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President Joe Biden raged against The New York Times in a private White House meeting early last week, after the Times amplified a Hamas claim that an Israeli airstrike was behind the Oct. 17 bombing of a Gaza hospital.
The news of the deadly explosion scuttled a planned presidential trip to Jordan, but the White House now believes a stray Palestinian rocket, not Israel, was to blame. (A more recent Times report has also called that assessment into question, and independent analysts continue to debate the evidence.)
The president told a small group of Wall Street executives in the White House’s Roosevelt Room early last week that he thought the headline was irresponsible and could have triggered military escalation in the Middle East, two people briefed on the conversation told Semafor. He fumed in particular that the headline had appeared “in an American newspaper.”