The Associated Press is being taken to task after the news it had no idea it was sharing a building with Hamas in Gaza City that was subsequently destroyed by an Israeli missile last week.
“We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building,” AP president and CEO Gary Pruitt said in a statement. “This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.” Pruitt added that he was “shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza.”
While US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said Monday he “has seen no evidence” presented by Israel of Hamas’ presence in the building, a former editor for the AP has publicly stated that Hamas and the news outlet had a history of sharing spaces.
“In my two essays from 2014, I gave multiple examples of the way news organizations like the AP had been compromised by Hamas in Gaza,” Matti Friedman, who worked as a reporter and editor at the AP’s Jerusalem bureau from 2006 to 2011, said in a tweet over the weekend. “Contrary to what I’ve seen attributed to me today, I didn’t write that Hamas operated out of the same building, and don’t know if that’s true.”
“I take army statements like I take foreign press reports – with several grains of salt. But a conversation with a friend who is intimately familiar with military decision-making right now suggests there were indeed Hamas offices there.”
Here is an excerpt from one of Friedman’s essays in which he details how journalists would ignore islamic extremism happening right in front of them:
I’ll begin with a simple illustration. The above photograph is of a student rally held last November at Al-Quds University, a mainstream Palestinian institution in East Jerusalem. The rally, in support of the armed fundamentalist group Islamic Jihad, featured actors playing dead Israeli soldiers and a row of masked men whose stiff-armed salute was returned by some of the hundreds of students in attendance. Similar rallies have been held periodically at the school.
I am not using this photograph to make the case that Palestinians are Nazis. Palestinians are not Nazis. They are, like Israelis, human beings dealing with a difficult present and past in ways that are occasionally ugly. I cite it now for a different reason.
Such an event at an institution like Al-Quds University, headed at the time by a well-known moderate professor, and with ties to sister institutions in America, indicates something about the winds now blowing in Palestinian society and across the Arab world. The rally is interesting for the visual connection it makes between radical Islam here and elsewhere in the region; a picture like this could help explain why many perfectly rational Israelis fear withdrawing their military from East Jerusalem or the West Bank, even if they loathe the occupation and wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. The images from the demonstration were, as photo editors like to say, “strong.” The rally had, in other words, all the necessary elements of a powerful news story.
The event took place a short drive from the homes and offices of the hundreds of international journalists who are based in Jerusalem. Journalists were aware of it: The sizable Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, for example, which can produce several stories on an average day, was in possession of photos of the event, including the one above, a day later. (The photographs were taken by someone I know who was on campus that day, and I sent them to the bureau myself.) Jerusalem editors decided that the images, and the rally, were not newsworthy, and the demonstration was only mentioned by the AP weeks later when the organization’s Boston bureau reported that Brandeis University had cut ties with Al-Quds over the incident. On the day that the AP decided to ignore the rally, November 6, 2013, the same bureau published a reportabout a pledge from the U.S. State Department to provide a minor funding increase for the Palestinian Authority; that was newsworthy. This is standard. To offer another illustration, the construction of 100 apartments in a Jewish settlement is always news; the smuggling of 100 rockets into Gaza by Hamas is, with rare exceptions, not news at all.
The Associated Press maintains that while they have had an office in al-Jalaa Tower for 15 years, they had no knowledge that Hamas was using the building, and have called for an independent investigation into the airstrikes.
“We are in a conflict situation,” AP executive editor Sally Buzbee said. “We do not take sides in that conflict. We heard Israelis say they have evidence; we don’t know what that evidence is. We think it’s appropriate at this point for there to be an independent look at what happened yesterday — an independent investigation.”
The Jerusalem Post reports that President Biden spoke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday, a discussion that included the bombing of the building, and Israel showed Biden and other US officials the intelligence behind their decision.
“We showed them the smoking gun proving Hamas worked out of that building,” the newspaper reported, citing a source close to Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi. “I understand they found the explanation satisfactory.”
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