The New Yorker is a literary magazine that once held a reputation for rigorous fact checking. But a recent article showed that when the subject is the Middle East, The New Yorker’s penchant for accuracy has disappeared. Isaac Chotiner’s interview of Jaser AbuMousa, (“What Life Is Actually Like in Gaza Today,” Sept. 21, 2026) included four mistakes that should have been caught but inexcusably were not.
AbuMousa is a Gaza-born analyst currently with the Middle East Institute. The angle of Chotiner’s interview with him is to show that the year-old ceasefire in Gaza hasn’t benefited Gazans much.
In a preemptive attempt at denying any Hamas responsibility for the situation, the article briefly mentions Hamas’s obligation to disarm but depicts it as merely an “Israeli condition.” This is the first factual error. Hamas’s disarmament is a key part of the internationally endorsed ceasefire plan. Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza is explicitly conditioned on the successful disarmament of Hamas.
Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s High Representative for Gaza, in charge of implementing the Gaza peace plan, has specifically tied the conditions in Gaza to Hamas’s failure to disarm. In a May 2026 report to the U.N. Security Council, Mladenov stated that the people of Gaza “are likely to remain trapped in the rubble, dependent on aid, with no meaningful reconstruction — because reconstruction financing will not follow where weapons have not been laid down. No investment. No movement. No horizon.”
Another error occurred when the article claimed, as a matter of fact, that a September 2026 building collapse “had been damaged by Israeli strikes in the war.” But the IDF denied targeting the building, and some Gazan social media accounts blamed the building collapse on a nearby terror tunnel.
Later in the interview, AbuMousa claimed that Israel wouldn’t allow peanut butter into Gaza, citing U.N. personnel. Chotiner supported the charge, noting “Palestinians are hoping to get peanut butter because it functions as a nutritional supplement for people who have not gotten enough nutrition, and it sounds insane, but the Israeli government is claiming that it is a ‘luxury.’”
The source of the charge is a release from the U.N., which also included a false claim of a confirmed famine. The U.N. offered no proof of their claim.
Unaddressed by New Yorker is that Israel vehemently denied the allegation, “This time [it’s] lying about peanut butter, what will be the next lie? Since the beginning of August, over 4,000 calories per person per day (including peanut butter), entered and distributed in the Strip.” The humanitarian organization, Samaritan’s Purse, also reported delivering 88,500 pounds of “nutritional peanut-based food product packets for families in Gaza” a month earlier.
Finally, at the end of the article, AbuMousa refers to Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya as a doctor who was unjustifiably being held by Israel. Abu Safiya was head of pediatrics at the Kamal Adwan Hospital. The Kamal Adwan hospital is operated by Gaza’s Military Medical Services (MMS), which falls under the aegis of the Hamas-run Interior and National Security Ministry.
In addition, there is photographic evidence that Abu Safiyah was an officer in Hamas. During an interrogation, a previous director of the hospital, Ahmad Al-Kahlout, admitted that Hamas had used the hospital for military purposes and that many of the staff were in fact members of the terrorist group.
In the interview, Chotiner and The New Yorker demonstrated that fact-checking is no longer a priority of the one-time highbrow magazine. Now it seems there’s no libel about Israel that’s too absurd to accept and amplify.