Palestinian Islamic Jihad is a Sunni extremist group whose members are recruited from refugees in Gaza and the West Bank. Depending on who you listen to, the PIJ’s military wing, the al-Quds Brigade, has somewhere between 1000 and 8000 active members. PIJ is a proscribed terrorist group in Australia, Canada, the US, the UK, the EU, Japan, New Zealand and Israel.
The PIJ is funded and armed by Iran. Unlike Hamas, it has no political apparatus. There is no real distinction between the PIJ and the al-Quds Brigade. The PIJ routinely hosts Palestinian children in camps within Gaza where the children are inculcated with hatred for Israel’s Jewish population who they describe as “colonisers and oppressors.”
The PIJ, like Hamas, has no interest in negotiated solutions. It rejects the two-state solution. Its sole objective is to destroy the state of Israel by what it calls military means. To date this amounts to terrorist activity including suicide bombings, mortar and rocket fire from Gaza into Israel since the terrorist group’s inception more than 40 years ago.
In August last year, the PIJ fired more than 11,000 missiles into Israel causing injuries but no deaths on their intended targets. However, missile misfires in the same incursion led to the deaths of 15 Palestinians in Gaza.
Overtly, what was reported ignored what is circumstantial evidence that the PIJ should have always been the prime suspect.
It’s hard to know where to begin in terms of media failures in this event alone. Initial reports described the hospital as destroyed. It remains largely intact. The casualty figure leapt to 500 within hours, largely driven by a bizarre Hamas press conference conducted on the grounds of the hospital with tangled and burned bodies in full sight.
But more than a week later, the number of casualties is unconfirmed.
Shortly after the explosion was seen on the hospital grounds, Al-Jazeera, Reuters and Associated Press attributed the carnage to an Israeli air strike. The New York Times ran with the headline, “Israeli strike kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.” The headline was amended three times within six hours.
The lie was halfway across the world while the truth was still tying its shoelaces.
The early reporting of the strike on the hospital – the only Christian hospital in Gaza, administered by the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem – had the effect of raising the temperature in an already explosive situation. There was a real prospect of an acceleration of hostilities, a broadening of the conflict to the regional and beyond with the pro-Palestinian lobby in Australia and around the world using the false reports to cling to some moral advantage, much of which continues to this day.
As an aside, what was reported by some of the most prestigious news agencies in the world was misinformation. Arguably, it was not a deliberate attempt to mislead its audiences which would amount to disinformation. In any event, how would this be handled by the Albanese government’s proposed Misinformation bill which seeks to empower the Australian Communications and Media Authority as the judge and jury of the spread of misinformation with the power to impose fines of up to $6.88 million, or 5 per cent of a company’s global turnover, whichever is higher, for breaching an industry standard?
The answer, in short, is that it wouldn’t. At least any imposed action would not occur in a timely fashion and any corrections to the record would be the sole responsibility of the news organisation.
Those pro-Palestinian marchers around the world continue to wash their hands of Hamas’s brutal strike on Israeli civilians and deftly avoid the topic of the more than 200 Israeli citizens held hostage in Gaza, which is a war crime in itself.
These people claim that no one supports Hamas but this contention, too, has no semblance of reality, amid a failure to acknowledge that the Palestinians in Gaza are largely the architects of their own misfortune.
In 2006, Hamas won an election over Fatah, the party of Yasser Arafat, securing 44 per cent of the vote in what were then known as the Palestinian Territories (Gaza and the West Bank) and won a stonking majority of 74 seats in the Palestinian legislature. Fatah was vanquished. There hasn’t been an election since in Gaza and in 2012, Hamas announced its second government without elections.
We might understand how media organisations get unfolding reports badly wrong but there is also an active denial of recent history.
At least one person got the analysis right, albeit seven years ago.
“Remember Israel left Gaza. They took out all the Israelis. They handed the keys over to the Palestinian people. And what happened? Hamas took over Gaza so instead of having a thriving economy with the kind of opportunity that the children of the Palestinians deserve, we have a terrorist haven that is getting more and more rockets shipped in from Iran and elsewhere.”
Those words came from Hillary Clinton in 2016 during a debate with Bernie Saunders on the Democratic primary campaign trail. Clinton, the secretary of State in the Obama administration, did not get much right in the election campaign and lost spectacularly to Donald Trump. But on Gaza, Hamas and the plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza, she was spot on.
Her words should still resonate through the fog of war today.
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Putting hard evidence aside for a moment, I ask who was more likely to have been responsible for the strike on the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza? The Israel Defence Force or a terrorist group who had a recent history of killing Palestinians in Gaza with indiscriminate rocket fire?