The Times publishes fabrication about deadly terror attack

On Oct. 27th, an Israeli man was killed and 32 others were wounded in a truck-ramming attack on a civilian bus stop near the IDF’s Gilot base, in Central Israel.  The victim in the terror attack was named as Bezalel Carmi, 72, from Rishon Lezion, and many of those injured were senior citizens who had disembarked from a bus ahead of a visit to a local museum.

However, the Times report on the incident, published on Oct. 27, by defence and political correspondent George Grylls, falsely claimed that it was an attack directly on the Mossad HQ.

Here’s the headline:

Here are the opening – often contradictory – paragraphs:

One person died when a man drove a truck into a bus stop outside Tel Aviv on Sunday morning in a suspected ramming attack on the headquarters of Mossad.

More than 30 people were taken to hospital after the collision near the Glilot military base between Tel Aviv and Herzliya. Many of the victims were reported to be elderly.

The base is adjacent to the headquarters of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, and is home to the 8200 signals intelligence unit of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), the equivalent of GCHQ in the UK.

The apparent targeting of a sensitive military site differs from the more random terror attacks that have plagued Israel in recent months.

As you can see below, The Times tweet of the article used the same language, and received a community note explaining that the claim was false.

Indeed, as every other report that we reviewed made clear, it was an attack on civilians waiting at a bus stop, which was merely near Israel’s spy agency.

Even Hamas, which put out a statement after the incident praising the “heroic ramming attack”, reportedly perpetrated by an Arab Israeli man, stated that it was carried out near “Mossad headquarters – as the Glilot area is close to the Mossad’s HQ, along with several IDF intelligence units.

Colleagues in our Arabic department provided the following translation from the Hamas statement above:

“a heroic ramming operation near the ‘Mossad’ headquarters north of Tel Aviv”

The fact that not even Hamas claimed that it was an attack directly on the spy agency’s offices reveals the depth of the Times reporter’s dishonesty in suggesting that the attack was on a military – as opposed to a civilian – target.

We complained to editors asking them to correct their erroneous claim, but haven’t yet received a reply.