Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Brian Williams Israel Helicopter Story ‘Accurate’

An Israeli army officer who was on a helicopter with NBC news anchor Brian Williams during the Second Lebanon War said his reporting “was representative of the experience.”

“The general descriptions Williams gave were accurate,” Jacob Dallal, a reserve major in the army’s media liaison office, told Bloomberg in a phone interview Monday.

Williams, who the Washington Post reported has given several different versions of the 2006 flight, announced over the weekend that he would take a break from anchoring “NBC Nightly News” after admitting that he was not on a helicopter that was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq in 2003. His accounts of incidents elsewhere also are being called into question.

In a 2007 interview, Williams said of his helicopter ride over northern Israel during the war between Israel and Hezbollah that there were “rockets passing just beneath the helicopter I was riding in.”

“There was Katyusha rocket fire during the helicopter flight, the pilots showed where the Katyusha had just landed, and you could see the big clouds of dust where they landed,” Dallal told Bloomberg.

Dallal added that the helicopter was not in danger and that the “trajectory of the rockets was beneath us.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.