The Dog Ate Hamas's Homework...

A few days ago Hamas ran to the world's press waving the bloody shirt of a claimed Israeli airstrike that had flattened a hospital and killed hundreds of innocent Gazans sheltering or being treated there.

Many of the world's leading press organizations, to their discredit, rushed to report the story. There were perverse incentives to do so, of course. You didn't want to get scooped by the other guy, and humanitarian tragedy always pulls in the eyeballs. Besides, it was being reported by official Hamas spokespeople, from the government...both de facto and de jure...of Gaza.

There was almost immediate pushback from the Israeli military, who claimed that they did not drop any munitions anywhere near the hospital, as well as US and Israeli intel sources, who began producing evidence that the explosion, such as it was, was a short round from a rocket barrage fired by another Palestinian terror organization that landed in the hospital parking lot. Also, the claims of horrific casualties were, well, pretty dubious.

Many of the world's leading press organizations, to their credit, ran off to do some of that journalism stuff and, well, Hamas is backing and filling at an impressive rate, changing their story on the fly...

But in the days since, as new evidence contradicting the Hamas claim has emerged, the Gazan authorities have changed their story about the blast. Spokespeople have released death tolls varying from 500 to 833, before settling on 471.

The Hamas-run health ministry has also declined to release further details about those 471 victims, and all traces of the munition have seemingly vanished from the site of the blast, making it impossible to assess its provenance. Raising further questions about Hamas’s claims, the impact site turned out to be the hospital parking lot, and not the hospital itself.

On Sunday, Hamas turned down requests by The Times to view any available evidence of the munition it said had struck the hospital, claiming that it had disintegrated beyond recognition.

“The missile has dissolved like salt in the water,” said Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, in a phone interview. “It’s vaporized. Nothing is left.”

Salama Maroof, the head of the Hamas-run government media office, said in a text message: “Who says we’re obligated to present the remnants of every rocket that kills our people? In general, you can come and research and confirm for yourself from the evidence we possess.”

Uh huh. Sure, bud.

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