Thursday, January 11, 2024
Elder of ZiyonThe families of the two Palestinian journalists killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza have rejected as "fabricated" and "false" a new claim from Israel's military that they were "terrorists"....On Wednesday night, the IDF put out another statement about the incident which said an Israeli aircraft targeted the operators of a "hostile drone near Rafah" and that Palestinian media had subsequently identified them as journalists."However, IDF intelligence has confirmed that both the deceased were members of Gaza-based terrorist organizations actively involved in attacks against IDF forces," it added.It alleged that troops in Gaza had found a document that identified Mustafa Thuraya as a "member of Hamas' Gaza City Brigade, serving as squad deputy commander in the Qadisiya Battalion".Troops had also found documents that showed Hamza al-Dahdouh's "role in the Islamic Jihad's electronic engineering unit and his previous role as a deputy commander in the Zeitoun Battalion's Rocket Array", it added. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is the second largest armed group in Gaza and, like Hamas, it is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the UK and others.The IDF released a photograph of one document in Arabic that included Hamza al-Dahdouh's name among a list of "operatives from the electronic engineering unit" of PIJ.The image is very poor quality, making it hard to assess its authenticity independently.However, two regional experts told BBC Verify that the use of English alongside Arabic in the document was unusual.Erik Skare, a researcher at France's Sciences Po university who has written a book on PIJ, said: "I regularly visited the website of the al-Quds Brigades... I have read their martyr biographies, their books etc, and I have never seen the combination of English and Arabic text."
Here is the document the IDF released, and the Google Translate of that document, showing the full name of the Al Jazeera "journalist" Hamza Al-Dahdouh and that he was part of the Electronic Engineering (G22) unit.
Is that true?
The website of the Al Quds Brigades is saraya.ps - a site that has been down since the beginning of the war. But we have plenty of archives of the site online. And here is what every single press release looks like:
"Al Quds Brigades" in English, upper left, organization name underneath in English, logo in the middle. Just like the document released by Israel.
The main logo of the group also includes English:
Either the "experts" are lying about what they've seen on the site or they never went to the site at all. Either way, this makes the BBC look very bad indeed.
And based on this non-existent "evidence" the BBC broadly implies that Israel is faking documents, which is a serious charge.
The problem goes beyond just lying. The BBC doesn't show anything near this level of skepticism for anything that Hamas or Gaza people say. They don't bother looking for "experts" to identify where the Hamas statements are inconsistent and provable lies. And make no mistake - every BBC employee who knows Arabic could easily prove Hamas lies all the time by comparing their daily claims of killing so many Israelis with the number of Israeli funerals there are. Any BBC employee with a spreadsheet can see the glaring inconsistencies of the daily casualty reports where the number of "women and children" killed sometimes exceed the total number killed.
Yet the BBC never reports about Hamas lies.
Israel is assumed at the outset to be always lying, and even that its evidence is faked, while Hamas is trusted implicitly.
This isn't journalism. This is anti-Israel propaganda.
Official IDF statements, which we can assume are not objective, are still far more trustworthy and objective than anything published by the BBC.
(If you think that the Islamic Jihad document is referring to another person with Al Dadhouh's name, his full name was indeed Hamza Wael Hamdan Al-Dahdouh as shown in the document.)
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