Hijacking truth: How OSINT in Gaza fell prey to groupthink

Ten days into Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, a few seconds of footage showing a projectile exploding in the night sky became the centre of a furious debate.

Israel claimed that the clip, captured by an Al Jazeera livestream at 18:59:50 on October 17, showed that a misfired Palestinian rocket was responsible for the deadly blast at al-Ahli Arab Hospital that occurred five seconds later.

Investigations by Al Jazeera and the New York Times showed that the projectile in question had nothing to do with the hospital tragedy. But, by then, the theory that the blast had been caused by a Palestinian rocket had taken on a life of its own, endorsed by open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers and commentators lured by groupthink and confirmation bias.

This matters. Before the conflict, OSINT journalism was already well established, bringing new rigour to reporting of events in places like Cameroon, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen. Organisations like Bellingcat and Forensic Architecture won plaudits for restoring the primacy of fact over opinion, helping to expose war crimes.

In Gaza, the trend has peaked. International media, locked out of the conflict zone, have been increasingly dependent on open source materials, including footage from Al Jazeera, the only global media organisation with a consistent presence in Gaza throughout the war.

There have been notable OSINT breakthroughs – including by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking unit Sanad, which disproved Israel’s claim of a Hamas tunnel under al-Shifa Hospital, and showed how Palestinians fleeing northern Gaza on Israel’s instructions were killed while on the very “safe routes” that Israeli forces had told them to take.

But, as the al-Ahli hospital episode illustrates, the war has also presented new challenges for the rapidly expanding field. To understand how OSINT practitioners have stumbled in this war, Al Jazeera spoke to Idrees Ahmad, associate editor at New Lines Magazine and director of journalism at the University of Essex.