Hamas admits Muhammad Deif's death after months of denials. When will the world admit the @IDF tells the truth and Hamas consistently lies? ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, January 31, 2025

Hamas admits Muhammad Deif's death after months of denials. When will the world admit the @IDF tells the truth and Hamas consistently lies?

On Thursday, Hamas admitted Qassam Brigades leader Muhammad Deif had been killed during the war.

This comes after months of denials. When Israel announced that Deif and other Hamas leaders were the target for ran airstrike in July, Hamas called these “false allegations” intended to “cover up the scale of the horrific massacre.” Deputy head of the Hamas political bureau, Khalil al-Hayya, told Al Jazeera that Deif had heard Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's claim that he was the target and laughed at it. Even as late as November, Hamas denied a report from Asharq al-Awsat saying Deif had been killed in that airstrike.

Now Hamas admits the truth. Everyone knows Hamas was lying for over six months and the IDF, which only confirmed Deif's death in early August, was telling the truth.

This has happened hundreds of times over the years. But the mainstream media still stubbornly pretends that both Israeli and terrorist claims have equal weight; that a masked Abu Obeida is as credible as an entire professional army that is under constant scrutiny. One which, it should be emphasized, admits mistakes when they happen, which should only add to its credibility when it denies others' accusations.

Knowing that Deif was indeed killed on July 13, and that Hamas lied about it, what does that mean for the coverage of the July airstrike?

Media at the time took the Gaza Health Ministry statement that 90 were killed in the strike as unvarnished truth, as the Washington Post headline shows.

But the only source for this is the Hamas run health ministry. At the time, the Palestinian Red Crescent society said they recovered 23 bodies. The health ministry counts bodies that arrive at hospitals. Perhaps some bodies were transported using other means, but there are no such claims. How could the health ministry have concluded 90 deaths if only 23 bodies were brought to hospitals?

Israel didn't just claim that they killed Deif in the airstrike. They said that they killed a number of senior Hamas officials, including the commander of the Hamas Khan Younis brigade, Rafa Salama, whose death Hamas also now admits.

This means that the IDF was also telling the truth that Hamas was hiding among civilians in the main humanitarian zone of Al Mawasi. Top Hamas commanders used the hundreds of thousands of civilians in the camp as human shields, which Hamas also consistently denies. If Deif and Salama was there, they were using the camp as a Hamas military headquarters. It can be presumed that Deif and Salama were not alone in their meeting in the middle of the camp, and if 23 were killed, a good proportion of them were Hamas members.

The story of an unprovoked massacre at the camp is now debunked. Yet the coverage of Hamas now admitting Deif's death does not mention the obvious: that this proves that the IDF strikes were fully legal under international law and Hamas cynically used its own people as human shields. The media is not admitting that its reporting from the camp did not admit that there were legitimate targets there, and that it skewed journalism to damn Israel.

Hamas just admitted that its senior members use the people it governed as human shields. That is the story that we are not seeing the media mention today.