AP slammed for claiming it was unaware of Hamas presence
Category: News & Politics
Via: vic-eldred • 3 years ago • 29 commentsBy: Yaron Steinbuch (New York Post)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Associated Press has been blasted for claiming it had no clue Hamas militants maintained a presence at the news agency's Gaza headquarters that was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike.
Israel said it shared "smoking gun" evidence with Biden administration officials that Hamas was operating out of the Al-Jalaa tower, which housed the AP, Al Jazeera and other news outlets, according to a report Sunday.
The strike destroyed the 12-story building an hour after the Israeli military ordered it evacuated, saying the high rise was targeted because it was being used by Hamas military intelligence, Fox News reported.
The AP condemned Israel for the attack and claimed to have "no indication" that the terror group operated from the building.
"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."
He 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."
However, a 2014 article in The Atlantic written by a journalist in the region described a questionable history between the news agency and Hamas.
"When Hamas's leaders surveyed their assets before this summer's round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press," Matti Friedman wrote.
"The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby — and the AP wouldn't report it," he wrote.
Friedman claimed the Hamas militants would regularly "burst into the AP's Gaza bureau and threaten the staff — and the AP wouldn't report it."
AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt said the company had "no indication" Hamas was operating out of their building.AP
Gabe Hoffman, producer of the documentary "An Open Secret," said in a tweet: "@AP didn't know about sharing a building w/ Hamas for 15 years?!?"
Noah Pollack, a contributor to the Free Beacon, said in a tweet: "Spoke to a well-placed friend in the IDF just now. The bombed AP office building contained multiple Hamas operations & offices including weapons manufacturing and military intelligence. The building also housed an Islamic Jihad office. And AP's local reporters knew about it."
Another user wrote in a tweet about the AP that it "doesn't say much for their reporting abilities if they missed a Hamas staging office a floor away."
The al-Jalaa tower reduced to rubble following an Israeli airstrike.AP
Meanwhile, AP Executive Editor Sally Buzbee is calling for an independent investigation into the Israeli airstrike, saying the government has yet to provide clear evidence supporting the attack.
Buzbee said The AP has had offices in al-Jalaa tower for 15 years and never was informed or had any indication that Hamas might be in the building.
"We are in a conflict situation," 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."
Israel told Biden administration officials that Hamas was operating out of the al-Jalaa tower.AP
Separately, Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders asked the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel's attack as a possible war crime.
The group, known by its French acronym RSF, said it had strong reason to believe that the IDF's "intentional targeting of media organizations and intentional destruction of their equipment" could violate one of the court's statutes.
It said Israel's actions serve "to reduce, if not neutralize, the media's capacity to inform the public."
RSF asked the court, based in the Dutch city of The Hague, to include the recent attacks in a war crimes investigation opened in March into Israel's practices in Palestinian territories.
IIDF spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said Israel was compiling evidence for the US but declined to commit to providing it within the next couple of days.
"We're in the middle of fighting. That's in process and I'm sure in due time that information will be presented," he said Sunday.
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, the Jerusalem Post reported Sunday.
"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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Let's see if we can sort this out. Hamas used a building that was being used by news organizations - as a shield for Hamas operatives, just as it does with civilian population locations. Israel knew, warned the Biden administration and then took action. The AP lied about it and in the process exposed themselves in being used by Hamas.
As someone here frequently used to say "If it looks like a duck....."
I have yet to see any evidence of this, and I trust Richard Engel more than anyone at NY Post or the Free Beacon.
"C'mon man". You don't think that an organization that uses schools and hospitals for rocket launching sites doesn't have the ability to think about using a building that houses international news organizations to help shield them from aggression?
Not buying it. Or are you being purposefully obtuse and negative in realization of their abilities and intelligence?
But I guess the real point was AP's denial it knew..........which may or may not be plausible.
Well if YOU haven't seen evidence of it, then it can't possibly true, eh? I guess you also don't believe that the Gazans launch thier rockets from residential areas, even next to schools (and they DID store missiles at a schoo, which WAS reported by the mainstream media a couple of years ago).
The entirety of Gaza is a residential area.
Morning Jim,
I don't believe anyone when it comes to the latest abominations. Certainly not Hamas nor Netanyahu who both need extremists for their political survival.
Maybe....???
So who governs Gaza?
Doesn't their government have an army?
If they do have any actual army...then by definition, they are not all civilians, eh?
Have you been there, Charlie? They grow their crops on the roofs of homes and other buildings?
Have you been there, Charlie? They grow their crops on the roofs of homes and other buildings?
Every few years the fascist government in Gaza sarts a war by firing rockets at civilian targets in Israel. In the last war it came to light that the barbaric terror organization that rules Gaza (Hamas) had its headquarters...under the main hospital in Gaza.
Throughout Gaza Hamas places their offices and munitions under and/or behind human shields...they actually want to maximize their casualties, attempting to gain worldwide support as the "innocent victims".
So therefore...it must be those "civilians" who are firing those rockets at Israeli civilian targets .....
And they have proven time and again how successful they are in doing it, supported by the mainstream media and thanks to a gullible public.
It is a good reason why the ICC has PROVEN itself to be ultra-biased against Israel.
Well,that's your problem right there.
Charlie?
Aw look at that, you've learned the 'art' of half a quote ... at best, pitiful.
Vas You There, Charlie?
Trump's administration was successful in achieving '"The Abraham Accords", the opening of relations between a few Arab countries and Israel, a process that was bound to expand and most likely eventually FORCE the Palestinians out of their intransigence to make peace with Israel. That all went down the sewer when Biden re-opened the Palestinian oiffices in D.C. and gifted the Palestinians $235 million - so Biden's biggest gift was to give the Palestinians and Gazans the balls to invoke destruction on Israel. Thank you Biden, you've made Rashid Tlaib and The Squad and every antisemite in the world happy. But Bernie Sanders isn't happy. He said all aid to Israel should be stopped. As you can see, Jews have their traitors too.
I'm still hoping Biden won't, at the very least, repeat the standard routine we've seen before:
Hamas attacks Israel, Israel retaliates and then the world pressures Israel to make peace.
So many parts of this story are funny.. Not only the journalists missing the terrorists down the hall, but the outrage from the AP over blowing up a building. There guidelines from last summer thought property damage should be downplayed. Now it's their property being destroyed, so suddenly property damage is a front page issue.
Context for the AP's "journalism" in Gaza:
"What most of the public don’t realise — because the western media never tells them — is that absolutely nothing exists in Gaza without the approval of Hamas. The only journalists allowed to be in Gaza are those who deliver the story Hamas wants to tell the world. Any journalist who tried to tell the truth about Hamas would be either thrown out of Gaza or murdered. That’s something of a disincentive to telling people what’s actually going on.
Most reporting from Gaza is delivered by local Palestinian “stringers” or fixers. They may boast respectable media accreditation like AP. But they are either members of Hamas themselves or are all too aware that if they don’t deliver what Hamas wants them to deliver, they’re dead. The same goes for Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. And the fact is that, for decades, the west’s major news agencies have used Palestinian stringers whose propaganda goes straight into national newspapers in Britain, America and elsewhere — sometimes even under the byline of a staff correspondent sitting in an office in a safe country — and is believed by the unsuspecting western reader who trusts the integrity of that newspaper. "
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-murderous-co-operation
And here I thought I would never thumb up a comment by Sean Treacy.
If the AP said it was unaware hamas was in their building, it makes you wonder what else they are unaware of.
AP's credibility went way down with that
If the AP said it was unaware Hamas was in the same building as them, it makes you wonder what else they are unaware of...???
Well, I suppose it might be possible that some other occupants of that building might not be aware that a terrorist orgsanization has a presence there...
But if AP is there and doesn't know Hamas is present in the same building as them...I suppose it might possibly make one wonder how trustworthy AP is as a news organization ...?
Either they're not really reliable due to their lack of awareness...or possibly they are not as unbiased a news source as they claim to be.
Which is it?
Curious minds want to know!
Do I really have to choose only one of those?
Israel has a duty to it's citizens to protect them and they have put up with these attacks too long.
Since Mossad is probably the best intelligence agency in the world, I would believe that they were capable of determining the true facts that Hamas was in that building.