Israel’s Hardest War Is Fighting the Lies Waged Against It

For nine long months, Israel has been locked in a battle against Hamas — the evil genocidal regime of Gaza...

The post Israel’s Hardest War Is Fighting the Lies Waged Against It first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

For nine long months, Israel has been locked in a battle against Hamas — the evil genocidal regime of Gaza that sparked this latest conflict when it launched a murderous campaign against Israeli civil society on October 7, murdering 1200 people and kidnapping a further 250 more.

Almost from the very beginning, the sympathy that should have been with Israel, a democratic free society that had been so brutally attacked, quickly evaporated, exposing much of the mainstream media’s almost obsessive desire to blame Israel as the aggressor.

As Israel fought back, many news agencies parroted the figures and the stories given by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, as if it were some kind of neutral trustworthy source of truth.

It isn’t.

On October 17, 2023, Hamas claimed that an Israeli missile strike hit a Gazan hospital, killing at least 500 people. This false and unverified claim received overwhelming media coverage. Soon, however, Israeli officials released their findings debunking entirely the Hamas claim, and displaying evidence that it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile that had fallen short and landed in the hospital parking lot, causing many fewer deaths than reported.

The media and social punditry haste to accept a terrorist organization’s slanderous claim marked the beginning of another battlefront in Israel’s war with Hamas — the information war.

Since that moment, there have been many more claims and accusations against Israel, often emanating from information provided by Hamas, which the world media has eagerly accepted. This includes false civilian casualties, omitting Hamas’ collusion with UNRWA and United Nations affiliates, and more.

It also includes the accusations that a famine was imminent in Gaza, a libel told by the UN’s World Food Program, only to be told later in another UN report that this wasn’t true.

The claim of record-breaking civilian casualties was also proved to be a lie, when the UN quietly revised down its civilian casualty figures from Gaza, after it became apparent the figures provided by Hamas, and which were once again parroted by the world as truth, grossly exaggerated the numbers of women and children killed.

Sometimes corrections are made, but often it is too late to correct the damage done. False narratives are accepted and spread, and Israel is vilified in ways that cannot be undone.

The consequences of all this misinformation is that Israel, not Hamas, is mostly blamed and held responsible for the misery of this war.

Even just last month, when Israeli forces heroically rescued four Israeli hostages, including Noa Argamani, who became a face of the October 7 massacre when haunting video of her being dragged away to Gaza on a motorcycle, desperately pleading for her life, many news outlets refused to acknowledge the Israeli achievement, falsely referring to the hostages as being “released” or “freed” rather than “rescued.”

Francesca Albanese, a UN “Special Rapporteur” known for her extreme anti-Israeli bias, tweeted that she was “relieved that four hostages have been released,” yet in the very same tweet accused Israel of using “hostages to legitimize killing” and Israel of “genocidal intent”.

What followed, in an all too familiar pattern, was a complete re-framing of the story to obscure the causes of the war and any Israeli suffering, and use any story as an avenue to attack Israel. Once again, the media accepted Hamas’ claim that at least 274 Palestinians were killed in the operation — a figure completely unverified and disputed by Israeli authorities  — rushing to reframe the story as a “massacre” in a Gaza refugee camp.

It’s a truly dystopian alternate reality when a country under existential threat from a brutal terrorist death cult rescues innocent hostages from its clutches, and the world’s reaction is criticism and lamentation.

Hamas started this war on October 7 with its vicious and cruel attack. Since then more than 19,000 rockets, drones and anti-tank missiles have been fired into Israel by Hamas and its various allies. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar openly welcomes the civilian deaths in Gaza as “necessary sacrifices” — yet despite all this and throughout this long war, it remains Israel that continues to be criticized in a way no country ever has, tainted by the misinformation and lies fed by an evil genocidal terror organization that revels in the death and destruction it sows.

It should be so simple, yet much of the world still cannot seem to find the necessary courage to stand behind Israel in its fight against this evil enemy.

This is a crazy world we live in.

Justin Amler is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).

The post Israel’s Hardest War Is Fighting the Lies Waged Against It first appeared on Algemeiner.com.