Some Hamas lies that are too ridiculous for even the media to parrot - so they don't report them, to give more credibility to a terror group ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, January 01, 2025

Some Hamas lies that are too ridiculous for even the media to parrot - so they don't report them, to give more credibility to a terror group

We have noted a number of times that the media tends to accept Hamas statements at face value, whether they come from a Hamas spokesperson, a Hamas Telegram channel, the Hamas-run Gaza civil service, the Hamas media office or the Hamas-run Ministry of Health. Israeli statements, on the other hand, are judged to be suspect at the outset, with lots of scare quotes and caveats like "the IDF claims could not be verified."

A Monday story in the New York Times shows this dynamic with Hamas claims reported straight but Israeli claims riddled with the most scare quotes I have ever seen in an article:

After nearly three months of an intensified Israeli military campaign in northern Gaza to quell what Israel has said is a Hamas resurgence, fighting raged unabated on Monday, with each side claiming successes against the other’s fighters.

The Israeli military released a statement saying that one soldier had been killed in combat in the northern Gaza Strip and that three members of the same brigade had been severely injured in the same clash. The statement provided no additional details.

The military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, said it had destroyed an Israeli vehicle in the northern town of Beit Hanoun, killing and wounding an unspecified number of soldiers. The militant group also said that it had targeted Israeli soldiers in another northern town, Jabaliya, killing five.

The Israeli military declined to comment, saying it does not respond to the announcements of “terror organizations.”

For its part, the Israeli military announced that it had killed and arrested “multiple” militants in an overnight operation near Jabaliya as they were trying to “flee, deploy deception tactics and conduct ambushes.” It said that action followed a “targeted operation” against a Hamas command center “embedded inside Kamal Adwan Hospital” in the same area over the weekend that led to the arrest of more than 240 militants.

Israel said its troops were “continuing to operate" in the area.

The Israeli military on Monday also released footage it said it had found in Gaza purporting to show Hamas operatives planting explosives near the Indonesian Hospital, which is in the north of the enclave. The military said its troops had been operating near there last week to “eliminate” militants “who attempted to flee the hospital,” and that it had arrested “tens” of additional fighters and “neutralized” areas rigged with explosives.

“This is another example of the Hamas terror organization’s cynical use of the population and civilian institutions in the Gaza Strip” the military said.
The New York Times was not able to independently verify the footage.

The implication is that everything Israel says is suspect and must be verified independently, even innocuous statements that no one disputes. Hamas claims are unquestioned. The IDF is asked to comment on Hamas claims but Hamas is not asked to comment on what Israel says.

It is especially risible in this case where Hamas claims of killing multiple soldiers is not only completely fictional, but it is an easily disproven claim Hamas makes daily.

Later on, the director of the hospital is quoted as an admirable, caring doctor, ignoring that he is a colonel in Hamas, he has accused Israel of crazy crimes and he celebrated October 7.

What makes this attitude go beyond a failure of writing fairly and crossing into antisemitism territory is that Hamas makes lots of statements, and a significant number of them are utterly ridiculous, transparent lies. The insane falsehoods are published in the same outlets as the more reasonable sounding lies that the media and NGOs believe. There is no way they are not aware of the many provable lies of Hamas and its fans.

But they don't report most of them, and it is rare indeed that they debunk them. Their readers and viewers have no idea of Hamas' trsack record of falsehoods, which should be a basic part of every story when Hamas is quoted.

Here is a very limited list of the lies I have written about in the course of this war, all with links to the original statements.

October 17, 2023: Hamas claims Israel bombed and destroyed the Al Ahli Hospital in an airstrike. (An area outside the hospital was damaged by an Islamic Jihad rocket.) Hamas also claims 471 people were killed, and not one analyst that looked at the blast site believe the number was anything close to that. Yet the 471 number was included in the ministry of health count of Gazans killed.

November 2023: The PA health minister claims Israel threw sick patients in the street outside Shifa Hospital and left hundreds of corpses in the street for dogs to eat. Israel at that point had not gone near Shifa.

November 2023: Hamas claims they destroyed dozens of tanks and killed the soldiers inside, while their videos are showing Israel's TROPHY system repelling the RPGs.

December 2023: Hamas claims that the hostages were treated well while in captivity.

December 25, 2023: Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar claims that Hamas had killed over 1,500 Israeli soldiers.

December 2023: Hamas claims Israel stole organs from dead bodies that had already been buried. Organ transplants from cadavers are medically impossible.

Starting in January: Hamas claims Israel is leaving booby trapped cans of food in Gaza for children to pick up and get killed or injured.

January 2024: Hamas issues a report claiming no rapes and no attacks on civilians on October 7.

January 2024: Hamas claims IDF soldiers stole $25 million of gold in Gaza checkpoints on Salah al-Din Road starting in October. There were no IDF checkpoints there.

February 2024: Hamas claims to have killed 15 soldiers in 24 hours (no one was killed.) Also Hamas claimed that they had destroyed over 900 IDF tanks by that time.

April 2024: Hamas claims Israel buried civilians it killed in mass graves outside Nasser Hospital. Those graves had been dug by Gazans in January.

July 13, 2024: Hamas denies Israel killed Mohammed Deif in an airstrike, saying he is mocking reports of his death. Nothing has been heard about him since.

August 2024: The lead of Kamal Adwan Hospital - the same one lovingly described in the NYT - accuses Israel of engaging in "germ warfare."

September 10, 2024: Hamas denies ever placing its militants in civilian areas.

October 2024: Hamas claims that Israel has secret weapons that completely vaporize bodies leaving no trace. It was repeated by the head of the Gaza health ministry in December.

November 2024: Euro-Med Monitor claims Israel has been blocking blankets, shoes and clothing from entering Gaza since the war began. (All those items arrive virtually every day as seen in UNRWA's own database.)

December 9 2024: Hamas media says Netanyahu admitted that the gangs of thieves stealing aid in Gaza work for Israel. He obviously never said that.

December 2024: Hamas claims that terrorists had stabbed and killed several IDF soldiers with their bare hands after they ran out of ammunition.

If these stories had been reported in the media with the appropriate debunking, then everything Hamas says would be properly suspect. Which is probably the very reason reporters and analysts prefer to keep these lies under wraps; they want to project the war as a battle between righteous Palestinians and colonialist Jews, and telling the truth about Hamas lies hurts that narrative.

If someone can give me an alternate explanation for the NYT and other media's self-censorship of the obviously false Hamas statements, I would love to hear it.