The Times of New York, a day in the life of Abed Salama, during the aftermath of the Hamas attack on September 11, 2001

“The early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified,” it read. The paper said it would re-examine its protocols and safeguards for covering breaking news in light of the incident.

Israel subsequently denied being at fault and blamed an errant rocket launch by the Palestinian faction group Islamic Jihad, which has in turn denied responsibility. American and other international officials have said their evidence indicates that the rocket came from Palestinian fighter positions.

The Times continued to update its coverage as more information became available, reporting the disputed claims of responsibility and noting that the death toll might be lower than initially reported. The headline and other text on the website reflected on the scope of the explosion and the dispute over responsibility.

The Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation and been more explicit about what information could be verified during the sensitive time of conflict. Newsroom leaders are looking at procedures for the use of the biggest headline in the digital report to figure out what additional safeguards are necessary.

The impact of Nathan Thrall’s new book, ” A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” was felt more than a month before the mass kidnappings committed by Hamas lit the Middle East on fire. The book is important with people still not knowing what is going on in this conflict.

The man told me he was pleased to be asked that question. “Because that was absolutely the ambition of the book, to depict real people” rather than villains and saints.

Several pro-Palestinian speakers have had events either scrapped or relocated in recent weeks. On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen was supposed to speak at 92NY, a major literary venue in Manhattan formerly known as the 92nd Street Y. That afternoon, however, the talk was abruptly called off, apparently because of an open letter Nguyen had signed about the “violence and destruction in Palestine,” as well as because of his past support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. The talk was held at a downtown bookstore. The live screenings of the Boston Palestine Film Festival werenixed after it moved online. The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights conference has been canceled by the hotel in Houston.

I don’t like the fact that the statement is only about Hamas’s killings of Israelis. In calling off his Friday evening appearance, 92NY, a Jewish organization, was playing by rules much of the left established, privileging sensitivity to traumatized communities ahead of the robust exchange of ideas. The creators of a censorious atmosphere are not the only ones who create a place for Zionism to feel intimidated and silenced. A professor at the University of California Davis is under investigation for a post on his social media platform, in which he called for the targeting of “Zionist journalists” who had houses with addresses, and included an ax and three drops.

Nevertheless, a commitment to free speech, like a commitment to human rights, shouldn’t depend on others reciprocating; such commitments are worth trying to maintain even in the face of unfairness. One of the benefits of art is that it keeps our minds and hearts open so that we can see beyond the hatred of war and understand that we are all humans.

92NY would have been an ideal place to ask him why the statement he signed didn’t live up to his words. The leaders who need to model it are the ones in the fraught and bitter moments of dialogue.

The Ezra Klein Show: Perspectives on Israel’s Warped Past, Present, and Future, and Their Contributions to the Jewish Left

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

Grief moves slowly and war moves quickly. The first week of the conflict was not over, with Israel bombarding Gaza with more than 6,000 bombs. More than 5,000 Palestinians have been killed and many more injured. There can be no way to reconcile what is happening and what needs to be felt.

My approach will be to try and cover it from many different perspectives, but I want to start with the one that is closest to me, which has felt particularly tricky recently: that of the Jewish left. So I invited Spencer Ackerman and Peter Beinart on to the show.

He is a columnist and author for The Nation and has a newsletter called “forever wars” that he writes about. Peter Beinart is an editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, the author of the Beinart Notebook newsletter and a professor of journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. And they’ve each taken up angles I think are particularly important right now: the way that Sept. 11 should inform both Israel’s response and the need to empower different kinds of actors and tactics if we want to see a different future for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

The audiences’ perception of fairness in the media affects how much they trust it. It is possible that speed may matter to readers and viewers. Accuracy and fairness still matter more, especially when stakes are so high.

The Gaza Assault Campaign: Israeli Atrocity, Hamas, and the Palestinian Dialogue of Human Rights in the First International Conference on Human Rights

The call was put out by Physicians for Human Rights for the protection of civilian life and an investigation into the blast on the day of it. It didn’t project blame.

Last week, The Washington Free Beacon’s Drew Holden documented a series of prominent news outlets and public figures organizations that appeared to rely on Hamas’ claims as authoritative with little or scant acknowledgement of how little had been verified before publication.

For its part, the Israeli government has been accused by human rights groups of hitting civilian targets in the past. And its credibility has also been challenged: For instance, the Israeli military initially denied that one of its soldiers had fired the shot last year that killed the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh of Al Jazeera.

The Times’ selection of journalists has come under fire in recent days. An Israeli diplomat chastised the paper for employing Soliman Hijjy as a freelance videographer in Gaza to document the conflict. On numerous occasions over the past 11 years, Hijjy has praised Adolf Hitler or invoked the Nazi leader in social media postings. A spokesperson for the Times says the paper reviewed those “problematic” postings last year, when the issue was first raised, and took actions “to ensure he understood our concerns and could adhere to our standards.”

Unlike in some other war zones, such as in Ukraine, it’s nearly impossible for outside reporters to get into Gaza, even from Israel. Most news outlets are either covering it remotely or relying on local journalists whose families are themselves at risk from Israeli strikes.

The next time there’s a story about an alleged Israeli atrocity in Gaza, readers deserve to know how the information was acquired and from whom. It is bad that Palestinians are tyrannized by Hamas. We don’t need it misinforming the rest of us.

Not only is Hamas a political movement, it is much more than that. It is deemed by the U.S. and the European Union to be a terrorist organization. It just unleashed the most deadly attack in the history of Israel, with over 1,400 people dead and more than 200 people taken hostage.

The Journey Through Hell: The Case of Judith and Natalie Liftz, a Gazan Women’s Hostage for the Sept. 7 Attack on Israel

The BBC later issued a statement citing the full breadth of its coverage but saying that the degree of speculation in his report was, in retrospect, wrong.

The stakes cannot be higher. The sources can prove unreliable. There aren’t often many concrete facts. Readers reward publications that quickly share information.

The 85-year-old woman who was freed after being held hostage in Gaza for 17 days described how she was beaten and taken away on a motorcycle.

Hamas has released four hostages, including Judith and Natalie Raanan, American-Israeli citizens who were freed last week. Ms. Lifshitz is the first released hostage to speak publicly about her ordeal.

On the day after her release, Ms. Liftz sat in a wheelchair in a hospital and told reporters she had gone through hell.

She was freed along with Nurit Cooper, 79, on Monday and transferred from Hamas custody to Israeli forces via the International Committee for the Red Cross and Egypt. Both of their husbands are still being held hostage in Gaza.

Her account of the tunnels offered a glimpse of the difficulties facing Israel as it weighs whether and how to launch a ground invasion of Gaza to eliminate Hamas, which led the devastating Oct. 7 attack against Israel.

Hamas has built a labyrinth of underground passages in Gaza for its fighters, military analysts said, complicating both Israel’s anticipated ground operation and any attempt to rescue the hostages.

Abducted, abused and neglected by the Israeli army after the September 11 attack in Tikritshah, Gaza: A memoir of a young woman

“Many people stormed our homes, they beat people, some of them they abducted, like me,” Ms. Lifshitz said. “It made no difference, they abducted the elderly and the young.”

She said her kidnappers hauled her onto a motorcycle and beat her painfully in the ribs, making it hard for her to breathe, and also took away her watch. They drove off through the fields surrounding Nir Oz.

They took her through the network of tunnels to the large hall where about 25 people were. She said that they separated five people from her kibbutz into their own room, where they were monitored by guards and a medic.

Ms. Lifshitz said that she and others were relatively well taken care of, given medicine and the same food as their captors. Fearing they’d get a disease, her abductors worked to make the area safe for her and doctors would visit occasionally. “They treated us gently and fulfilled all of our needs,” she said.

Ms. Lifshitz had criticized the Israeli military at times for ignoring warnings of the threat to towns near Gaza. The Israeli military admitted after the attack that they didn’t live up to the mission of protecting Israel’s citizens.

During the previous weeks Palestinians had fired balloons near the Gaza border fence causing fires in southern Israel.

Hamas, Ramallah, Nablus: a Palestinian journalist’s story about the occupation of the Gazan border and its investigation by the Palestinian Press Association

The people I talked with were senior Hamas leaders in Gaza, officials in Ramallah and retired terrorists in Nablus. We developed a friendship. He called me in panic because of something I wrote in The Wall Street Journal that annoyed the officials in the Palestinian Authority. He said that the goon squad paid for an admonitory visit in his family’s apartment, and that he wanted to take the story down. I told him that it wasn’t a question. It was never safe for us to work together again.

I will not criticize the media to others. But Western audiences will never grasp the nature of the current conflict until they internalize one central fact. Political and military officials sometimes lie, but journalists don’t live in fear of midnight raids on the door, and often tell the stories they want to tell.

The Palestinian territories, by contrast, are republics of fear — fear of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and of Hamas in Gaza. Palestinians are just as honest as people in other parts of the world. But, as in any tyrannical or fanatical regime, those who stray from the approved line put themselves at serious risk.

Or take the case of Hani al-Agha, a Palestinian journalist who was jailed for weeks and tortured by Hamas in 2019. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate condemned al-Agha’s arrest and torture as an attempt to intimidate journalists, who are subject to repressive police authority. Yet, outside of a few news releases, the story received almost no coverage in the wider media.

The news media still needs fixers and freelancers to tell the full story in war zones. But people consuming that media should know the threats, pressures and cultures that these journalists operate in — not because we necessarily distrust them individually, but because we appreciate the dangerous circumstances in which they find themselves.