Gaza hospital: What video, pictures and other evidence tell us about blast | Hacker News Reader

Gaza hospital: What video, pictures and other evidence tell us about blast

bbc.com

14 pointsdjkivi21 comments

This article is trying desperately to avoid stating the obvious, that the evidence now points directly at a failed Hammas missile launch.

If it states "obvious" and then later we find out the obvious is wrong, they lose all of their credibility. Publications should only report, not make conclusions (let someone else connect the dots and report on their conclusions instead).

Unlike the situation in which everyone jumped on the same headline within 5 min before any evidence or footage was even identified and then had to walk back from it?

Again, if you read the article, it would probably say X claims Y, not Y is true. Like BBC articles:

- Hundreds feared dead at Gaza hospital as Israel denies strike (17 hours ago)

- Hospital blast in Gaza City kills hundreds - health officials (18 hours ago)

- Dozens killed as Israeli strikes hit southern Gaza refuge areas (1 day ago)

The last one is before the hospital was hit.

If you have a specific article with a headline, what was it?

The only thing I can find is:

https://www.thejc.com/news/news/bbc-criticised-after-reporte...

Which wasn't a headline, rather than in-person live report. And ya, that's still bad, but it isn't as bad as crafting an article with time to think and still coming up with a bad headline. And even in the live reporting, the byline still has attribution ("health officials: at least 500 killed in strike on hospital"), meaning I would need to actually hear what was said live to pass judgement (if they said "health officials are saying that X is true" is quite different from saying "X is true").

The titles were changed after the fact, BBC did had “Israeli strike hits hospital killing over 500” for several hours last night on their main page.

Ok, I'll have to take your word for it, or maybe someone archived it?

The problem is that they started by implying the opposite. They should have been at least this ambiguous to begin with.

Hamas? I understood the Israelis were stating it was Palestinian Islamic Jihad's. Which evidence are you relying on to be sure it was Hamas?

Are you insinuating that Hamas is not an Islamic jihadist organization?

I made no such assertion. However, PIJ != Hamas. It's factually wrong and unhelpful to conflate the two.

The BBC came out on the wrong side of this initially and are now pretending that the proximate cause is harder to determine than it is.

Nobody should expect rolling TV news to meet the same standards of accuracy as written news.

An open question also means people are more likely to check back for an update. Once the question is closed, there's less value for further reporting.

None of the 3 experts are engineers, here are their backgrounds:

- J Andres Gannon: PhD, Political Science (His background is omitted in the article)

- Justin Bronk: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=9CS4EGsAAA... (definitely some war stuff but not an engineer)

- Valeria Scuto, London School of Economics and Political Science (no need to say more)

What might add a lot of fuel to the flame is Israel's spokesperson initially confirming it was Isreal in a tweet he later deleted: https://twitter.com/HananyaNaftali/status/171440059899126196...

This guy appears to be an “influencer”. Google says he’s a YouTuber.

Dos he have some official position with the government?

His website says he works for the prime minister: https://www.hnaftali.com/

His website looks like some influencer snake oil marketing crap…

He has no official position in Israeli government and seems to be just some self serving crisis peddler.

I think it's pretty obvious to any unbiased observer that this was caused by Hamas.

The Hamas isn't the only armed organization in Gaza, merely the one bankrolled by Netanyahu. Its kinda obvious it was from Palestinian stock, not that it was the Hamas.

What are the grounds for your statement?

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