The New York Times doesn't want to make any assumptions:
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York was sweating, his shoes caked in dust. He had just climbed out of a tunnel near the Gaza border that Israel says was covertly built by Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza.See how careful the NYT is? After all, you cannot be 100% certain Hamas dug these tunnels, even when they brag about it. It might have been an Israeli false flag operation. Or a series of natural cave formations that happened to all run in parallel between Gaza and Israel and are just now being discovered.
...Israeli officials seemed eager to use the occasion, and their sympathetic audience, to highlight what they presented as evidence of Hamas’s malevolence.
...Mr. Cuomo climbed into an armored truck, which took him to a field that had been excavated to reveal a tunnel that Israeli officials said Hamas had dug.
The New York Time has an obligation to verify everything before it reports things as facts. Just like it did on July 18:
Around noon, an airstrike killed three children in their bedroom. Three more strikes in the afternoon killed an additional four children. And after 9 p.m., an artillery shell killed eight people in their home, including four children.No doubt the reporters checked each incident and determined that they were airstrikes or artillery, and not Qassam rockets or Hamas mortars. They didn't rely on third parties, but on their own military forensics skills, to make this flat determination. No need to qualify those facts.
