and even then often waters down, omits, offers apologetics, whilst regurgitating what has already been long established by journalists and media outlets who have only a fraction of the same resources.

Enter stage right their new investigation, headlined ‘Israel loosened its rules to bomb Hamas fighters, killing many more civilians’.

Now some might go: just be grateful that establishment media outlets are publishing this stuff at all.

The piece, which focuses on Israel’s bombing campaign in the first few weeks after 7th October 2023, confirms that Israel has committed multiple war crimes in that bombing campaign.

The newspaper notes how an order was issued at 1pm on 7th October which granted mid-ranking Israeli military officers the authority to approve missile strikes against thousands of supposed militants and military sites, and they could now aim for those classified as ‘the lowest ranking fighters’.

And crucially, these mid-ranking Israeli military officers now had the approval to target those classified as ‘the lowest ranking fighters’ if it meant risking the killing of up to 20 civilians - that is, 20 civilian deaths being an acceptable level of collateral damage for one supposed ‘lowest ranked fighter’, which we’ll discuss more later on.

According to this New York Times article:

“Mid-ranking officers had never been given so much leeway to attack so many targets, many of which had lower military significance, at such a high potential civilian cost.”

Crucially the newspaper states:

‘The order, which has not previously been reported, had no precedent in Israeli military history.’

“Which has not previously been reported”: as soon as I read that sentence, it jarred. Because it was instantly familiar to me. And I knew why - because I had covered an investigation into this by Israeli-Palestinian media outlet +972 magazine back at the beginning of April - that is, nearly 9 months ago

When discussing the use of an Artificial Intelligence targeting programme named Lavender, the article stated the following:

“In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants.”

That article also quoted an Israeli military source who said the following:

“Every person who wore a Hamas uniform in the past year or two could be bombed with 20 [civilians killed as] collateral damage, even without special permission. In practice, the principle of proportionality did not exist.”

That source went on to say:

“In this calculation, it could also be 20 children for a junior operative … It really wasn’t like that in the past.”

When asked by +972 Magazine about the security rationale behind this policy, the source replied: “Lethality.”

So what is the New York Times talking about? They are claiming this has never been reported before, and yet here I am, quoting from an article which I covered in a video entitled ‘Israel’s Dystopian Killing Machine Exposed’:

Here’s another quote in the New York Times article:

“Strikes that endangered more than 100 civilians were occasionally permitted to target a handful of Hamas leaders, as long as senior generals or sometimes the political leadership approved, according to four Israeli officers involved in target selection.”

Let’s go back to that +972 Magazine article, which says their sources said that:

“In the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”

Here’s another chunk from that article:

“In the bombing of the commander of the Shuja’iya Battalion, we knew that we would kill over 100 civilians,” B. recalled of a Dec. 2 bombing that the IDF Spokesperson said was aimed at assassinating Wisam Farhat. “For me, psychologically, it was unusual. Over 100 civilians — it crosses some red line.”

In actual fact the New York Times waters down what was originally established by +972 Magazine. They say strikes that endangered more than 100 civilians were “occasionally permitted” - rather less emphatic language: +972 Magazine wrote that the army on “several occasions authorised the killing of more than 100 civilians”.

Now the New York Times know all about +972 magazine. How do we know this? Because they refer to +972 magazine and the piece in question in this paragraph:

“In other units, three officers said, an individual was considered a confirmed militant if he was simply listed in Lavender. Details of that process were previously reported by +972, an Israeli-Palestinian news website; the Israeli military has denied that was military policy and said that any analyst who relied solely on Lavender would have been overruled by superiors.”

Well it’s striking here they’re not attributing their work properly, but what they do is bring up +972 Magazine to undermine them. They use a denial by the Israeli army to combat the claims made by +972 Magazine about the use of this Artificial Intelligence system in the selection of targets.

Now the framing of the New York Times article tells you what you need to know. The subheading reads as follows:

“Surprised by Oct. 7 and fearful of another attack, Israel weakened safeguards meant to protect noncombatants, allowing officers to endanger up to 20 people in each airstrike. One of the deadliest bombardments of the 21st century followed.”

So what the New York Times is doing here is offering empathy for Israel’s decision to commit grave war crimes. More empathy is offered there than for the actual victims of these war crimes, the countless Palestinians who have been slaughtered by Israeli air strikes.

Indeed the New York Times push notification for the piece reads “How Israel loosened its rules” followed by “shocked by Oct. 7, Israel severely weakened its system of safeguards meant to protect civilians to fight Hamas, the Times found.”

Here they frame Israel’s decision to commit war crimes as an understandable emotional response, and then portray what is mass slaughter as a mere weakening of safeguards.

Indeed, the article itself makes Israel’s slaughter seem careless, rather than a deliberate policy fleshed out by the repeated statements of Israeli leaders and officials which make clear they regard Palestinian civilians as a whole as fair game.

For example, the newspaper discusses the Israeli military striking at such a pace that it made it “harder to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets”. Yes, their military strategists were truly devastated about that. The Times then says “It burned through much of a prewar database of vetted targets within days and adopted an unproven system for finding new targets that used artificial intelligence at a vast scale.”

In other words: a rationale for mass indiscriminate bombing.

As the work of others has established, allowing for so-called “lowest ranking militants” to be targeted means a vast swathe of society, because Israel uses Hamas as an indiscriminate label.

Here’s the issue. Throughout Israel’s mass slaughter, there were those of us who pointed to the obvious: the Israeli state is slaughtering civilians en masse, its bombing campaign in Gaza alone is a litany of extreme war crimes - and we were vilified. The mainstream narrative was this was the right to self defence, and mass civilian killings were being caused by the use of so-called human shields, and we were all Hamas stooges.

The New York Times comes along to confirm the obvious 14 months after the bombing campaign started: indeed note another article by +972 Magazine, published November 30th 2023, entitled ‘A Mass Assassination Factory: inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza’ went into detail about how Israel was wiping Gaza from the face of the earth with its bombs.

Here’s a really important point. +972 Magazine did incredible work. They operate on a shoestring budget compared the global juggernaut that is the New York Times, who have vastly more resources. The New York Times could have done this work a long time ago in great detail. They chose not to, while indulging Israel’s deceitful narratives. Don’t expect the findings of this later piece to be woven into their overall narrative of what Israel is doing.

And now as most of Gaza is rubble and so many of its citizens have been butchered and maimed, they claim to exclusively report what was already established a long time ago.

What should be said, though, is that this article, however woeful its limitations, should be added to the overwhelming body of evidence that Israel is guilty of some of the worst possible crimes, and that the apologists as well as the perpetrators, have nowhere to hide.