◆ What happened next?

The first days after 7 October 2023 were full of claims made within hours, on both sides, and they set most people's picture of the war before anything could be checked. It is much easier to accept a piece of information than to check it, and people judge it by whether it fits what they already believe and 'comes from a credible source'; 'the more widespread a piece of misinformation, the harder it becomes to debunk', and misinformation is 'sticky', often 'resistant to correction' (Lewandowsky and colleagues' review, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2012, as summarised by the Association for Psychological Science). A trusted outlet that reports before confirming does the most damage for exactly that reason: its first version is what others cite, and what later readers, and the language models trained on their writing, take as the record.

Both sides' first days: the '40 beheaded babies' headline combined two separate details from a reporter's broadcasts into a claim she never made (see 'The image does the arguing'); the al-Ahli hospital '500 killed by an Israeli strike' headlines rested on the word of Gaza's Hamas-run authorities, and the New York Times later said its coverage 'relied too heavily on claims by Hamas' (see 'The correction nobody sees'). Later records overturn later claims too: in June 2026 the Committee to Protect Journalists removed eight names from its list of journalists killed as later-confirmed combatants, and kept 209 (see 'If there are any journalists in Gaza who aren't Hamas, they're damn hard to find.'); an indictment of Israeli soldiers for abuse at Sde Teiman, often cited as proof of accountability, was dropped in March 2026 (see 'The IDF is a terrorist army that targets Palestinian civilians on purpose.'); 'cut off Iran's head and the tentacles fall' was put to the test in 2026, and the question it claimed to settle is still open (see 'Iran is the head of the octopus — cut it off and Hamas and Hezbollah fall.').

Waiting is not the same as doubting everything. Much of what was reported in the first days held up: the scale of the 7 October massacre was documented in detail, and so was the scale of death and destruction in Gaza. A correction to one detail is not a correction of the event, and the corrections were then used on both sides to deny what had happened ('if the babies story was false, the massacre was exaggerated'; 'if al-Ahli wasn't Israel, the bombing isn't real'). The rule is about timing, not trust: a claim made in the first hours is a lead, not yet a fact, whoever makes it.