New York Times Issues Correction After Controversial Israel Statement

The New York Times issued a clarification and removed a sentence from a report concerning Israeli reactions to the documentary "Nezah" after facing sharp criticism. The original phrasing stated, "Israelis still largely see themselves as victims of October 7th," in a paragraph that also noted approximately 1,200 people were killed and 250 abducted in the Hamas attack. This wording, which implied that Israelis being victims of the terror attack was a matter of perception rather than fact, sparked outrage on social media and renewed accusations of the newspaper's bias against Israel.

An editor's note appended to the article explained, "Due to an editorial error, an earlier version of this story included a sentence intended to describe Israelis' perceptions of the government's military response to the October 7th terror attack, but it inadvertently implied that Israelis' experience as terror victims is a matter of perception. The sentence has been removed from the story."

The article, published on September 14th by the Times' Israel correspondent Isabel Kershner, focused on the controversy surrounding "Nezah," a film by Yuval Avraham and Rachel Shore, and the strong reactions it elicited in Israel. The problematic sentence appeared in a section attempting to explain the intensity of public and political opposition to the film as the third anniversary of the massacre approached and amid Israel's election system.