A spokesman for the U.S. State Department, Matthew Miller, is scolding American press outlets for accepting at face value the claims from Hamas terrorists that hundreds of people were killed by an Israeli strike on a hospital in Gaza earlier this week.

Speaking at a briefing Thursday, Mr. Miller said he didn’t want to play media critic, “but I will say that I do think that this event was a reminder that everyone — this includes officials in government and everyone that watches this conflict and that commentates on it — it would be wise for all of us to take a beat and pause and collect all the information before choosing to decide what we believe and what we don’t.”

Mr. Miller noted a number of reports in major American newspapers such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that immediately reported Hamas’ claims of Israeli responsibility on Tuesday. Many of those reports were changed after it became clear in the subsequent hours and the next day that the explosion outside the hospital was the result of an errant terrorist rocket that misfired and landed in Gaza instead of its intended target in Israel.

“I would hope that everyone who is watching what’s happening would not take claims from a terrorist organization at face value,” Mr. Miller told the gathered journalists during the briefing.

While the exact cause of the blast and the number of victims remain unclear, it is now increasingly clear that Hamas wildly exaggerated both the cause of the explosion and the number of victims. Hamas continues to claim that nearly 500 people died in the blast.

Assessments by American intelligence officials seen by CNN, however, put the number of victims at “the lower end” of between 100 and 300. Contrary to early claims — also accepted and reported credulously by Western press outlets — about the building being “leveled” in the blast, the report says the buildings suffered only “light structural damage.” The unclassified assessment was sent to Capitol Hill by the Director of National Intelligence and states unequivocally that Israel was not responsible for the incident.

Separately, a European intelligence source tells the AFP news agency Thursday that its assessment of the incident estimates that even fewer people were killed than the American assessment. The European official said that a maximum of 50 people died in the accident.