Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett criticized the media during his appearance on CNN, accusing them of showing bias in their reporting of the Gaza hospital strike.
“There are no two sides to this hospital [attack]. Either it was bombed by Israel, or it was targeted by someone else on the Palestinian side,” Bennett told host Anderson Cooper.
“If two people come and say — one says it’s raining outside and the other says it’s dry, you don’t bring the quotes of both sides. You just G–d—n open the window and look whether it’s raining or not. That’s what we did and this hospital, in fact, it’s a parking lot, was hit definitely, 100% by Islamic Jihad barrage,” he bluntly added.
He claimed that multiple pieces of evidence, including videos from different angles and ballistics data, indicated that Israel was not responsible for the strike.
Additionally, he mentioned intercepted radio messages from two Hamas terrorists suggesting that Islamic Jihad was behind the attack. Bennett argued that if it were another nation fighting Hamas, the media might not have been as quick to accept Hamas’s version of events.
“So, Anderson, with all due respect there aren’t two sides to this. Not everything is two sides, and I have a feeling that if it wasn’t the state of Israel then I think the global media would have behaved very differently,” he lamented.
President Biden also stated that Israel was not to blame, and the Pentagon confirmed the Israeli military’s findings, attributing the blast to a rocket misfire by Islamic Jihad, another terrorist organization operating in Gaza.
However, some news organizations, such as The New York Times and CNN, cited information from the Hamas-backed health ministry in Gaza, blaming Israel for the attack.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper defended the network’s reporting, explaining that they couldn’t independently verify the Hamas claims and had presented findings from both Israel and U.S. intelligence.
Bennett, though, remained dissatisfied and accused the media of having a “double standard” in their coverage of terrorism.
“Anderson, I — I have to barge in here. I have to say something. You know, I was in 9/11. I was in Manhattan when it happened and if a day later, if Al-Qaeda would have said that it’s America who perpetrated it, no one would have quoted Al-Qaeda. And you didn’t have validation back then that it was Al-Qaeda, but you knew it’s not America. Somehow there’s a double standard here,” he scolded.
IDF Lt. Col. Peter Lerner also engaged with CNN over their reporting on the hospital strike, suggesting that the network was not eager to consider the evidence that could determine responsibility for the attack.
In addition to media reports, Democratic Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar blamed Israel for the strike in their social media posts. Protests occurred on college campuses, in front of the White House, and at the U.S. Capitol, with demands for a cease-fire and accusations of Israel committing “genocide” against Palestinians.
