Three years ago today, Hamas came across the Gaza border, invaded Israel, and did the worst thing done to Jews since the Holocaust. About twelve hundred people were killed. Babies, grandparents, people enjoying a concert. Women were raped. Hostages were hauled into tunnels. Some of the killers even filmed it.

Then, bizarrely — no, frighteningly — the story changed in matter of days…Hours, actually.  

It was suddenly no longer about the massacre and the victims. It was about Israel’s response. That’s the trick Israel’s enemies already understood: you don’t need the true story. You need the first one. The correction can show up later with the receipts. Way too late.

Charlie Brown never learns. The Western press doesn’t either. There are almost too many instances of the media failing to do its due diligence in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks, but it is important that we remember them.

The hospital Israel didn’t bomb

October 17, 2023. Ten days after the massacre. An explosion in the parking lot of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. “Hamas’s health ministry” said Israel had bombed the place and killed about 500 people. The New York Times even put it on the homepage: “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.”

Palestinians say. Not Hamas says. Not unverified. A ministry run by the people who had just murdered twelve hundred Jews, treated like a county health department. Riots erupted across the Middle East. King Abdullah canceled a summit with President Joe Biden. The story was set before dark.

Then the facts. Human Rights Watch, which is not in the habit of covering for Israel, said a big Israeli airstrike was “highly unlikely.” Crater, fireball, fragmentation: a rocket, the kind Palestinian groups fire. AP, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal all landed in the same place. A misfire from inside Gaza. American, British, and French intelligence agreed. U.S. estimate of the dead: 100 to 300, not 500. The building was basically fine. The blast was in the parking lot.

One clip everyone passed around, from Al Jazeera, turned out to be junk. An Israeli interceptor, miles away. It didn’t save the airstrike story. The hole in the ground still didn’t look like an Israeli bomb. A few analysts disagreed. Most of the serious research and reporting didn’t.

Six days later the Times ran an editors’ note. Early coverage had “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas” and left readers “with an incorrect impression.” Six days. Summit already canceled. Campuses already lit. Nobody riots over an editors’ note.  An editors’ note.

Lucy yanked the football. Charlie Brown ate dirt. Then, he got back in line.

The famine that wasn’t

For the better part of two years, famine in Gaza was imminent, then happening, then something you weren’t allowed to question. In August 2025, the UN-backed IPC classified famine in the Gaza Governorate. Tom Fletcher, the UN relief chief, called the evidence “irrefutable.” Anchors (teleprompter readers, really) reported it like the weather. Israel was starving children on purpose. Doubt was considered indecency.

December 2025, the same IPC: “No areas are classified in Famine.” Ceasefire, more aid, more commercial food. Not even the first time the monitor blinked. June 2024, its own Famine Review Committee wouldn’t confirm famine in northern Gaza, and said earlier models had skipped commercial deliveries and some World Food Programme bread. The press spent the year in between treating a projection like a conviction.

Gaza was not fine. December still had the whole Strip in emergency, one notch under famine, more than 100,000 people in catastrophic conditions, and a warning it could tip back if the aid stopped. What didn’t hold was the declaration. The version on television ran ahead of the monitor’s own later paperwork. The people who had said irrefutable did not come back at the same volume. Accusation screamed, retraction mumbled. Every time.

The football only has to move at the last second.

How it works

Hamas, or a ministry Hamas owns, puts out a number. A Western newsroom sticks “Palestinians say” or “Gaza officials report” on the front and hits publish. The attribution is the alibi. You circulated a terrorist press release and you can still say you only quoted a source. Then the riots, the encampments, the canceled meetings, the Jew beaten on a sidewalk in Brooklyn over a thing that wasn’t true. Later, a correction. Small. Late. Unread.

They call it the fog of war. But fog doesn’t pick a side. These “mistakes” do. You do not see the Times lead the site with an unverified Israeli claim and walk it back in a mumble. Israel “claims.” Hamas “reports,” until the crater is the wrong size.

See how it works? 

A serious newsroom would treat a Hamas communiqué like a press release from a company under indictment. Maybe useful. Not fact until somebody else looks. On the hospital, and again on the famine, the prestigious rooms did the reverse. The benefit of the doubt to the death cult. None to the Jews. They’ll say the other option was silence. It wasn’t. It was one honest clause: unverified, Hamas-run, up where a reader might see it.

The day, not the narrative

The information war keeps paying dividends, so it keeps going. Another cycle, another UN session, another campus, another sidewalk.

October 7 was a deadly pogrom. What came after was a lesson in how a first story, run through institutions that are supposed to know better, can move the world before the facts show up.

Once is a mistake. Twice might be laziness or willful neglect. This many times? It’s got to be more than useful idiocy.  It’s got to be deliberate. 

Lucy has the football. By all means, don’t try to kick it.

Larry O’Connor is a nationally syndicated radio host and streaming podcast host based in Washington, DC on Salem Media and the editor of Townhall.