New York Times building. Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images
A key source named by The New York Times as an expert helping to verify the authenticity of internal Hamas documents in a major report in October told Drop Site News he had raised concerns about the veracity of the documents in his interviews with the Times. Israel provided the paper with alleged Hamas meeting minutes as part of its campaign to directly link Iran to the planning of the October 7 attacks.
Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, whom the paper described as “a Hamas member and a former fighter in its military wing who is now an analyst based in Istanbul,” said a Times reporter only permitted him to review one page of the 30 pages of documents the Times asked him to verify. Al-Awawdeh, according to WhatsApp messages seen by Drop Site News, told a Times reporter that without seeing more of the document “it is hard to judge” its authenticity.
“I asked for the other pages and he said he couldn’t send them to me but he said he could read them to me at a later time and I told him that wouldn’t work, if I could see the pages, it would be preferable,” al-Awawdeh told Drop Site. The Times never provided al-Awawdeh with additional pages and subsequently cited him in an October 12 story as the only named source for its verification of what it described as “Minutes of Hamas’s secret meetings” that “provide a detailed record of the planning for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.”
Notably, the Times did not address Drop Site’s questions about the authenticity of the documents in response to a request for comment. The story “involved multiple reporters speaking to numerous people in order to understand, corroborate and contextualize the documents referenced,” Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said in a statement. “This work did not just interpret the sensitive documents themselves but also reported from multiple angles on the real-life events and entities involved. It’s an exhaustive and deeply-reported piece of independent journalism. Mr. al-Awawdeh was just one of the numerous people consulted in the course of reporting to offer context, and was not the sole or even primary means of understanding the contents of the documents.” The Times, however, stated that it consulted al-Awawdeh specifically to assess their authenticity.
This episode, along with other reports published in the Times and other major U.S. and international news organizations, raises serious questions about the extent to which powerful media organizations have permitted Israel to launder its agenda in Gaza. Throughout the past 14 months, news organizations have crafted stories based on unverified Israeli assertions and “intelligence” that have bolstered Israel’s strategic messaging and propaganda campaigns that often accompany its escalation of brutality and killing in Gaza.
Over the weekend, the Israeli military killed at least 63 people in bombings it carried out against two schools that were housing thousands of displaced Palestinians. The Khalil Oweida School in Beit Hanoun and the Ahmed bin Abdul Aziz School in Khan Younis were both run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, the main international organization providing aid to the Palestinians of Gaza.“Civilians were hit as they were sleeping, including women and children. They were not warned by the Israeli military before the attack,” Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Abu Azzoum, said, reporting on the Khan Younis attack. “Some of the bodies were shredded to pieces due to the scale of the attack in question.” The Israeli military alleged that the Khan Younis school, which was teeming with displaced civilians, served as a Hamas command and control center—a claim that was then repeated in news stories on the strike.
Israel did not release any actual evidence to support its claim, but the thin pretext on which it justified the deadly strikes on UNRWA schools had already been planted in major international news organizations for months. Last week, The New York Times published a major article headlined, “Records Seized by Israel Show Hamas Presence in U.N. Schools,” alleging that at least 24 UNRWA employees working as educators in schools run by the UN agency in Gaza were members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad and that nearly all of the UNRWA personnel linked to Hamas were fighters in the group’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades. The paper based the claims on “secret Hamas military plans that show that the Qassam Brigades regarded schools and other civilian facilities as ‘the best obstacles to protect the resistance’ in the group’s asymmetric war with Israel.” The Times story does not mention that Israel’s previous allegations that UNRWA is a front group for Hamas have been repeatedly debunked.
In a statement to Drop Site News, an UNRWA spokesperson pointed to the fact that the Times admits it did not independently authenticate the alleged records. “These articles can only be seen as feeding into a blanket claim that UNRWA is a terrorist organization, something that is unheard of in the history of the UN,” said UNRWA spokesperson Tamara Alrifai. “We have had several instances since the war started in Gaza with a few reputable media outlets covering the claims against UNRWA in an utterly unprofessional and mostly irresponsible way, putting the lives of our own staff at risk while they are racing against time to distribute food, manage shelters and fix water pumps during the fighting.”
The Times wrote it could not authenticate the records provided to the paper directly by the Israeli military, but instead justified publishing their claims by saying that the documents “bear similarities with other Hamas records that The Times has examined.” Drop Site asked the Times which previous Hamas documents it was referring to and Stadtlander did not reply.
“Our reporters sought multiple perspectives and on-the-ground corroboration in order to provide context,” Stadtlander stated, again declining to address the central issue of whether the documents about UNRWA—which were touted in the headline—were properly verified. “As UNRWA was the subject of this reporting, our reporters sought their comment and detailed the scope of the claims surrounding them. As you can see in the piece, we included comments from current and former UNRWA leaders, and tried to contact current staff for their perspectives, though none responded to our reporters. Again, this was an exhaustive piece of independent journalism that The Times stands behind.”
This lethal playbook—Israel providing unverified intelligence to news organizations as part of its campaign to justify attacks on civilian sites—has been employed repeatedly over the past 14 months as UNRWA facilities have been systematically targeted and attacked by the Israeli military. Nearly 200 UNRWA facilities have been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN and over 250 UNRWA staff have been killed. More than 85 percent of UNRWA schools in Gaza have been hit, some completely destroyed and others severely damaged— most of them were being used as shelters for displaced Palestinians when they were targeted by Israel. In the month of November alone, the agency documented 21 attacks on UNRWA schools in Gaza.
Throughout the Gaza war, Israel has made extensive claims about Hamas’s use of civilian facilities that later turned out to be dubious, exaggerated, or outright false—often around the same time that Israel itself is being heavily scrutinized for its mass killing of Palestinian civilians and its deliberate attacks against hospitals, schools, camps for displaced persons and other protected sites in Gaza. This is especially true of UNRWA, which was established in 1949 with the explicit mandate to protect Palestinians violently expelled from their homes and land by the creation of the Israeli state and which Israel has seen as an obstacle to its decades-long agenda of colonial settlement and expansion.
The aftermath of an Israeli attack on an UNRWA school housing displaced families in Khan Younis, Gaza on December 16, 2024. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images.
The War Against UNRWA
In January, on the same day the International Court of Justice ruled that South Africa’s case against Israel for the Gaza genocide could proceed, Israel publicly accused 12 of UNRWA’s 30,000 employees of participating in the October 7 attacks. Israel then presented the U.S. and other governments with “intelligence” it claimed to have obtained from the interrogations of Palestinian captives, seized cell phones, signals intercepts, and from documents Israel claims it recovered from the bodies of Palestinians killed in Gaza. The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other major news organizations quickly spread Israel’s charge that 10 percent of UNRWA’s 12,000-person local staff in Gaza had unspecified “links” to Hamas.
Semafor reported in August that the Journal had never actually viewed the intelligence underlying the Israeli dossier itself, that unnamed WSJ journalists had tried and failed to independently corroborate the 10% claim, and that the Journal had never been given a list of names of the accused which they could attempt to verify. The paper has nonetheless stood by its report. “The fact that the Israeli claims haven’t been backed up by solid evidence doesn’t mean our reporting was inaccurate or misleading, that we have walked it back or that there is a correctable error here,” Elena Cherney, the chief news editor, wrote in an email obtained by Semafor. The publication noted that the reporting by the WSJ and the Times on Israel’s “dossier,” the full contents of which neither paper saw, constituted “a one-two punch that had an immediate impact on the agency.”
The U.S. responded to Israel’s unverified allegations by immediately announcing it was suspending all funding to UNRWA, with another 15 nations following suit. Since then, all 15 countries have resumed support to the U.N. agency following several probes that turned up no evidence to substantiate Israel’s claims, leaving the U.S. as the sole holdout.
“UNRWA does not receive these documents that the government of Israel has shared with the media, diplomats or other entities,” said Alrifai, the UNRWA spokesperson. “We repeatedly requested additional information from the government of Israel without avail, to enable us to investigate internally. We have really struggled to get information from the government of Israel. UNRWA shares the lists/names of its staff in the occupied Palestinian territory with the government of Israel every single year, so it is astonishing that a country with some of the highest intelligence and military security in the world has not come back to a UN agency with concerns about staff until the war started.”
Two weeks after Israel’s allegations were first disseminated to governments and media outlets, some news organizations reported that the underlying materials did not back up Israel’s claims. Britain’s Channel 4 said the summary dossier provided by Israel “contains no evidence to support Israel’s explosive new claim” that UNRWA employed scores of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members. CNN concluded that the materials Israel provided news media did “not provide evidence to support its claims.”
Israel’s efforts to legitimize its attacks against UNRWA occur against the backdrop of a sustained information warfare campaign that has seen Israel achieve success in securing major news coverage for some of its most incendiary narratives. In some cases, news outlets adopt Israel’s interpretation or do not rigorously vet its claims. There is also legitimate reason to question the extent to which Israel may have fabricated or manipulated purported Hamas documents to serve its political or war agenda.
In July, Germany’s largest newspaper Bild and the UK-based Jewish Chronicle published stories based on what the publications said were internal Hamas documents claiming to show that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar did not want a ceasefire in Gaza and that Hamas was only engaging in negotiations as a tool of psychological warfare. The documents turned out to be fabricated. Four Israelis, including an aide to Netanyahu, were subsequently arrested on charges of falsifying and distributing the documents. The fake documents also claimed Sinwar was preparing a plan to smuggle himself and some Israeli hostages through the Philadelphia corridor and into Egypt. At the time Netanyahu was refusing to withdraw Israeli forces from the area and asserting that Israel must retain control of the corridor while falsely claiming Hamas, not Netanyahu, was sabotaging ceasefire negotiations.
“I raised doubts”
The Times’s October story, which appeared on the paper’s front page, also played into an important and timely narrative for Israel. Based on 30 pages of what Israeli officials told the Times were internal minutes from 10 secret Hamas meetings, the Times claimed the documents revealed a determination by Yahya Sinwar and other Hamas leaders “to persuade Hamas’s allies, Iran and Hezbollah, to join the assault or at least commit to a broader fight with Israel if Hamas staged a surprise cross-border raid.” The documents allegedly revealed that as part of this effort Hamas delayed executing the Al Aqsa Flood offensive and that in July 2023, three months before the October 7 attacks, a “senior Iranian commander told Hamas that Iran and Hezbollah were supportive in principle, but needed more time to prepare.” These allegations, which al-Awawdeh expressed skepticism about, were published in the most influential newspaper in the U.S. and fed into Netanyahu’s campaign to directly link Iran to the October 7 plot.
The Times claimed it “assessed the documents’ authenticity by sharing some of their contents with members of and experts close to Hamas.” The only named source assessing the documents was al-Awawdeh. The Times report said al-Awawdeh “was familiar with some of the details described in the documents and that keeping organized notes was consistent with the group’s general practices.” A second unnamed Palestinian analyst “confirmed certain details as well as general structural operations of Hamas that aligned with the documents.” The Times story did not cite a single source other than the Israeli military who asserted with certainty the documents were genuine. In a statement provided to the Times, Iran’s Mission to the UN said the allegations were based on “fabricated documents.”
Al-Awawdeh told Drop Site that the Times only shared one page out of 30 with him. After looking it over, he said he told Times reporter Adam Rasgon that there was a particular phrase in the document that he suspected was a translation and that the person who wrote it did not sound native in Arabic. “I told [Rasgon], “This looks translated, it doesn’t look real. This phrase is out of context, it is not used, and its meaning is not clear,’” al-Awawdeh told Drop Site. The phrase in question roughly translates to English as “air cover.” “I told him it might be translated from another language, that whomever wrote it translated it literally but it is not used in the modern Arabic context.” Al-Awawdeh also shared a voice note with Drop Site he says he sent to Rasgon where he raises his doubts.
Al-Awawdeh asked to see the other pages, noting that the unusual phrase “might be something that is clarified in the preceding pages or the pages after,” but Rasgon refused, he said. Al-Awawdeh said he told Rasgon that “the appearance of the document and the things outlined in it, seem like it could be real—but it doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been forged because he could have gotten hold of the minutes of a meeting and someone changed what was in it. And I raised doubts about this phrase within the document.”
Al-Awadeh also said that before sending the one page, Rasgon asked him if he thought anyone outside of Gaza would have known about the plans for the surprise Hamas attack. “I don’t think so, because according to my understanding, the entire world was surprised, including the other parts of Hamas, al-Awadeh says he told Rasgon. The Times article alleged that Hamas originally planned its attack against Israel for the Fall of 2022 and internally used the codename, “the big project.” Al-Awawdeh said Rasgon asked him if that phrase referred specifically to the plans for October 7. “I told him no. Certainly the resistance has agreed on general plans for confrontations with the occupation and the circumstances in which they might confront the occupation, and those are an attack on the al-Aqsa Mosque. But was there talk about a battle like the Al Aqsa Flood initiated by the resistance? I didn’t hear about it and I don’t think anyone talked about this.”
The Times did not answer Drop Site’s question about why the article did not reflect any of these concerns or caveats from its only named source on the documents. Instead, the story still states without equivocation that the documents had been verified by the paper—and that they “represent a breakthrough in understanding Hamas.”
By SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS AND JEREMY SCAHILL
DEC 17, 2024
Nicholas Rodelo contributed research.