On Saturday, when Israel attacked the al-Taba’een Hamas command centre in Gaza City, jihadi propagandists swung into action straight away. The group had placed the military facility inside a school compound for precisely this reason. Now it was time to cash in.
At first, things seemed to be going according to plan. ‘Nearly 100 killed in Israeli strike on school, Gaza officials say,’ blared the Washington Post, a typical example. In the story, Mahmoud Bassal, a ‘Gaza civil defence spokesman’, was given space to hype up the attack without any indication that the Gaza civil defence is controlled by Hamas.
Hamas sat back and waited for the international outrage to place Israel under pressure. This time, however, Jerusalem was prepared. In short order, the IDF released a list of the names and mugshots of the terrorists who had been targeted, as well as their ages and the ranks they held within Hamas and Islamic Jihad. First, it provided the details of 19 such combatants. Then, when Hamas revised its numbers to say that only 40 had lost their lives, Israel released a further batch of information about 38 dead terrorists.
The truth remains elusive. Aside from treating Hamas’s numbers with well-deserved scepticism, Israel has not offered a definitive answer on the numbers of civilians killed. In war, it takes much time to ascertain the numbers of the dead; all these years later, estimations of the casualties of the Iraq war, for instance, range within a spectrum of hundreds of thousands. The IDF has, however, confirmed that small and precise munitions were used in the strike to avoid harming civilians sheltering nearby and published a video showing that the compound was still intact, contrasting with unverified social media footage of the bodies of women and children.
Track records, however, speak for themselves. In the past, Hamas’s strategy for manipulating the media, and consequently world opinion, has worked shamefully well. From casualty numbers to myths about Israeli soldiers menacing detainees with dogs, from allegations about starvation and genocide to specific lies about........