NYT under fire for casting doubt on whether Israelis were ‘victims of Oct 7’

New York Times removes Oct. 7 victimhood line after backlash, blames ‘‘editing error.’’

By World Israel News Staff

The New York Times removed a line from an article about Israel and the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack after critics accused the newspaper of casting doubt on whether Israelis were victims of the massacre, with the Times attributing the wording to an “editing error.”

The disputed sentence appeared in a September 14 report by Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner about “NAZA,” a controversial documentary film regarding collateral damage during the Gaza war.

Discussing Israeli attitudes toward the war and responsibility for the failures preceding the Hamas attack, the original article stated: “But Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.”

The sentence immediately drew criticism online, with detractors arguing that the wording presented an established fact — that Israeli civilians were victims of the Hamas-led assault — as merely a matter of Israelis’ perception.

Hamas-led terrorists murdered some 1,200 people in southern Israel during the attack, most of them civilians, and abducted roughly 250 people into Gaza. The attack included killings at homes and communities near Gaza and at the Nova music festival.

Media researcher Eitan Fischberger was among the first to draw widespread attention to the sentence, posting a screenshot on X and asking: “What the f**k is this, @nytimes?”

His post was subsequently viewed more than a million times.

Tamar Sternthal, director of the Israel office of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, similarly challenged the phrasing.

“That Israelis are victims of the Oct. 7 massacre is a matter of Israeli perception, and not simply fact?” she wrote, before asking: “If they’re not the Oct. 7 victims, then what are they?”

CAMERA later said the sentence wrongly implied that Israeli victimhood was somehow disputed.

“Intelligence failures don’t negate civilian suffering,” the organization said, adding that news coverage should distinguish between debate over Israel’s response to the attack and the status of those targeted on October 7.

CNN commentator Scott Jennings also reacted to the passage, writing: “No words for this abomination.”

Following the criticism, the Times deleted the sentence and appended an editors’ note explaining that the wording had not conveyed what the newspaper intended.

“Because of an editing error,” the note said, the earlier version had “inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception.”

The Times said the sentence had instead been intended to describe Israeli perceptions of the government’s military response to October 7.

The Times’ communications department also publicly acknowledged the change Wednesday, reproducing the editors’ note and confirming that the sentence had been removed.

The controversy came only days after a separate debate over the Times’ coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

A peer-reviewed study by Yale School of Management professor Edieal Pinker, published September 7 in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, analyzed 1,559 Times news articles published between October 7, 2023 and June 7, 2024.

Pinker concluded that the coverage contained a dominant framing that assigned “near-exclusive agency and responsibility to Israel” while diminishing Hamas’s continuing role in the conflict.

The study said Israeli casualties after October 7, Hamas combatant deaths and subsequent Palestinian violence received comparatively little attention, while personal accounts of Palestinian suffering appeared far more frequently than comparable accounts of Israeli suffering.

The New York Times rejected the broader accusation of systematic bias.

“The advocates behind multiple studies on media bias cherry-pick data that supports their beliefs while ignoring any evidence to the contrary,” the newspaper said in response to the research.

“We remain open to good-faith disagreement,” the Times added, “but we will not let critics or advocacy campaigns move us away from independent reporting.”

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