Israeli forces bombed a building housing foreign media outlets in the Gaza Strip in May LONDON: Journalists have criticized the Israeli army’s claim not to have known in advance that foreign media outlets had offices in a building it bombed in the Gaza Strip last May. Israel further claimed that the army only discovered that the Associated Press and Al Jazeera had offices in the Jalaa tower during the “knock on the roof” procedure, which is a small missile strike meant to warn the building’s occupants to evacuate before an imminent airstrike. “Israel claims not to have known AP and Al Jazeera had offices in the building it destroyed yet it claimed it contained Hamas assets,” said Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding. “We are asked to believe it had precise intel on Hamas, and no idea where journalists worked. AP worked there for 15 years,” he said. Kaamil Ahmed, a journalist for The Guardian, said: “The claims in Israeli media that Israeli military didn’t know media offices were in Gaza’s Al-Jalaa tower until they started bombing it don’t match up with a recording we have here. “The owner told them in the first call that Al Jazeera and AP were in the tower.” Al-Jalaa tower, which housed international media offices and residential apartments, was bombed by the Israeli army during its conflict with Hamas last May. Despite their claim, however, sources revealed that the Israeli army did in fact contact residents in the building, and some senior military officials were informed of the presence of foreign journalists and international media outlets. “We literally have a recording where the first person they called in the tower, an hour before the strikes, told them AP and Jazeera were there,” said Joe Dyke, a senior investigator for Airwars. “For this @haaretzcom piece to be true you have to somehow believe the IDF had good enough intelligence to discover a secret Hamas research entity in a tower block but not enough intelligence to find the openly declared AP and Al Jazeera offices in the same building . . .” Dyke said.