Reporter Tells Truth About Rocket Fired from Gaza Hospital, Complains When Quoted by Pro-Israel Media

A Finnish journalist reported seeing Hamas terrorists launch a rocket at Israel from a Gaza hospital, but later attacked news outlets for using her report as a pro-Israel “propaganda weapon.”

Aishi Zidan, a journalist for the daily newspaper Helsinging Sanomat, described the rocket attack in a report, which was uploaded to YouTube on Friday. The blog Legal Insurrection provided a translation of the Finnish report.

Zidan reported that a rocket was fired at 2:00 a.m. from the parking lot of Gaza City’s main hospital, Shifa Hospital. 

The rocket launch “happened somewhere close by because the noise right here at the hospital area was really loud,” she said. “Indeed, these rockets launched here from the Gazan side are headed into Israel.”

When blogs and news outlets posted her report, the Finnish journalist expressed her outrage on Facebook.

“Don’t use me as your propaganda weapon,” she wrote. The main purpose of her report, she explained, was to cover “Palestinian civilians who were victims of war.”

Zidan noted that her report of the rocket launch from the hospital has spread to pro-Israel media, clearly working against the intentions of her story. 

“I find it very disgusting how this one sentence was taken out context to be used as an excuse to target civilians in Gaza,” she wrote. “My story became quickly a tool of propaganda.”