The New York Times (NYT) has issued a statement on Tuesday rebutting claims that a report about Israeli forces shooting Palestinian children was based on "fabricated evidence" after online pro-Israel 'experts' weighed in against the piece.
NYT opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury said in a rare statement that the report had been "rigorously edited" and verified, including through expert opinions and supporting photographs, which the outlet judged as too graphic for publication.
"We stand behind this essay and the research underpinning it. Any implication that its images are fabricated is simply false," Kingsbury asserts.
The article in question, written by trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa last week, detailed his and dozens of other doctors' chilling accounts of seeing patients — including children — wounded and killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
"Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total," Sidhwa writes.
"At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby. But after returning home, I met an emergency medicine physician who had worked in a different hospital in Gaza two months before me. 'I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,' I told him. To my surprise, he responded: 'Yeah, me, too. Every single day.'"
The essay included images of CT scans provided by Dr Mimi Syed, another American doctor who worked in Gaza between August and September, showing bullets lodged in the heads of young victims.
"I had multiple pediatric patients, mostly under the age of 12, who were shot in the head or the left side of the chest. Usually, these were single shots. The patients came in either dead or critical, and died shortly after arriving," Syed was quoted as saying.
The images shared by Syed became the subject of speculation among pro-Israel activists, including anonymous online accounts claiming expertise on the issue.
"The only problem with this is the 'evidence' provided by those same 'experts' appears, according to analysis from numerous ballistics experts, radiologists, trauma nurses, medics, and more, to be digitally altered or completely falsified," wrote Israeli-American activist Emily Schrader on X.
Schrader previously shared posts on the "Pallywood" myth — a pro-Israel conspiracy theory which accuses Palestinians of faking atrocities to garner international sympathy for their cause.
Colonel Richard Kemp, a British commander who heads the UK Friends of the Association for the Wellbeing of Israel's Soldiers, weighed in to simultaneously dismiss the scans and provide possible explanations for why children may have been shot by Israeli soldiers.
"Nothing here is proof of war crimes by the @IDF. This x-ray, which looks suspicious anyway, certainly doesn’t prove it. Who is to say the headshots were not Hamas fire, either deliberately or unintentionally aimed at their own children?" Kemp posted on X, adding that the children may also have been caught in the crossfire.
"Children can and have carried out terrorist acts for Hamas and therefore can be legitimate targets, no matter how tragic that is, including for the soldiers who are forced to deal with them."
Other pro-Israel voices accused the NYT of bias against Israel — despite the long being accused of a pro-Israel slant in its coverage of Israel's latest war on Gaza.
Meanwhile, social media users supportive of the NYT report highlighted the significance of the statement by Kingsbury, saying that such a robust statement was not issued for its controversial 'Screams Without Words' investigation published in December, which alleged a campaign of mass rape by Hamas on 7 October.
Among other issues with the article was the claim that 34-year-old Israeli Gal Abdush, a key subject of the story who was killed in the 7 October attack, had been sexually assaulted. Abdush's family later denied the claim.
The NYT later distanced itself from one of the article's writers, Anat Schwartz, after it was revealed that she had 'liked' severs several pro-Israel posts on social media, including an X post calling for Gaza to be turned into a "slaughterhouse".