ABC News Quietly Removes All Four Reporter Bylines From Piece That Referred to Israel’s ‘Occupation Forces’

ABC also removed the phrase, which Hamas uses in reference to the IDF, but did not mention doing so in an editor’s note

ABC News has quietly removed the bylines of four reporters from a controversial piece that initially contained a false report accusing Israel of dropping menacing leaflets throughout Gaza and used a phrase popularized by Hamas, “occupation forces,” to describe Israel’s military. The Disney-owned network has not commented on the piece, which has gone through four byline changes, a correction, and the unacknowledged removal of the “occupation forces” epithet since it was published a week ago.

The original piece, published last Wednesday, listed two authors, Tom Soufi Burridge and David Brennan, and referenced “Israel’s renewed campaign of strikes against Hamas.” Hours later, ABC updated the piece to include information on Israel’s resumption of ground operations in Gaza and added two more authors, Jordana Miller and Nadine El-Bawab. By early Thursday morning, it swapped in a fresh lede to reference the “occupation forces” and the leaflets, which it said included messages to Gazan civilians like, “You are left alone to face your inevitable fate” and “the world map will not change if all the people of Gaza vanish.”

ABC retracted the information shortly thereafter, pinning an editor’s note to the top of the piece that said the network “has not been able to confirm the authenticity of these leaflets.” It also removed Miller and Burridge from the byline. Now, the byline lists no names at all. Instead, the piece lists “ABC News” as its author.

ABC has not explained its decision to remove the authors from the piece. It has also not explained how the term “occupation forces” made it past editors and into the since-retracted lede. The editor’s note, which remains at the top of the piece, does not reference that language, and ABC did not respond to repeated requests for comment on whether it has an editorial policy regarding the use of the phrase. Hamas routinely refers to the Israel Defense Forces as “occupation forces.”

The ordeal comes in the wake of layoffs at the left-leaning network, where a long period of steady decline and cutbacks has accelerated in the last year. ABC News president Almin Karamehmedovic told staff after the latest round of layoffs that ABC News is being restructured to focus on “straightforward journalism.” The firings saw ABC’s owner, Disney, slash roughly 200 jobs. ABC News has also recently been forced to move from its longtime, grand headquarters on New York City’s Upper West Side to smaller quarters in downtown New York’s relatively remote Hudson Square neighborhood, as plummeting ratings at Good Morning America, the main revenue generator for the news division, have increased pressure on news executives.

While the layoffs reportedly hit ABC News’s beleaguered digital unit hard, Burridge, Brennan, Miller, and El-Bawab appear to have survived them. Both Brennan and El-Bawab published pieces on Wednesday, while Miller sat for a radio interview Tuesday as an “ABC News correspondent.” On his active X account, Burridge describes himself as a “Storyteller and fact finder @ABC News.”

ABC has disciplined employees in similar situations. In January 2020, it suspended its chief national correspondent, Matt Gutman, for erroneously reporting that all four of Kobe Bryant’s children were on board the helicopter that crashed in California, killing the former basketball star. One year later, the network again suspended Gutman for “visiting a hospital without the network’s approval, a violation of its COVID-19 policy.”

Of the four reporters, only Miller, who is Israeli, primarily covers Israel’s war with Hamas. Brennan, who is based in London, more regularly covers the war in Ukraine, while El-Bawab, a breaking news reporter, covers a wide array of issues, from international developments to U.S. politics to local weather and crime. Burridge, ABC’s foreign correspondent, is based in France and has reported on the ground across Europe and in the Middle East.

Miller is no fan of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, having accused him of “authoritarian tendencies” and of launching attacks on “democracy itself,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. El-Bawab, meanwhile, has relied on the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health in her reporting. Last month, she wrote that the ministry “confirmed” that six children had died from “extreme cold” in Gaza during a two-week span.