Hamas terrorists play on a gullible commentariat

At this stage Israel is struggling in the propaganda war. Too few people around the world understand that Israel is fighting Hamas, not the people of Gaza. Picture: Getty Images

There are lessons for the media – but not just the media – in The New York Times’ mea culpa over its gullible rush to accept Hamas’s baseless claim that Israel was to blame for last week’s deadly blast at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. That the influential left-of-centre newspaper got it hopelessly wrong is now beyond dispute. Authorities across the world accept video and other evidence proving the rocket was the work of Hamas’s Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad ally. It was aimed at a target inside Israel but it misfired, like many of the terrorists’ rockets, and struck the hospital.

By the time Israel’s assurances that it was not responsible were accepted The New York Times had published a series of stories under headlines such as “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians say”. The stories ran a photo of a wrecked building that turned out not to have been the Al-Ahli hospital. There also were claims that Israel had killed at least 500 people in the strike. That number, according to Hamas’s propaganda machine, rose to 833 innocent victims. US officials have concluded the death toll caused by the PIJ’s own-goal rocket was between 100 and 300. Some European officials believe it was about 50. As The New York Times’ editors conceded: “Early versions of the coverage – and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert and social media channels – relied too heavily on claims by Hamas and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.”

Too often in this and other wars in which Israel has been under attack, commentators have readily accepted the claims of terrorist groups and, by contrast, treated whatever Israel says with disdain. In Britain, the BBC is riven by a ludicrous debate over whether Hamas and its allies should be referred to as terrorists – despite the barbarity it unleashed against Israeli civilians on October 7. “Terrorism is a loaded word,” the BBC’s veteran world editor, John Simpson, said. In this case it is apt, evidenced by footage released on Monday by the Israeli government of 43 minutes of harrowing raw video taken by the terrorists’ bodycams during their massacre of Jews, showing murder, torture and decapitation scenes.

At this stage Israel is struggling in the propaganda war. Too few people around the world understand that Israel is fighting Hamas, not the people of Gaza. Gaza is an overcrowded prison of 2.2 million people as pro-Hamas activists claim. But it is ruled harshly not by Israel but by Hamas, which has banned elections since 2006. Neither is the right of Israel, like any nation, to defend itself sufficiently acknowledged. It needs to be. Hamas has attempted to score points for releasing two elderly Jewish female hostages (one of whose family regularly drove Palestinians to and from Israeli hospitals) for “humanitarian” reasons. The women and about 200 others should never have been captured in the first place. Negotiations over a possible ­release of 50 more hostages ­reportedly has stumbled over the terrorist group’s demand that Israel allow fuel deliveries into Gaza. Not unreasonably, Israeli officials want all hostages released before permitting the delivery of fuel, fearing Hamas and other militants could divert it for military purposes.

Civilian casualties must be avoided as much as possible. But Hamas made that impossible in earlier conflicts by misusing Palestinians as human shields. That, and the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, has created a dilemma for Israel about how to conduct its ground war so as to avoid mass civilian casualties as much as possible. The need to eliminate Hamas, however, for the sake of Israeli security and the long-term wellbeing of Gaza and the rest of the Middle East is imperative.