Gaza's al-Ahli Hospital: "Two Employees Injured," "No Staff or Patients Were Killed," in October 17th Blast, But the Media Took No Notice

The day after the disaster, hospital officials had answers that apparently few in the press wanted to hear.

The day after the explosion at Gaza's al-Ahli hospital, news of the blast was everywhere - facts, on the other hand, were harder to come by. However, a press conference held that very day by the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem that runs the hospital could have provided clarity to a world looking for answers but was instead widely ignored by the media. In the wake of the massive explosion and fireball, “two of our employees were injured,” the hospital said.

At the press conference streamed on Facebook, Anglican Archbishop Hosam Naoum declined to comment on possible total casualty figures, deferring to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry claims of hundreds, and would not assign blame for the explosion despite being pressed to do so. Then a reporter asked “Can you tell us how many doctors and nurses were injured or killed in this attack?” Archbishop Naoum replied (18:00 mark in video), “From the hospital, that was stuck later during the day, that’s devastating, two of our employees were injured.” The archbishop went on to say that while surgeries were being conducted at the time of the explosion, the blast was followed by in a full evacuation.

At the press conference, Naoum was not asked, nor did he say anything about injuries to patients, but an American group, the American Friends of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem (AFEDJ), which supports the diocese reports on its website that on Friday, October 20th, the archbishop told the group in a Zoom meeting that although “the surrounding buildings and chapel suffered some infrastructure damage, no buildings collapsed, and no staff or patients were killed. The hospital force-closed immediately, and all existing patients were evacuated to nearby hospitals.” [emphasis in original]

Despite the clear statement from Archbishop Naoum on October 18th that only “two of our employees were injured,” only one media outlet that reported on the press conference included that detail in its dispatch, the UK’s The Guardian. The reporting from the New York Times was typical of what the press focused on: warnings to evacuate that the Israeli military had given to humanitarian facilities throughout Gaza in the days following Hamas’s attack.

On Wednesday, Archbishop Naoum said that the Israeli military had called and texted the hospital managers at least three times since Oct. 14, asking its patients and staff to leave the hospital compound.

Archbishop Naoum said the warnings were particular to the hospital, and not part of Israel’s wider push to encourage civilians to leave northern Gaza for the territory’s south.

“There were specific warnings to get out of the building,” the archbishop said.

Despite the reporter’s obvious familiarity with the substance of the press conference, the Times included nothing of what Naoum said about the pair of injuries sustained by hospital staff and lack of damage to the buildings.

Meanwhile, early reports such as this from Al Jazeera the night before, headlined “Israeli air raid on al-Ahli Arab Hospital kills 500, Gaza officials say,” went uncontradicted and uncorrected: “The hospital attack has sparked international condemnation, as patients and displaced Palestinians number among the dead.”

Public figures around the world , such as Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, were making statements based on the initial reports, saying that “patients [and] healthcare workers” were killed:

Words fail me. Tonight, hundreds of people were killed – horrifically – in a massive strike at Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, including patients, healthcare workers and families that had been seeking refuge in and around the hospital. Once again the most vulnerable. This is totally unacceptable.

Even President Biden’s official statement included “patients, medical staff and other innocents killed or wounded”:

The United States stands unequivocally for the protection of civilian life during conflict and we mourn the patients, medical staff and other innocents killed or wounded in this tragedy.

In an article on its website, a version of which ran in print the following day on the front page, the New York Times reported [emphasis added,] “Photos and videos posted online and verified by The New York Times showed bloodied and battered bodies…,” with the next paragraph noting that a “woman shared a video she recorded as she made her way through the rubble of the ruined hospital[.]” The reader was left with the impression of devastated hospital buildings with mass casualties, presumably doctors, nurses and patients alike. The Times even accompanied the article with, both online (for a time) and in print the following morning, a photo of a collapsed building that the average reader might assume was the hospital - it was not, because as Archbishop Naoum noted, no buildings collapsed.

The Times later corrected the article, removing the phrase “rubble of the ruined,” noting that “this article described incorrectly a video filmed by a woman at the hospital after the blast. The hospital itself was not ruined; its parking lot was damaged most heavily in the blast.” Not noted in the correction is that the original sub headline included the phrase ”the explosion that devastated the hospital,” later changed to simply “the explosion at a hospital.”

Though my October 20th article for The Dispatch focused on the New York Times’ coverage, the Times was not alone in blowing this story. Less than 24 hours after the disaster, officials of the hospital reported two injuries among its personnel, yet thanks to sloppy and incomplete reporting, the world continued to react under the assumption that, whoever was responsible, medical personnel and patients, likely scores or even hundreds, were among the dead. Inexplicably, Archbishop Naoum’s statement that “two of our employees were injured” was quoted in a single news report the day of the press conference and nowhere since. The AFEDJ statement that “no staff or patients were killed” at the hospital in the blast has likewise been blacked out.

When the statements of the Hamas-controlled “Gaza Health Ministry” receive, in this case, infinitely more coverage than the clear words of the humanitarian mission that operates the hospital, something is wildly wrong with the world’s media. A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on, the old saying goes. And at times, even with pants, the truth still gets left out in the cold.