It’s been five years since an IDF air strike on a Gaza soccer field sparked outrage from FIFA and war crimes accuastions from B’Tselem.
The reason for the attack? The site was being used as a Hamas training camp, a fact which Hamas itself confirmed. But only now is B’Tselem retracting its charges against Israel. Arutz-7 reports:
The first version of the B’Tselem group’s story reported that the IDF killed 14 Palestinian Authority Arabs “not engaged in fighting” during an Israel Air Force aerial attack on a Hamas community centre on Sept. 7, 2004. Ostensibly, Arab civilians were wrongly killed while engaging in a harmless cultural activity. The casualties were included in B’Tselem’s database of Arab civilians killed by the IDF.
Now, nearly five years later, B’Tselem reports that the Arabs were “engaged in fighting” and “were stationed at a Hamas training camp.”
Dahoah-Halevy notes that on the very day of the attack, Hamas itself made an official announcement stating that the bombed target was a training camp and that the 14 Arabs that were killed were members of the Al-Kassam military brigade of Hamas . . . .
In contrast, B’Tselem has not published an official apology nor explained why it took the organization nearly five years to change the story.
Another tarnish on what NGO-Monitor calls the halo effect:
The evidence shows that many journalists simply reprint NGO reports without question or verification. This is known as the “halo effect,” and violates both journalistic ethics, which require skepticism and independent verification, and the norm when reporting from other sources, including government officials. But when a “highly respected human rights watchdog” such as Amnesty International or HRW makes a statement, journalists tend to ignore the bias and repeat this as fact.
A recent Harvard study of reporting on the 2006 Lebanon War shows that most of the media around the world continued to cite HRW’s claims on the Qana incident, even after HRW was forced to admit their errors. And there are many other examples, not only with respect to Israel, but in Colombia, Iraq, and wherever NGOs rely on “eyewitnesses” and lack independent capabilities.
