FakeNews

I saw this photo on Twitter of the Times of Gaza.

The caption was:

“Urgent: The Israeli Air Force is conducting intensive white phosphorus bombing in the area of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza.”

It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? And it works. It’s scary. It’s infuriating. ⠀

The last thing I want to do is downplay the suffering of Palestinian civilians who have become hostages of Hamas. The number of civilian casualties in Gaza is appalling. And it causes great sympathy. ⠀

But there is a nuance with the photo posted in the tweet. ⠀

The picture was taken not in Gaza, but in the city of Raqqa in Syria. And not recently, but in 2017. During an operation against ISIS militants. ⠀

There are a lot of such “news”. Hundreds, if not thousands.

⠀ Terrorists use Photoshop or neural network generated images – like the famous photograph of a “wounded Palestinian boy” who turned out to have six fingers. But most often, the Hamas propaganda machine uses real photos taken during the conflicts in Iraq, Syria and other countries of the Middle East. Hamas propaganda works according to the classic “rotten herring” principle.

⠀ A completely false accusation has been selected. It is important that it be as brutal as possible – Israel bombed the hospital, 800 people were killed. Fascists.

The purpose of the “rotten herring” is not at all to prove this accusation. And in order to cause its wide public discussion. The human psyche is such that as soon as an accusation becomes the subject of public discussion, its “supporters” and “opponents”, “experts” and “specialists” inevitably appear.

But regardless of political views, all the participants in the discussion again and again associate Israel and the allegedly bombed hospital in one sentence. Then it turns out that all this is a lie, the hospital is still standing, the rocket is not Israeli, but was fired by Islamic Jihad, it hit the parking lot, less than 50 people were killed…

But the Israeli “smell” will remain. It is important to remember about information hygiene.

That all the horrific figures about the number of people killed in Gaza have been published by Hamas and cannot be verified.

“The spirit of the Palestinian people cannot be broken.”

Attentive subscribers may remember this photo – I have already posted it. On November 2, 2020, in a post about the winners of the Siena International Photo Awards.
⠀ In this shot – a woman who returned to the war-torn Syrian city of Homs due to the civil war. She is carrying her son’s toy car. Today I came across this photo on the Twitter account of the loud American “journalist,” known for his vehemently anti-Ukrainian and anti-Israeli position, Jackson Hinkle. For his two million followers, Hinkle captioned this photo as follows:
⠀ “The spirit of the Palestinian people cannot be broken.”
⠀ Modern wars are wars of information as well. Thousands of FakeNews attack global public opinion every day.
⠀ Why does the world believe so easily in footage and figures coming from Gaza? I will use fragments of an article in Ha’aretz by the brilliant Arabist Ksenia Svetlova.
⠀ The Ministry of Health in Gaza is an organ of Hamas. If a journalist needs to quote any data (and in Gaza, this is the only source of data), it is worth always adding that it refers to the ministry that is entirely under the control of Hamas.
⠀ Hamas’s Ministry of Health not only always inflates the data but also “records” those who died from Palestinian rockets, from “friendly fire,” as a result of “work accidents” in the production of weapons, etc. And they never separate terrorists from civilians. ⠀ The goal is one: the world must know that the main target of the Israeli army is civilians, mostly children.
⠀ Many Western media outlets take information from the Gaza “Ministry of Health” as a basis without questioning why only high-ranking leaders of Hamas or exclusively peaceful citizens are killed in Gaza.
Indeed, civilians die in Gaza, including many children. Each such death is a tragedy.
The special project “Whisper from Gaza” shows that there are those in Gaza who realize that Hamas is their enemy.
On the morning of October 7, all people were peacefully sleeping in their beds, and if not for the bloody massacre that terrorists staged in the south, all Gaza residents would be alive to this day. ⠀