Time and again, major English-language news outlets have presented a deeply distorted view of the Gaza war, a fact that is perhaps in keeping with much of the history of reporting on the subject. Zach Kessel and Ari Blaff take a systematic look at how the Washington Post has handled the conflict and conclude that the paper, highly influential with the nation’s political class, has been particularly egregious. While other publications quickly backed down from the story that Israel struck the al-Ahli hospital when it was shown to be false, the Post was slow to come around to the truth. Later it invested much effort in denying that Hamas was using the al-Shifa hospital as a base.

What followed was even worse:

Two days after the al-Shifa report, on December 23, the Post ran an in-depth visual analysis of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, arguing that it was among the “most destructive wars” of this century and “has outpaced other recent conflicts.” The paper relied on a combination of satellite imagery, airstrike data, and UN damage assessments to reach its conclusion. Based on its review of the evidence, the Post concluded that the Gaza war far outpaced the destruction of Aleppo during the Syrian civil war and the U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition’s assault on Raqqa.

As a bevy of experts on military affairs observed, there was little basis for these claims, which included factual errors that were later retracted. “To compare Gaza to the deliberate, nationwide destruction of Ukraine is not just a stretch, it’s idiotic,” Chuck Pfarrer, a former squadron leader of Navy Seal Team Six, told Blaff and Kessel.

Once more, three days after the Post’s flawed military analysis, a team of the outlet’s senior reporters, including its Istanbul and London bureau chiefs, wrote about Israel returning dozens of Hamas bodies recovered in northern Gaza. . . . In its report on the body return, the Post cites a statement from the “Hamas-run government media office,” advancing the well-worn anti-Semitic conspiracy that the Jewish state had “stolen” the organs of slain Palestinians and “mutilated” their bodies.

“The claims could not be independently verified,” the Post wrote of the Hamas-ministry reports. . . . “It’s factually absurd. They’re harvesting organs from dead terrorists who’ve been lying around for days?” Reed Rubinstein, deputy associate attorney general for the Trump administration, said.

It’s unclear what explains such consistent failings, but Kessel and Blaff note that many of the journalists covering these stories have previously written for Qatar’s propaganda mouthpiece Al Jazeera.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.