Ten days into Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, a few seconds of footage showing a projectile exploding in the night sky has become the center of a furious debate.
Israel claimed the clip, captured by an Tel Aviv Tribune live broadcast at 6:59:50 p.m. on October 17, showed that a dud Palestinian rocket was responsible for the deadly explosion at al-Ahli Arab Hospital which happened five seconds later.
Investigations by Tel Aviv Tribune and the New York Times showed that the projectile in question had nothing to do with the hospital tragedy. But, by then, the theory that the explosion had been caused by a Palestinian rocket had come to life, supported by open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers and commentators drawn to groupthink and prejudice of confirmation.
It is important. Before the conflict, OSINT journalism was already well established, bringing new rigor to reporting on events in countries like Cameroon, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen. Organizations like Bellingcat and Forensic Architecture have been praised for restoring the primacy of fact over opinion, helping to expose war crimes.
In Gaza, the trend has reached a peak. International media, excluded from the conflict zone, increasingly rely on open sources, including footage from Tel Aviv Tribune, the only global media organization with a constant presence in Gaza throughout the war.
There have been notable OSINT breakthroughs – including by Tel Aviv Tribune’s fact-checking unit, Sanad, which refuted Israel’s claim that a Hamas tunnel lies beneath the al-Qaeda hospital. -Shifa, and showed how Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza on Israel’s instructions were killed while using very “safe” routes. » that Israeli forces told them to take.
But, as the al-Ahli hospital episode illustrates, the war also presented new challenges for this growing sector. To understand how OSINT practitioners have stumbled in this war, Tel Aviv Tribune spoke to Idrees Ahmad, deputy editor of New Lines Magazine and director of journalism at the University of Essex.
Tel Aviv Tribune: You’ve written about how open source research has reinvigorated war reporting. It appears to have been particularly prominent in Gaza, with open source experts attracting enormous attention from the general public online. Your thoughts?
Idrees Ahmad: The OSINT landscape has changed a lot over the years. In the case of Syria, the OSINT community was doing very rigorous work associated with unblocking war crimes investigations. But in Gaza, the opposite is happening. We’ve seen anonymous accounts post speculative information, giving it the shape and aesthetic of OSINT, but without the rigor. This information spreads quickly, becoming a sort of groupthink, making it very difficult for anyone to swim against it.
Tel Aviv Tribune: Let’s unpack what happened with al-Ahli. Why is this remarkable?
Ahmad: Al-Ahli was important. Importantly, this happened against the backdrop of many similar attacks on hospitals. The justification was that the hospitals were used either to launch attacks or as Hamas headquarters. Interestingly, the media immediately assumed that Israel had done it.
Tel Aviv Tribune: Yes. Can you describe how the tide then turned?
Ahmad: It started with a few anonymous OSINT accounts, which had the appearance of the precision and rigor associated with OSINT. Thus, the Tel Aviv Tribune live feed showing the projectile exploding in mid-air was analyzed, suggesting that the coordinates of this rocket were right above the hospital, which clearly supported the theory according to which a Palestinian rocket had exploded in the air and then caused the explosion on the ground. Another took separate images, reaching the same conclusion.
Tel Aviv Tribune: Wasn’t there also a lot of attention on the OSINT visuals from the hospital parking lot, with the crater looking too small for an airstrike?
Ahmad: Yes, after the first anonymous accounts exposed their theory, suddenly everyone started jumping into this theory. speculate that the Israeli version of events was accurate. This sparked a sort of groupthink where everyone engaged in speculation and deductive logic to support this theory without any physical evidence.
Tel Aviv Tribune: Can you be more specific? How did groupthink develop?
Ahmad: Yes, obviously none of us witnessed the strike directly. But we do know that OSINT people’s perceived rigor became the basis for error-based theory.
One of the things that happens when so-called experts are cited is that their reputation is tied to a theory, which is then endorsed by other experts. So it got to the point that a respected figure in the OSINT community shared this Wall Street Journal video that claimed to have multiple angles on the rocket and said very conclusively that it was the one that caused the explosion. And as the New York Times investigation proved, that was certainly not the case.
Tel Aviv Tribune: Yes, it was major, wasn’t it? The New York Times said the “rocket” was not Palestinian at all. It was an object launched from near an Iron Dome center in Israel that exploded a few kilometers from al-Ahli. Surely a reason to go back to the drawing board?
Ahmad: The fact is, once the New York Times published and debunked the Israeli claim that the projectile in the Tel Aviv Tribune video caused the explosion, people began looking for new rationalizations to get away with it. stick to their conclusion. This is the essence of conspiracy theory.
Tel Aviv Tribune: So what is the result of all this?
Ahmad: This raises serious questions about these very confident judgments. There was no rush to admit that they had been royally wrong. Or maybe withhold judgment until there’s an investigation or something. AP, for example, had released its own open source investigation, essentially regurgitating existing theories, using the same group of enthusiastic experts. Once the story collapsed, it simply turned to a new group of experts – smaller and more obscure – willing to endorse the “failed rocket” thesis.
The fact is that this has succeeded in creating a fog of misinformation. It is obvious that Israel was attacking hospitals at that time. But instead, we now have this big question mark over this single event. So if there is any doubt around this one, that somehow makes all the other incidents moot.
Tel Aviv Tribune: So Al-Ahli has become a sort of barometer to know which side should be believed? Do you think the pendulum has simply swung the other way?
Ahmad: Yes, and even the New York Times went further than necessary. I mean, their investigation was solid. But even they felt obliged to pay lip service to the theory of the rocket’s failure. They didn’t need to speculate. Perhaps because they were debunking this theory, they felt that they had to make some sort of concession to this theory. So they continued to say that a Palestinian rocket could be responsible, referring to images of a barrage of Palestinian rockets fired into the area, emphasizing that the aftermath did not resemble an Israeli airstrike and that Hamas had not produced no evidence.
Tel Aviv Tribune: So we have this element of clarity, that the projectile in the video has nothing to do with the explosion, and then we have all this noise? But what about the Gaza Health Ministry’s claims of 500 deaths, which were later revised? Do you think this has fueled attempts to discredit Palestinian demands?
Ahmad: Yes, there was a revision, but it was still a pretty significant number. What’s interesting about this is that this (Israeli) narrative (about Palestinian claims of deaths) was later itself contradicted by a senior US official, who said that estimates of total deaths could actually be higher than what the Gaza Health Ministry reported. .
Tel Aviv Tribune: So will we ever find out the truth about al-Ahli?
Ahmad: Creating a fog has always been Israel’s key strategy. I mean, there are people who still insist that Israel never killed Muhammad al-Durrah. Twenty years later, it is still said that the video of the child being protected by his father was staged or that he was killed by Palestinian fire. Over time, physical (evidence) often perishes and memories deteriorate, so that no one can then confirm or deny what happened. And you know, the same thing happened here. Even if someone is assigned to investigate in the future, where will they find reliable evidence?
Tel Aviv Tribune: What is the main takeaway from all this?
Ahmad: I understand why Israel would want to obfuscate; or why anonymous stories of dubious provenance could sow misinformation. What worries me is the groupthink infecting the OSINT community where, instead of questioning erroneous beliefs, some have found creative ways to maintain dominant orthodoxies. There is a particular need within the OSINT community to guard against infiltration by state actors.
The goal of propaganda is to get people to act in accordance with the propagandist’s wishes. Sometimes the goal is simply to obfuscate to alleviate your audience’s cognitive dissonance. Israel did not need to prove anything because, like any conflicting party, they have an enthusiastic public predisposed to believe whatever they are told. So they’re just giving the public something to counter allegations of mass atrocities.
This is not a tactic exclusive to the Israelis. A few years ago, Seymour Hersh wrote an article in Die Welt, refuting accusations that the Syrian government attacked Khan Sheikhoun with sarin gas. Just as the Israelis used a fake audio intercept purporting to confirm Palestinian responsibility for the attack, Hersh’s story on Syria also included a transcript of an alleged conversation between rebels planning the attack. Both have been debunked and become a subject of satire. But the fact is that supporters of Israel and the Syrian regime took advantage of it.
Tel Aviv Tribune: So we believe what we want to believe?
Ahmad: If you are ideologically predisposed to believe something, your threshold for skepticism becomes very low. You simply accept.