Former AP Reporter Said AP ‘Wouldn’t Report’ on Hamas Launching Attacks Outside Gaza Office
The Associated Press took care to avoid publishing stories that would reflect negatively on Hamas, a former reporter for the outlet alleged in a 2014 column, even when the terrorist group launched rockets outside the AP’s offices.
“When Hamas’s leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press,” former AP reporter Matti Friedman wrote in a November 2014 column for The Atlantic, which began circulating anew online over the weekend.
Friedman added: “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, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff — and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.) Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. (This too happened; the information comes from multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of these incidents.)”
The Israel Defense Forces destroyed a 12-story office building in the West Bank on Saturday, which contained offices for the AP and al Jazeera, alleging that it was also used by Hamas. AP CEO Gary Pruitt claimed in a memo that employees “narrowly avoided a terrible loss of life,” but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu contested Pruitt in a Sunday interview, telling CBS’ Face the Nation, “One of the, I think, AP journalists said we were lucky to get out. No, you weren’t lucky to get out. It wasn’t luck. It’s because we took special pains to call people in those buildings, to make sure that the premises were vacated.”
The AP responded to Friedman’s claims in a statement at the time they were written. “His arguments have been filled with distortions, half-truths and inaccuracies, both about the recent Gaza war and more distant events,” the outlet said, in part. “His suggestion of AP bias against Israel is false. There’s no ‘narrative’ that says it is Israel that doesn’t want peace; the story of this century-long conflict is more complicated than that.”
In tweets published Sunday, Matti Friedman addressed the attention his 2014 report was receiving.
In my two essays from 2014, I gave multiple examples of the way news organizations like the AP had been compromised by Hamas in Gaza. Contrary to what I’ve seen attributed to me today, I didn’t write that Hamas operated out of the same building, and don’t know if that’s true.
— Matti Friedman (@MattiFriedman) May 16, 2021
“In my two essays from 2014, I gave multiple examples of the way news organizations like the AP had been compromised by Hamas in Gaza,” he wrote. “Contrary to what I’ve seen attributed to me today, I didn’t write that Hamas operated out of the same building, and don’t know if that’s true.”
Update: A spokesperson for the Associated Press flagged the outlet’s 2014 response to Friedman. This story has been updated to include it.
