How the media misreported Nasser Hospital (Real Jerusalem Streets)

Guest essay by Real Jerusalem Streets:

It was 25 years ago, but I remember it better than last week.

We lived in New York City, I was standing in my husband's office. On his desk was the New York Times - a must-have newspaper in those days.

One little news brief mentioned First Lady Hilary Clinton for the Senate seat to open up with the retirement of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. 

As I stood there, I thought - the manipulation of the masses by the media. 

The woman who had never lived in NY before 1999, was voted the US Senator from New York in 2000 after Nita Lowey - graciously - backed out of the race.

This week, multiple times, the media was influencing the public, but I will focus on only one specific issue, rather than do a long rant.

July 23, 2024, was Tuesday the 17th of Tammuz and a Jewish fast day. 

In Jerusalem, Israel, the sun was blazing and too hot to go outside, better to attend Zoom meetings and stay close to the computer and the air conditioning. 

Scrolling on X in the morning, I found Reuters live-streaming the Emergency Room entrance of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

Here is one screenshot of the morning scene. The video live stream was on my computer all day as I did other things. Constantly I referred back, watching and listening for ambulances, etc. 

You can watch all six hours here:

For most of the day, I and thousands of others watched the very less-than-chaotic images. At times little boys roamed around, and occasionally a small crowd of men gathered outside the fence. Women constantly were walking this road, even as a few cars and trucks came along.

It looks like the amount of ambulances any major hospital emergency room would receive in any six hour period. No evidence of panic or desperation. 

So what's the problem?

The Washington Post used this Shutterstock image as feature on its story.

JERUSALEM — Israel’s army intensified military operations in southern Gaza on Monday, sending Palestinian casualties streaming into already buckling hospitals, as thousands of civilians fled an area that the army had previously designated a safe zone.

In Nasser Hospital, one of the most functional remaining medical facilities in the Gaza Strip, casualties streamed in and doctors did what they could. Many of the patients were children, and some arrived by themselves, medics said..."

Who are you going to believe, your own eyes or the Washington Post?

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Just another @WashingtonPost lie about Gaza fatalities

The Washington Post headline says:

Over the last week, Israel has unleashed a wave of airstrikes across the besieged Strip.... that Palestinians and humanitarian workers likened in intensity and lethality to those in the early weeks of the nine-month war.

Really? Because even Hamas disagrees.

The Hamas-run health ministry numbers claim that during the first four weeks of the war there were 9,485 killed - an average of 2,371 per week. 

That is five times the number claimed by that same ministry over the past seven days: 466.

Since the humanitarian pause in November, the number of weekly deaths in Gaza has gone steadily down, even according to the Hamas authorities. Here's a chart.

The bump in the past week was entirely from Israel's airstrike aimed at the head of the Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif, nearly the most valuable military target in Gaza that more than justifies the apparently high death toll, according to the principle of proportionality under the laws of armed conflict as applied to every other war since the Fourth Geneva Convention was written.

But even with that airstrike, the number of fatalities this past week was less than every week of the war from October to April (excluding the humanitarian pause in November.) 

The Palestinians and health workers are proven to be liars. The Washington Post embraces the lie so much that they place it in their headline. 

Quoting the health workers and Palestinians saying the lie does not exonerate the newspaper. It should fact check them, and anyone who has been following the war - including the reporter Miriam Berger -would immediately know that it is a lie. 

This is not an oversight. It is not a mistake. It is a consciously false attack on Israel by the Washington Post.

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The @WashingtonPost's investigation about Shifa Hospital misses the real story

On Thursday, the Washington Post published an investigation  casting doubt on whether Shifa Hospital in Gaza was being used as a Hamas command center.

Its top major finding: "The rooms connected to the tunnel network discovered by IDF troops showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas."

The key to the story is the word "immediate:"

“The law is about what was in the mind of the attacker at the time the attacker planned and executed the mission with respect to both what they expected the collateral damage they expected to cause and the military advantage they anticipated gaining,” said Michael Schmitt, an emeritus professor at the U.S. Naval War College.

The IDF would not comment on the military advantage sought or achieved.

“What was the urgency? This is not yet being demonstrated,” said Yousuf Syed Khan, a senior lawyer with Global Rights Compliance, a law firm, who has drafted U.N. reports on siege warfare.

While the underground tunnel uncovered by Israeli forces after the raid does point to a possible militant presence underneath the hospital at some point, it does not prove that a command node was operating there during the war.

“We’re getting more of a granular, three-dimensional understanding of al-Shifa Hospital, the tunnels underneath it,” said Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser at the State Department and now a senior adviser at Crisis Group.

“What we’re really lacking here is a confident understanding of the fourth dimension, which is time. When were various elements of the hospital being used in certain ways? When were the tunnels beneath the hospital complex being used in certain ways?”

The Washington Post has its doubts:

The bare, white-tiled rooms showed no immediate evidence of use — for command and control or otherwise. There are no signs of recent habitation, including litter, food containers, clothing or other personal items.  

Let's look at the context.

Hamas' use of the hospital for military purposes was well known as early as 2006. Even the Washington Post itself wrote in 2014 that it  “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” 

Israel had built bunkers under the hospital when Gaza was under Israeli control, but bunkers aren't tunnels. However, we know that there were tunnels under Gaza's Al Wehda Street that were bombed in the 2014 war, and that street leads directly to the hospital compound. Given that Hamas built hundreds of tunnel shafts underneath their offices and leaders' homes, it is apparent that there were connections between Hamas offices in the hospital basement and the tunnels under Al Wehda Street.

Israel might not have revealed the specific locations of each shaft, and that is hardly important considering that there is no doubt that these tunnels existed directly underneath a hospital.

Just as there is no doubt that the only purpose of these tunnels, underground rooms and bathrooms is military. They aren't hotels or summer camps.

The IDF first laid out a specific series of accusations about the Shifa Hospital on October 27, nearly three weeks before the raid, before the ground war even began. There were unofficial discussions of Shifa Hospital before that. It didn't show "urgency" - it showed unheard-of patience before moving in.

Hamas knew the IDF was coming for them. And they had weeks to clear out and clean up the evidence from the tunnels (even though they left behind plenty of weapons on the hospital grounds themselves, which were harder to clean up since there were so many people around.)

Here's the part that no one is talking about: The IDF knew quite well that they were giving Hamas a heads up that they were coming. They knew Hamas would not stay and it would hide evidence of explicit military use. So why give the warning at all? Why not surprise Hamas? What army tells the enemy where they will be going?

The warning was meant to force Hamas commanders to move to other areas. 

This achieves three military aims. Firstly, it  disrupts their operations temporarily. Secondly,  it allows the IDF to go there, gather evidence and valuable intelligence like footage from cameras, and destroy the military infrastructure beneath Shifa without a firefight and endangering patients and civilians taking shelter. And thirdly, Hamas leaders moving to other areas allows Israel to attack them without worrying about the complexity of protecting hospital patients during a battle.

Israel has now released evidence that Hamas brought hostages to Shifa. The tunnels had electricity and plumbing that were attached to Shifa's infrastructure. Weapons were found in the radiology ward and in a garage on Shifa's grounds. We know that employees and even directors at other hospitals were also Hamas terrorists. The Gaza health ministry is Hamas and it admits its officials have Hamas military rank. While there might not be direct evidence of Hamas using those tunnels underneath Shifa in mid-November as their main headquarters, no one can seriously doubt that Hamas used the hospital for military purposes and that the reason was to use the patients as human shields. 

Israel managed to clear Hamas out of the hospital it was using for military purposes with a minimum of fighting and a minimum of physical destruction. That is not violating international law - it is adhering to it in ways far beyond the limited imaginations of those whose entire worldview is poisoned by always assuming malevolence from Israel.

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Hospital head is a Hamas lieutenant colonel. His lies were widely quoted by the media for months.

Times of Israel reports:

The director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital in Jabaliya has revealed in a Shin Bet interrogation that his northern Gaza hospital was turned into a military facility under Hamas’s control and that at one point, it had housed a kidnapped soldier.

In footage published on Tuesday by the Shin Bet and Israel Defense Forces, hospital director Ahmed Kahlot could be seen telling an Israeli interrogator that Hamas had offices inside the hospital and used it as a base for operational activity.

According to Kahlot, who said he has been a lieutenant colonel in Hamas since 2010, some 16 members of the hospital’s staff — including doctors, nurses and paramedics — were Hamas operatives serving in the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the terror organization.

He added that several members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades were also employed in the hospital.

Here is his statement:

 Kahlout was widely quoted by the media for two months. Now that we know he is Hamas, we can assume that a large percentage of his statements that helped shape world opinion were propaganda.

So what has the media quoted a Hamas official as if he was a dedicated medical professional?

AP quoted him November 7 defending how casualty numbers from Hamas' health ministry are trustworthy.  

“Hamas is one of the factions. Some of us are aligned with Fatah, some are independent,” said Ahmed al-Kahlot, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. “More than anything, we are medical professionals.”

The Guardian, November 12:

 The head of northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital has told Al Jazeera that the hospital has run out of fuel.

“Ahmed al-Kahlout, the head of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that the facility’s main generator has run out of fuel, forcing the hospital to shut its operation,” the news organisation reports.

More than 5,000 people are sheltering at the hospital in addition to patients, al-Kahlout said.

The Guardian, November 22, quoted him again:

The hospital had received more than 60 bodies with over 200 injured since last night, he added. “The medical teams are very tired. We don’t have a single drop of fuel. We work in the dark using handheld searchlights,” he said

In another message distributed by the health ministry, Kahlout said the hospital was using cooking oil rather than diesel to run the hospital’s generators, and an ambulance targeting the wounded had been struck near the hospital grounds.

CNN, December 11, quoted him as saying that the maternity ward was hit by tank shelling, killing two women and leaving two more so badly wounded their legs required amputation.

Pravda, December 12:

"Israeli drones target anyone entering or leaving the hospital. ...The IOF targeted the hospital's water system, and we had to rely on groundwater. No electricity, water, or food in the hospital. The IOF shelled the maternity ward. Three children in the hospital lost their lives in the last three days due to a shortage of oxygen. "

Every quote from every medical professional in Gaza since October 7 is as suspect as Al-Kahlout's. But there was no skepticism about his accusations - until now. 

Now that he is telling everyone that Hamas controls the hospitals and ambulances, the Times of London has lots of reservations about  his statements:

Israel has sought to justify arresting scores of medical staff in Gaza by posting a video that purports to show a hospital manager confessing to working for Hamas.

Ahmed Kahlot, head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, was detained last week along with 70 other medical staff.

The release of the video was condemned by pro-Palestinian groups, who said there was no justification for publishing interrogation evidence obtained under unclear conditions without the presence of a lawyer.

Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British-Palestinian surgeon who spent weeks earlier in the conflict working in both al-Shifa and al-Ahli hospitals, said the Israelis were taking these actions because their attempts to show al-Shifa had been used as a command centre had failed.

“The Israelis plan to have show trials to justify the attacks on hospitals, because the whole narrative on al-Shifa was so ludicrous,” he said.

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Another batch of EoZ memes, cartoons and posters

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Antisemites framing the discussion so Israel can't win

Israel-haters/antisemites often use an exceptionally effective method to win in the court of public opinion, known a "framing." When one sets the ground rules of what is and is not up for debate, they can create a playing field where the Zionist or Jewish side cannot win. Forcing Jews to argue within those parameters gives them a huge handicap.

One classic example is to pretend that the history of Israel starts with modern Zionism. If you exclude any talk about the history of the Jews in the Land of Israel before the 19th century, they look just like the foreign colonialists that the haters claim we are. 

With Operation Iron Swords, the framing has been elaborate and very effective.

The false framework goes like this:

* Telling civilians to move, whether within or without their territory,  is a war crime.

* Neighboring countries have no obligation to accept refugees.

* Killing lots of civilians is a war crime by definition. 

* Limiting humanitarian aid to a war zone is a war crime.

All discussions of the war on TV is bound by this framework. These four "rules" are not always explicit, which makes it harder to go against them. Who wants to see dead civilians? 

The framing statements are incorrect.  But the framework is carefully created to ensure that Israel cannot achieve its military objective of destroying Hamas.

* In fact, in a war zone, the attacker is obligated to tell civilians to move out of the war zone - which Israel has done and Hamas has tried to stop. 

* While I don't think that Egypt is legally obligated to open its border, it never had a problem with taking in hundreds of thousands of other refugees from elsewhere. It certainly has a moral obligation to do so.

* Targeting civilians is a war crime. Knowing that civilians will die during an attack on a legitimate military target is acceptable as long as the casualties are not excessive, and international law has a much more liberal view of what is excessive than what Israel does.

* Israel has every right to inspect and limit aid to ensure that Hamas does not get it. 

But the first four rules are accepted as the framework on CNN and Al Jazeera. Most news shows don't bother explaining the truth about international law because nuance is not TV-friendly. 

Spokespeople on TV must break the framework by saying that they do not accept these parameters and creating their own, accurate framework:

* Hamas started this war with an unprecedented, horrific attack on Israel.

* Hamss has made it clear that they will never change or reform. This is who they are.

* The only moral choice is to utterly destroy them.

* Hamas has turned the entire Gaza Strip into a huge human shield for its army and vast subterranean military complex.  

* Israel scrupulously follows international law even under these difficult constraints.

* Therefore, while Israel tries to minimize casualties, every civilian death is purely Hamas' fault.

How many TV shows or newspaper articles have you read that accepts these accurate statements as their framework? 

It's going to be a long war, and Israel needs to reframe the discussion. 

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At the @NYTimes, things that are normal for every other country become nefarious when Israel does them

In a long New York Times Magazine profile of Benjamin Netanyahu by Ruth Margalit, we see this:

Admirers credit Netanyahu with “changing the paradigm” around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Boaz Bismuth, a Likud lawmaker, told me. Netanyahu did so by effectively bypassing the Palestinians and signing normalization agreements with other Arab countries in the region. But those agreements, known as the Abraham Accords, are the diplomatic end result of an arms deal in which Israel would provide nearly all signatories with licenses to its powerful cybersurveillance technology Pegasus, as an investigation in this magazine revealed last year. “He made use of knowledge and technologies to get closer to dictators,” a former senior defense official told me.   

According to this article, the Abraham Accords are just a cover for a cyber-arms deal that enriched a private Israeli firm.

This is an insane perspective. Even though written by a Tel Aviv based Jewish writer, it plays into classic antisemitic tropes. After all, she is saying that the most consequential peace deal in the region in four decades is really about Jewish greed and disregard for human rights.

The Abraham Accords deal resulted in the US selling $23 billion of arms to the UAE. Can you imagine the New York Times claiming that the US only brokered the deal our of greed to enrich US defense contractors?

Every negotiation involves give and take in an attempt to find results that benefit both parties. The Obama-brokered Iran nuclear deal gave Iran the ability to refine uranium after a time period in exchange for short-term pause (that they ignored anyway)  If there is a Saudi peace agreement, the US would be giving the Saudis access to nuclear technology which is just as dual-use as spyware is, but on a quite larger scale. The downsides in both cases are merely nuclear weapons in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists facilitated by the US. 

And every Western, democratic country makes compromises to their own human rights standards in order to maintain relationships with countries whose own human rights records are less than stellar. 

But only for Israel are negotiations viewed through such a bizarre lens of how Israeli greed and disregard for human rights is what drives its desire to reach peace agreements with other Middle Eastern countries - countries that all happen to be repressive Muslim and Arab dictatorships to begin with.

And there are more articles in the media against Israel for allowing cyberweapons to be sold than against the regimes that abuse them. 

Pegasus is a tool, like a hammer. It has legitimate uses but it also can be abused to attack dissidents, just like bullets or surveillance drones. The New York Times, though, seems to regard spyware as an exclusively Israeli, magical tool. As I noted earlier this week, when similar spyware tools to Pegasus were misused by Greece and Egypt, the New York Times didn't mention that newly blacklisted spyware developers came out of  Greece, Hungary, Ireland and North Macedonia - but highlighted that two of them were headed by a former Israeli general. 

The hypocrisy doesn't end there. When Israel does put restrictions on dual-use items to be transferred - meaning, when it stops items at the Gaza border that could be used to build missiles and other weapons  aimed at Israeli civilians - Israel is blamed by the NYT for unfairly hurting Palestinians for no good reason.

There are no limits to the double standards Israel is subjected to by the New York Times. 

(h/t Yisrael Medad)

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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