NY Times Publishes Editor’s Note After Reporting Israelis ‘Largely View Themselves’ As Oct. 7 Victims

By: Tamar Sternthal September 16, 2026

Shiri Bibas with sons Kfir Bibas, just 10 months old, and his older brother Ariel, aged four, kidnapped Oct. 7, 2023 and later murdered by their Islamic Jihad captors

CAMERA today prompted a social media uproar and an Editor’s Note at The New York Times after the Gray Lady reported that “Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7,” wording which suggests that Israelis were not, in fact, the victims of Hamas’ horrific Oct. 7, 2023 massacre. In the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the terror organization and its allies carried out widespread war crimes, murdering 1,200 Israelis including entire families in their homes and hundreds of attendees at a music festival, kidnapping 251, and wantonly maiming, torturing and raping.

“Wait, what, @nytimes @IKershner? That Israelis are victims of the Oct. 7 massacre is a matter of Israeli *perception*, and not simply fact? If they’re not the Oct. 7 victims, then what are they? The perpetrators?,” CAMERA’s Tamar Sternthal posted today on X (formerly Twitter), flagging the Times’ alarming statement which appeared in both English and Spanish article (“After Accolades Abroad, an Israeli Documentary Faces a Backlash at Home,” Sept. 14).

 

Jerusalem News Syndicate covered Sternthal’s viral post, and The Times subsequently deleted that sentence and posted an Editor’s Note. It states:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article included a statement that was intended to convey Israelis’ perception of the government’s military response to the Oct. 7 terror attack in relation to the attacks, but inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception. It has been removed from the article.  

 

“The article comes just days after a study found that the NYT’s coverage of the first months of the war in Gaza displayed a clear bias against Israel by downplaying the country’s casualties and minimizing Hamas’s role in the conflict,” JNS reported. The Sept. 7 Studies in Conflict and Terrorism study by Edieal Pinker is consistent with CAMERA’s own findings about Times coverage.

As of this writing, The Times has yet to correct the Spanish version of the article.

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