The analysis compared photos and videos taken on the same day and location by wire service photojournalists in Gaza.
By HonestReporting
At the outset of the Israel-Hamas war, Gaza photojournalists working for international media operated near Hamas terrorists in Shifa Hospital but excluded them from their photos, according to a visual analysis by HonestReporting.
The analysis, which reveals an alarming photo bias, focused on one day of coverage — October 11, 2023 — and showed that tens of Hamas terrorists were present at the hospital, where they kept a watchful eye over the media and managed the arrival of wounded into the emergency room.
The terrorists were clearly seen in wire service videos and social media posts from that day.
But they don’t appear in the still photos distributed by Reuters, AP, or The New York Times, whose photojournalists at the site chose to leave the terrorists out of the frame and include only the wounded and dead.
Videos Vs. Photos
The analysis compared photos and videos taken on the same day and location by wire service photojournalists in Gaza. That’s because a picture may be worth a thousand words, but one can only see what’s inside the frame.
Videos, however, are dynamic. Video cameras can tilt and pan and reveal what’s outside the frame of a frozen still photo. It’s also harder to edit people out of videos.
Therefore, after we came across this Facebook reel from photojournalist Mariam Dagga (who currently works for AP), we decided to compare photos and videos of Shifa Hospital that were published by the mainstream media.
That’s because the reel shows the hospital entrance was infested with Hamas forces (circled in red on the video), while dozens of journalists stood by:
We found another angle of this video in a TRT X post, which clarified it had been taken on October 11, 2023 — several days after Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel and abducted hundreds into Gaza — some of them straight into the Shifa hospital, where the terror group had an underground tunnel infrastructure.