The Associated Press is taking heat for claiming it had no idea Hamas militants operated at the news agency’s Gaza headquarters destroyed by an Israeli airstrike — as US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said Monday he “has seen no evidence” presented by Israel of the group’s presence in the building.
“We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building,” AP president and CEO Gary Pruitt said in a statement. “This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.”
He said he was “shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza.”
But a 2014 article in The Atlantic written by a journalist in the region described a history between the news agency and Hamas and critics took to social media to cast doubt on Pruitt’s assertion.
“@AP didn’t know about sharing a building w/ Hamas for 15 years?!?” tweeted Gabe Hoffman, producer of the documentary “An Open Secret.”
Noah Pollack, a contributor to the Free Beacon, said in a tweet: “Spoke to a well-placed friend in the IDF just now. The bombed AP office building contained multiple Hamas operations & offices including weapons manufacturing and military intelligence. The building also housed an Islamic Jihad office. And AP’s local reporters knew about it.”
Another user wrote that the AP claim “doesn’t say much for their reporting abilities if they missed a Hamas staging office a floor away.”
Meanwhile, Blinken spoke Monday at a news conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, two days after the Israeli airstrike that destroyed the Al-Jalaa Tower, which housed multiple news outlets including AP.
“Shortly after the strike we did request additional details regarding the justification for it,” Blinken said, but declined to discuss specific intelligence, saying he “will leave it to others to characterize if any information has been shared and our assessment that information.”
But he added: “I have not seen any information provided.”
Israel has said it shared “smoking gun” evidence with Biden administration officials that Hamas was operating out of the building.
The strike destroyed the 12-story building an hour after the Israeli military ordered it evacuated, saying the high-rise was targeted because it was being used by Hamas military intelligence, Fox News reported.
As to whether AP was aware of Hamas involvement with the building, Matti Friedman wrote in his 2014 Atlantic piece: “When Hamas’ leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby — and the AP wouldn’t report it.”
Friedman claimed the Hamas militants would regularly “burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff — and the AP wouldn’t report it.”
Associated Press executive editor Sally Buzbee, who said the wire service has had offices in al-Jalaa Tower for 15 years and was never informed or had any indication that Hamas might be in the building, called for an independent investigation into the airstrike, saying the Israeli government has yet to provide clear evidence supporting the attack.
“We are in a conflict situation,” Buzbee said. “We do not take sides in that conflict. We heard Israelis say they have evidence; we don’t know what that evidence is. We think it’s appropriate at this point for there to be an independent look at what happened yesterday — an independent investigation.”
Separately, Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders asked the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel’s attack as a possible war crime.
The group, known by its French acronym, RSF, said it had strong reason to believe that the IDF’s “intentional targeting of media organizations and intentional destruction of their equipment” could violate one of the court’s statutes.
It said Israel’s actions serve “to reduce, if not neutralize, the media’s capacity to inform the public.”
RSF asked the court, based in the Dutch city of The Hague, to include the recent attacks in a war crimes investigation opened in March into Israel’s practices in Palestinian territories.
IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said Israel was compiling evidence for the US but declined to commit to providing it within the next couple of days.
“We’re in the middle of fighting. That’s in process and I’m sure in due time that information will be presented,” he said Sunday.
President Biden spoke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday, a discussion that included the bombing of the building, and Israel showed Biden and other US officials the intelligence behind their decision, the Jerusalem Post reported Sunday.
“We showed them the smoking gun proving Hamas worked out of that building,” the newspaper reported, citing a source close to Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi. “I understand they found the explanation satisfactory.”
With Post wires
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