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A. When information comes from the Israeli Defence Forces, it is to be doubted, by default, until and unless it can be unimpeachably verified, by at least several sources.B. When the information comes from Hamas, or any of its surrogates, like the Hamas Ministry of Health, or the UNRWA, it is to be accepted, by default, unless there is immediate, clear and unambiguous debunking of the claim. Even then, even if it is debunked, the debunking will be reported at the bottom of page 57.
Re "B" above, the most recent and egregious example of this was the photo on the front page of the New York Times. A Gazan woman is holding a severely malnourished infant in her arms, just skin and bones. The story was that this child was starving to death in his mother's arms because Israel was withholding food.
It turned out that this was a photo of a boy who was suffering from a birth defect of severe, and incurable, Muscular Dystrophy. His younger brother, who had been cropped from the photo, was in perfectly good shape, when the full photo was revealed. The New York Times had carried the photo on its main digital page, "The New York Times dot com", with its 55 Million subscribers.
When the NYT were forced to retract the photo, they did so on their "NYT PR" page, which has 55 thousand subscribers. IOW, only 0.1% of the readers of the original, and horrific photo, would have seen the retraction. Of course, the NYT can say "we retracted the photo as soon as we knew it was fake".
What the NYT did NOT do -- nor did the many western media outlets that also carried the photo -- was to try to verify the photo before publishing. They didn't do so because it had come from Hamas, and ... see "B" above.
