Members of Hamas cracking down on Gazans. Photo: Screenshot from X account of Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib

There’s an old journalism maxim, “consider the source.” Investigators should not only ask “what happened?” but also “who is telling us what happened?” NBC, CNN, and AP all seemingly overlooked that principle in their coverage of a recent funeral in Gaza, relying on a member of Hamas moonlighting as the spokesperson for a search and rescue organization for their stories without disclosing that association.

In his August 4 coverage, titled “In Gaza, a mass funeral for 112 members of 2 families, three years after deadly Israeli strike,” NBC Senior Editor Henry Austin heavily relies on Mahmoud Bassal, who he describes as “a spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defense, a rescue agency operated under the enclave’s Hamas-run Interior Ministry.” But this description severely misleads on the extent of his relationship with the US designated terrorist organization.

Austin’s report highlights an August 4 memorial in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City, where an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) strike allegedly killed over 100 people on November 22, 2023, just a month after the Hamas-led atrocities of October 7 plunged the enclave into violent conflict. Austin references a separate Reuters article, in which Bassal talks about the alleged victims from the Abu Sharia and Al-Hassayna clans.

In CNN’s case, the outlet released a video covering the funeral. Again, the outlet quotes Bassal, who was quoted saying “Those we didn’t manage to recover [from the buildings], we couldn’t find any signs of them. Where did their bodies disappear to? Were they eaten by stray dogs?” Bassal is identified in the article merely as the “Gaza Civil Defense Spokesperson,” with his terror ties omitted from the story.

The AP, on the other hand, decided not to even disclose their sourcing, instead releasing an 18 second video with the caption, “Palestinians gathered on Tuesday for a mass funeral of more than 100 bodies finally recovered from a deadly Israeli strike in Gaza in 2023. More than 300 people were killed on Nov. 22, 2023, weeks into the war with Hamas, when warplanes flattened a residential block in Gaza City’s Sabra neighborhood.”

The AP notably never covered the alleged strike until now while refraining from explaining to readers that one of its primary sources on the alleged incident is a known Hamas operative and propagandist.

Details around the alleged strike are notably sparse. The IDF did not announce a strike on November 22 or in the days following. No prominent media picked up on the strike at the time either.

Whatever happened on that day, the media’s heavy reliance on a known terrorist source as well as a terrorist-adjacent body in Gaza to breathlessly and uncritically report on a carefully produced memorial, without any caveats, is concerning.

NBC at least acknowledged that institutional affiliation matters by noting that Civil Defense operates under Hamas’ Interior Ministry, which makes the omission of his membership in Hamas questionable. CNN and AP, however, did not include this fact in their coverage.

Even a cursory investigation of Bassal would have revealed that the spokesperson played more of a role in Hamas than just belonging to an affiliated rescue organization.

On June 8, 2025, the IDF published an announcement revealing that “following an analysis of documents found during operational activities in the Gaza Strip … Mahmoud Zabar Tafesh Bassal, is an active terrorist in the Hamas terrorist organization.”

It continues:

The terrorist, Bassal, has served as the spokesperson for the Civil Defense for an extended period of time and abuses his role by spreading false and unverified information to the international media, while falsely attributing war crimes to Israel and by presenting fabricated data. This information receives global media exposure and has caused a severe distortion of the reality on the ground.

An IDF video published the same day further states that Israel has “evidence that Mahmoud Bassal is registered as a military operative of the Zeitoun Battalion of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades,” Hamas’ armed fighting wing. The video further alleges that international media “eats up his lies,” laundering Hamas statements “without being held accountable.”

CNN infamously used Bassal as a source while covering the now-debunked Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion in Gaza, which reporters initially blamed on an errant Israeli airstrike. According to the transcript from CNN’s coverage of the incident on October 18, 2023, Bassal told CNN that the blast was a “massacre,” adding, “We were here in the first moments after the bombing, and honestly, we found this place full of dead, burned bodies and bodies torn to pieces. Bodies without heads, heads over there, hands and legs over here. A massacre that we have never seen in our lives.”

US intelligence agencies later corroborated IDF assessments that the blast had been caused by a wayward Palestinian rocket, assessing “with high confidence that Israel was not responsible for the explosion at the hospital and that Palestinian militants were responsible.”

The hospital strike took place years before the IDF documented his connections to Hamas’s armed wing. NBC, CNN, and the AP’s continued reliance on Bassal, however, cannot be so easily dismissed.

A 2024 NBC article began with “Disinformation poses an unprecedented threat to democracy in the United States.” CNN released a podcast in 2020 labeled “Election 101, disinformation.”  And the AP at one point even published a running ticker on what it called “Not Real News.” But all three outlets are now guilty of violating the ethical standards they pledge to uphold. Major media must heed its own warnings, and stop using a known disinformation super-spreader, and exposed Hamas terrorist, as a source.

The author writes for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.