The Blogs: 5 times the world got it wrong on Gaza (and 3 times before that)

People are quick to believe every bad thing they hear about the only Jewish state, rarely waiting to find out if it is, you know, actually true, before rushing to publish an article or issue a public condemnation. As we see all too clearly these days, that has real-world consequences. And when the truth comes out, who even notices the belated apologies (of which there have been many, by the way — as former BBC Director of Television Danny Cohen has disdainfully noted, BBC Arabic alone has had to issue more than 80 corrections since the Gaza War’s start). Here, by way of example, are five lies about Israel during this Gaza War, later disproved, but not before the lies had gone around the world.

The Al-Ahli hospital bombing
On October 17th, 10 days after Hamas and partner groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched their war on Israel, there were widespread reports that the IDF had bombed the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, killing 500. “An Israeli bombardment has struck a packed hospital compound in central Gaza, killing an estimated 500 people, including patients and displaced Palestinians sheltering inside, according to officials in the besieged Gaza Strip.” trumpeted Al-Jazeera. The BBC’s long-time Middle East expert Jeremy Bowen, meanwhile, rushed to report live on air that “The missile hit the hospital not long after dark…The explosion destroyed Al-Ahli Hospital…The building was flattened.” He later admitted that “we got that wrong” but that he ‘didn’t regret his reporting.” In fact, it quickly transpired that a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket hit – not the hospital itself, but the car park, and it became evident that, far from the “500 deaths” immediately reported by Hamas and repeated by much of the world’s media and NGOs, some dozens had been killed outside of the building. Thus, the IDF was not to blame, and the figure was wildly inflated. The ‘experts’ should have known that it is surely impossible to count the number of deaths from any major catastrophe within minutes (many weeks after October 7th, Israel was still finding bodies and hence without a final count from that grisly day), that simply dropping a bomb on a hospital full of civilians would be both morally repugnant to the IDF and would not serve Israel’s interests, and that in every Gaza conflict many Palestinian deaths have been caused by misfiring Palestinian rockets (fully 10 per cent of Hamas rockets in the 2014 conflict landed within Gaza itself).
Hamas’s ‘vanishing’ casualty figures
For months, international media and NGOs accepted, seemingly as gospel truth, regular casualty figures supplied by the Gaza Health Ministry or by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Media Office – despite the fact that both are organs of Hamas, and despite the fact that the figures, carefully manicured to sound like the deaths were almost all civilians, did not in fact differentiate between civilians and combatants, nor between those killed by the IDF and those killed by Hamas and its partners (either by misfires, as above, or deliberately – such as those shot at by Hamas while trying to move to humanitarian zones).Many media outlets didn’t even bother to mention, and still don’t, the source for these figures. They do, however, frequently parrot Hamas’s claim that 70 per cent of Palestinians killed are women and children. However, on May 9th, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) announced a dramatic reduction in its reporting of civilians killed. Instead of the previously-repeated Gaza Media Office figures of 14,500 child deaths (which they reported on May 6th), and 9,500 deaths of women, OCHA now reported 7,797 children and 4,959 women – a reduction of around half in each case. Just as important, rather than Hamas’s “70 per cent” figure previously repeated ad infinitum, it was now reported that women and children accounted for 47 per cent of fatalities. And instead of the previously-claimed 34,904 total Palestinian deaths, OCHA now noted the massively-lower 24,686 “identified” (i.e., verifiable) deaths.These figures still used Gaza Health Ministry figures rather than those of the Gaza Media Office – so they still ultimately relied on a Hamas mouthpiece, but apparently a less-exaggerated one. And even by these figures it is now clear that the militant-to-civilian fatality ratio in this was is somewhere around, or perhaps lower than, 1:1. Any civilian death is tragic, and the IDF tries its utmost to avoid any at all (while facing an enemy that illegally and outrageously tries to maximise them, as a propaganda tool) – but this ratio, it is now clear, is far better than in other comparable urban warfare conflicts, where, US and EU sources note, around 90 per cent of all casualties are usually civilians.
South Africa’s Factual Untruths at the UN International Court of Justice
South Africa’s latest accusation of Israel at the International Court of Justice largely rested on the false accusation that Israel had closed crossings and was blocking aid from coming into Gaza. Yet this was demonstrably untrue, as the Israeli defence lawyers quickly pointed out – indeed, some commentators were quite bewildered by the South Africans’ contentions given how clearly false they were. As ICJ judge Aharon Barak noted, “these past months have seen the highest numbers of humanitarian trucks entering Gaza since the beginning of the war. Importantly, last week, the IDF reported that it had allowed hundreds of humanitarian aid trucks carrying flour and fuel into Gaza through the Kerem Shalom and Erez crossings. As shown by the statement of United Nations Senior Humanitarian Coordinator Sigrid Kaag and Israel’s reports submitted to the Court, there has been a significant increase in the amount of humanitarian aid delivered to Gaza. The newly constructed temporary pier is now operating, and the Cyprus Maritime Corridor will make it possible to increase the entry of humanitarian aid and assistance. Israel maintains that it has facilitated both of these initiatives.” And whereas South Africa accused Israel of closing the Rafah Crossing, in fact this crossing was controlled and closed by Egypt. Israel, in the meantime, had created various new crossings (especially to help deliver aid to the north of Gaza, where aid trucks were often looted by Hamas) and had even managed to reopen the Kerem Shalom crossing that had been destroyed by Hamas only days earlier.
The ‘impossible’ / possible evacuation of Rafah
In a much-syndicated Agence France-Presse article in late April, aid organisation officials asserted that an evacuation of Gazan civilians from Rafah, ahead of an IDF military operation there to root out Hamas leadership and search for the hostages, would be impossible. “It’s not clear to us where people will be moved to… where they can have decent shelter and essential services,” the Red Cross’s Fabrizio Carboni said in the article, “So today, with the information we have and from where we stand, we don’t see this (massive evacuation) as possible.” Head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, was also quoted, calling a military operation an “apocalyptic situation…there is no safe place in Gaza if people leave Rafah”. A report of an Israeli estimation that an evacuation could be safely carried out in two to three weeks was dismissed as “unlikely”. Elsewhere, some foreign governments were also cited as believing such an evacuation to be highly destructive and likely to take around four months. In the event, the Israeli estimate proved correct. After Israel began issuing partial evacuation instructions on May 6th, as early as May 24th, NPR reported that nearly one million people had already moved from Rafah to one of the designated safe zones (which were supplied with aid and field hospitals and medical supplies). This was the vast majority of the Rafah’s population, and more quickly joined them. Is this the fastest and least destructive mass evacuation in modern military history? Could well be.
The ‘famine’
After multiple predictions that there was about to be famine in Gaza, resulting in disgraceful accusations that Israel was “using starvation as a weapon of war”, in June 2024, a new study by the widely-respected Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) found that, in fact, there is no famine in Gaza. They reported that the amount of food being brought into the territory had been significantly increasing (not least due to strenuous Israeli efforts despite the very difficult situation). The report also dramatically reduced the percentage of the population in severe categories for food insecurity – it cut those in the ‘Catastrophe’ level by half, from 30 percent to 15%, and those in the ‘Emergency’ level by a quarter, down to 29%. With thanks to this excellent Times Of Israel piece by Rachel Lester (which I am unashamedly plagiarising, and which you should read), drilling down further, the famine myth looks even weaker. As Lester relates, the myth was largely spread by an earlier IPC report from the body FEWS NET (Famine Early Warning Systems Network). However, FEWS NET reports are reviewed by a linked committee, the FRC (Famine Review Committee). This June report is from the FRC and is highly critical of the FEWS NET methodology. Whereas FEWS NET reported that Gazans were only receiving up to 63 per cent of their calorific needs in April, the FRC review found that Gazans had been receiving up to 157 per cent of their calorific needs (and at least 109 per cent)!The FRC review, continues Lester, found “the FEWS NET conclusions tenuous” and that FEWS NET’s predictions for deaths from malnutrition or dehydration “are not supported by the available evidence”. The FRC review also found “that the overall number of trucks entering the Gaza Strip and available food that FEWS NET used for its analysis is significantly less than reported by other sources.” And that “FEWS NET relied on multiple layers of assumptions and inference.”All of this despite evidence that has emerged of Hamas having stolen large amounts of aid, and for instance this sickening recent video of Hamas thugs publicly marking and badly beating hungry Gazans for trying to access food Hamas has stolen.None of this is to negate the dreadful suffering of many Gazans and the ongoing difficulties supplying their food needs. But it does show that Israel – under intense fire, in the midst of a war in which Hamas has been using its own people as human shields on an unprecedented scale, has been widely stealing aid, and attacking the trucks that deliver it – has clearly been making enormous efforts to get food to the Gazan people. That despite the false reporting and false accusations, the amount of food getting through has been greatly increasing. And, though it has been used to justify many of the accusations against Israel, there is no famine. A further IPC report issued in early July contains data that shows, as The TOI again relates, that their previous figures were wrong by around 300 per cent!

And in brief: 3 debunked myths from previous conflicts

At the time (and even now), many in the world took these as gospel. There are so many more.

The ‘Jenin massacre’ that wasn’t – when the IDF was forced to fight terrorists in Jenin in the West Bank during the Second Intifada, the UN and NGOs breathlessly warned of ‘a massacre’, duly reported by the media (“Israel faces Rage Over ‘Massacre’” – The Guardian) and ‘the Jenin massacre’ became widely accepted as a fact. Yet many reports subsequently found that there was no massacre, one of these the UN Secretary-General’s report which found that, contrary to Palestinian claims of between 400 and 500 deaths, in fact “around 55” fatalities had occurred, a figure that included fighters.
The ‘organ harvesting’ libel – In 2009, a Swedish newspaper reported that Israel was taking organs from dead Palestinians, an accusation which has since continually resurfaced and in this latest conflict has again been shared by the model Gigi Hadad and others. In fact, even in 2009 it was untrue. Back in the 1990s, when medical guidelines were said to be less clear about such things, one hospital – the Abu Kabir Medical Centre – was found to have been using corneas, bones etc from dead patients (including Israeli and Jewish patients) without consent. The medical centre head responsible was dismissed, guidelines clarified and a new law passed. The journalist who wrote the original article had clarified that there was no evidence of Israeli forces stealing Palestinians for organ harvesting. Another classic blood libel.
The bizarre boars – First reported in 2007 and regularly repeated since – as recently as February this year by the New York Times, no less – is the ridiculous accusation that Israelis have trained wild boars to attack Palestinians in the West Bank. Mahmoud Abbas reiterated the claim in 2012 and 2014, adding that the boars were intended to uproot Palestinian trees “and spread corruption on the face of the Earth” (what?). There has never been any evidence of this bizarre claim. Although the number of boar attacks in Israel have been on the rise, not least in Haifa in northern Israel as reported by the New York Times itself, Israelis have been injured as well as Palestinians. Thus, the strange accusation joins other animal-’facts’ like the claims of Mossad-trained sharks attacking Egyptians in the Red Sea, the dolphin spies, and Hamas claims of Israeli killer dolphins.

Again. None of this is to deny some terrible mistakes that Israel, like all countries at war, have made. Nor, doubtless, crimes committed by individual soldiers – again, as happens with all armies, and we have seen Israel arrest and punish culprits. And nobody should deny that this war that Hamas started, actively supported by its allies on multiple fronts (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and of course Iran – who have been physically attacking Israel, a tiny country the size of New Jersey, daily), is savage and causing great devastation. But. the moral of all of the above? When Israel says that it’s trying as hard as humanly possible to avoid loss of innocent lives on all sides, give it the benefit of the doubt, and perhaps don’t unquestioningly accept what its enemies say. History shows that the truth will most likely show Israel to have been right.