It has been the source for the recent charge that Israel is harvesting organs from dead Palestinians, for many sketchy casualty allegations, that Israel is is guilty of hundreds of "field executions" of civilians, that Israel destroyed over 200 archaeological sites, and so on. It is a non-stop factory manufacturing lies.
So, who is behind it?
Their website is down. Their YouTube channel has been removed.Their Instagram and Facebook pages have not been updated since October. They are not holding press conferences.
Everything comes from their Telegram channel (which, as of this moment, I cannot find the link to.) That is what gets quoted in Arabic media.
Earlier, we discussed Israel's transparency. Well, here is an example of Hamas' opacity.
There is no means to check anything released by the Hamas media office. There is no name attached to it.
The head of the media office was Salama Marouf, but he hasn't posted anything on his own Facebook or TikTok since October 9, and his last messages on Facebook strongly hint that he was not healthy. He posted, "Our Lord, do not burden us with what we have strength to bear, forgive us, and have mercy on us, You are our Lord, so give us victory over the disbelievers."
So we don't even know who is in charge of the Telegram channel. We don't know its sources.
The media that quotes Hamas' media office knows literally nothing about who they are transcribing. It could be an AI, it could be a hacker, it could be a 14-year old son of Marouf.
Yet this completely opaque channel is trusted enough to be quoted as if the journalists know that it is legit, let alone that the information it spreads is accurate.
And while statements from this mystery terrorist Telegram channel are trusted, official Israeli statements given by people with real names and real faces and backed up with real evidence are treated as potential lies.
Treating what Jews say as barely more reliable than the statements of murderers and rapists is not journalism. It is antisemitism dressed up as journalism.
