![](https://i.imgur.com/CLvY2jA.png")
10-02-2024, 08:57 AM
Rami G Khouri
Distinguished Fellow at the American University of Beirut
9 Feb 2024
In the last two weeks, the Israeli government put on a masterclass on how to use the Western media to spread fake news and propaganda and to justify anti-Palestinian actions taken by the United States and its allies. It worked – but only in part.
On January 26, in a landmark preliminary ruling on South Africa’s genocide charge against Israel, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found it “plausible” that Israel is committing acts that violate the Genocide Convention; and demanded that it take “immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Israel ignored this, and within hours, launched a deception campaign to weaken UNRWA, the UN’s main humanitarian agency for Palestinian refugees, to inflict further suffering and death on nearly two million displaced, injured, sick and starving Palestinians in the Strip.
......
Israel suddenly came up with an “explosive” dossier on alleged links between Hamas and UNRWA staff because it wanted to divert attention from the ICJ ruling on its own genocidal acts, and instead raise doubts about the crucial UN agency’s credibility.
Thanks in large part to the Western media’s uncritical reporting, Israel’s plan succeeded, at least partially, as it triggered significant funding cuts and a congressional hearing in the US
......
But independent reports and investigations quickly revealed major holes in the Israeli narrative that mainstream media had eagerly adopted and disseminated.
As Western journalists outside the mainstream, Global South media like Al Jazeera, activists and scholars started to ask questions about the claims against UNRWA, Israel’s story started to unravel.
Unable to provide any hard evidence on UNRWA staff involvement in the October 7 attacks, the intelligence agency that distributed the “dossier” said its information came from “interrogations of Palestinian prisoners”. The revelation further raised suspicions among journalists and scholars who follow the conflict, as Israel is known to use torture to extract false confessions from Palestinian prisoners. Realising the global community is questioning their story, Israel’s intelligence agents simply changed it and started to say they obtained the information through surveillance.
......
An analysis of the dossier by Britain’s Sky News revealed that these documents claim only six, not 12 as initially suggested, UNRWA staff entered Israel on October 7. It noted that “the Israeli intelligence documents make several claims that Sky News has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA”.
After also analysing the documents, Britain’s Channel 4 reached a similar conclusion and said the six-page-long dossier “provides no evidence to support the explosive claim that UN staff were involved in terror attacks on Israel”.
The terror accusations against UNRWA were perhaps the most striking example of exposing major Western media for uncritically circulating Israeli fabrications and propaganda since October 7. But it was hardly the only one.
The Israeli claims about “terror tunnels” and “Hamas command centres” under Gaza hospitals, which were repeated by most Western media without any scrutiny or attempt at verification were also proved to be baseless by several open source investigations, in-depth reporting by local journalists on the ground and extensive video evidence.
In February, Al Araby TV filmed what Israel claimed was a “Hamas tunnel” it discovered under Sheikh Hamad Hospital in northern Gaza, which proved to be nothing but a water well.
Earlier, in December, an explosive New York Times report on Hamas’s weaponisation of sexual violence during the October 7 attack was criticised for its weak sources and sloppy reporting. The paper of record eventually had to pull a podcast episode it had prepared on the subject.
......
The Electronic Intifada published several articles and podcasts with more details of the New York Times’ investigation of its mass rape story, mostly confirming the lack of credible evidence or eye-witnesses in the stories that Israeli institutions, including the armed forces, shared with the global media.
......
The Oct7factcheck project – an exhaustive collection of claims, where they originated, who propagated them, and whether the evidence confirms or refutes them put together by the Tech for Palestine initiative – has also published the results of independent investigations into a dozen or so of the most dramatic Israeli accusations and reports about the Hamas attack, which were uncritically repeated by most of Western media, debunking most of them as untrue and lacking evidence.
They show, for example, that some of the evidence Israel submitted to the ICJ hearing – evidence republished by mainstream Western media without question – was false.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/...n-stumbles
......
Distinguished Fellow at the American University of Beirut
9 Feb 2024
In the last two weeks, the Israeli government put on a masterclass on how to use the Western media to spread fake news and propaganda and to justify anti-Palestinian actions taken by the United States and its allies. It worked – but only in part.
On January 26, in a landmark preliminary ruling on South Africa’s genocide charge against Israel, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found it “plausible” that Israel is committing acts that violate the Genocide Convention; and demanded that it take “immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Israel ignored this, and within hours, launched a deception campaign to weaken UNRWA, the UN’s main humanitarian agency for Palestinian refugees, to inflict further suffering and death on nearly two million displaced, injured, sick and starving Palestinians in the Strip.
......
Israel suddenly came up with an “explosive” dossier on alleged links between Hamas and UNRWA staff because it wanted to divert attention from the ICJ ruling on its own genocidal acts, and instead raise doubts about the crucial UN agency’s credibility.
Thanks in large part to the Western media’s uncritical reporting, Israel’s plan succeeded, at least partially, as it triggered significant funding cuts and a congressional hearing in the US
......
But independent reports and investigations quickly revealed major holes in the Israeli narrative that mainstream media had eagerly adopted and disseminated.
As Western journalists outside the mainstream, Global South media like Al Jazeera, activists and scholars started to ask questions about the claims against UNRWA, Israel’s story started to unravel.
Unable to provide any hard evidence on UNRWA staff involvement in the October 7 attacks, the intelligence agency that distributed the “dossier” said its information came from “interrogations of Palestinian prisoners”. The revelation further raised suspicions among journalists and scholars who follow the conflict, as Israel is known to use torture to extract false confessions from Palestinian prisoners. Realising the global community is questioning their story, Israel’s intelligence agents simply changed it and started to say they obtained the information through surveillance.
......
An analysis of the dossier by Britain’s Sky News revealed that these documents claim only six, not 12 as initially suggested, UNRWA staff entered Israel on October 7. It noted that “the Israeli intelligence documents make several claims that Sky News has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA”.
After also analysing the documents, Britain’s Channel 4 reached a similar conclusion and said the six-page-long dossier “provides no evidence to support the explosive claim that UN staff were involved in terror attacks on Israel”.
The terror accusations against UNRWA were perhaps the most striking example of exposing major Western media for uncritically circulating Israeli fabrications and propaganda since October 7. But it was hardly the only one.
The Israeli claims about “terror tunnels” and “Hamas command centres” under Gaza hospitals, which were repeated by most Western media without any scrutiny or attempt at verification were also proved to be baseless by several open source investigations, in-depth reporting by local journalists on the ground and extensive video evidence.
In February, Al Araby TV filmed what Israel claimed was a “Hamas tunnel” it discovered under Sheikh Hamad Hospital in northern Gaza, which proved to be nothing but a water well.
Earlier, in December, an explosive New York Times report on Hamas’s weaponisation of sexual violence during the October 7 attack was criticised for its weak sources and sloppy reporting. The paper of record eventually had to pull a podcast episode it had prepared on the subject.
......
The Electronic Intifada published several articles and podcasts with more details of the New York Times’ investigation of its mass rape story, mostly confirming the lack of credible evidence or eye-witnesses in the stories that Israeli institutions, including the armed forces, shared with the global media.
......
The Oct7factcheck project – an exhaustive collection of claims, where they originated, who propagated them, and whether the evidence confirms or refutes them put together by the Tech for Palestine initiative – has also published the results of independent investigations into a dozen or so of the most dramatic Israeli accusations and reports about the Hamas attack, which were uncritically repeated by most of Western media, debunking most of them as untrue and lacking evidence.
They show, for example, that some of the evidence Israel submitted to the ICJ hearing – evidence republished by mainstream Western media without question – was false.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/...n-stumbles
......
