Please read the following headline and subhed on a New York Times report today:

“The Tunnel That Leads Underneath a Hospital in Southern Gaza

To Israelis, the location of an underground passageway highlights Hamas’s abuse of civilians. To Palestinians, Israel’s decision to target it highlights Israel’s own disregard for civilian life.”

Just so we’re all clear on what happened: The leader of Hamas was using a bunker directly underneath the emergency department of a hospital. Israel took out that leader with a strike that avoided the hospital itself, after giving advance warning of its intentions. Then Israel cleared the area around it and retrieved the body.

According to the Times, the preceding scenario is open to interpretation.

But to really understand what’s happening here, one has to rewind slightly to the moment of the strike and its aftermath. Last month, Israel struck the tunnel under the European Hospital in an attempt to eliminate Muhammad Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and successor to his brother, Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks. News agencies insisted Israel was lying about the presence of Hamas leadership or an underground bunker, relying on fake “experts” whose expertise I debunked here.

Then it turned out that, as usual, Israel was telling the truth. Then journalists complained that Israel was keeping journalists out of the war zone, a kind of veiled justification for why they keep making up stories. Israel responded by giving journalists a tour of the underground bunker itself. Journalists responded by saying, essentially, ah well, nevertheless!

So here’s a question worth repeating: Will these news agencies still continue to platform the fake “experts” who keep making fools of them? Will they still use the same reporters and anchors that keep getting these stories wrong while behaving unprofessionally on-air?

Let’s put a pin in that one and talk briefly about a man named Mahmoud Bassal. He is a spokesman for a Palestinian agency called Civil Defense, a security and emergency service that claims some independence from the Palestinian government under which it works. This ruse is less important in territories governed by the Palestinian Authority, which is a legitimate governing body, than it is in Gaza, which is governed by the barbaric terrorist organization Hamas. No one can operate such an agency in Gaza unless it is effectively controlled by Hamas, just like everything else. But news agencies have been sensitive about the fact that most of their “reporting” is regurgitated Hamas press releases, and that this is not in fact journalism at all. So they quote “civil defense” officials.

Bassal is a key player in this scam, because news reports can quote him without saying the word “Hamas.”

Well, they could. Past tense.

Yesterday, the IDF revealed that it recovered Hamas documentation of Bassal’s role within the organization. Bassal, the documents purportedly showed, was not Hamas-adjacent but rather simply Hamas. “The three intelligence documents disclosed by the IDF all mention Bassal by name and list him serving in various roles, including as a cell head in a Hamas intelligence unit,” the Jewish Chronicle reported. “According to the documents, Bassal joined Hamas in 2005, became a soldier in 2013, and was promoted to officer in 2020.”

Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov did a quick search and turned up Bassal’s appearances in stories in the Guardian, France24, AFP, and Reuters right off the bat. Will news organizations continue to quote Bassal? For that matter, will news organizations quote Palestinian Civil Defense?

Probably. Will they do so at least with a caveat about Bassal’s apparent Hamas membership? Unlikely. Just as it is unlikely all the reporters and analysts and “experts” and anchors who got it wrong on the hospital story will see no meaningful reduction in their contributions to the global journalism charade that is reporting on Israel and Gaza.

And we should take it one step further: The type of imaging evidence that Israel has released regarding tunnels under hospitals is reliable; will it be treated as such going forward? Additionally, there is no question now that Hamas and other terror groups operate from within and around and underneath the medical facilities just as Israel says they do. A remotely honest fourth estate would see this fact reflected in future reporting.

Just imagine how informed the public might have been—and how many fewer Jews attacked in the streets all over the world—had news agencies gotten the story right all along. Instead, the coverage of the war has been a 20-month work of extended fiction produced on behalf of a terrorist group that murders and kidnaps and tortures and does little else. I don’t know that the world is even capable of grappling with the extent of the scandal its news organizations have been perpetrating.