By Murat Sofuoglu
The whole world watched as the Israeli military massacred at least 500 people, many of them women and children, when it targeted a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday night with an air strike.
One of the deadliest attacks, which experts are calling a war crime, came just hours after the US-led Western bloc at the UN Security Council rejected a Russian ceasefire proposal to end hostilities in Gaza.
Israel is so confident of the continuous backing of its Western allies that its military officials are sure of getting away with the attack on the Christian charity-run Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza.
“In this hospital attack, we witnessed Israeli lies from the first moment,” says Riham Abuaita, a Ramallah-based Christian-Palestinian, who leads a Fact-Checking platform, Kashif, to verify claims of attacks.
The first Israeli lie was about who is responsible for the attack on the hospital, says Abuaita.
Soon after news reports of the tragedy surfaced, Israeli officials from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to opposition leader Yair Lapir began peddling fake information based on an unverified video which depicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) as being responsible for bombing of the hospital.
Ely Cohen, an Israeli journalist, even accused Hamas with a fake video, says Abuaita.
But within hours, Netanyahu and his allies deleted the video from their social media posts via which it was shared. “It was not true. The video was old,” Abuaita tells TRT World.
“The second lie came from a fake twitter account called Farida Khan, who claimed that she is an Al Jazeera reporter and she saw with her own eyes that the missile was Ayyash 250 and it hit the hospital. Also this was not true because Al Jazeera released a statement saying that the twitter account has no relations with the media group,” says Abuaita. Ayyash 250 is part of Hamas’s missile arsenal.
Israelis were bombing Palestinians and churning out propaganda at the same time to mask their war crimes exactly like they did when Shireen Abu Akleh, an Al Jazeera reporter, was killed, says Abuaita.
Israelis first denied any responsibility for the reporter’s death and instead accused Palestinian armed men similar to how the blame for the Gaza hospital attack is being shifted.
But in the face of growing evidence and under increasing international pressure, Israel finally accepted that one of its soldiers killed Shireen Abu Akleh.
“After they killed her, they spread lies about what had happened” as Israelis have been doing since the hospital attack, says Abuaita.
Israel has all along relied on Western allies especially the United States to help it avoid scrutiny and sanctions despite overwhelming evidence that its military has been involved in war crimes.
The US recently sent an aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean Sea to shore up support for the Jewish state.
“Due to strategic geopolitical relationships, powerful lobby groups, and the intricacies of international diplomacy, Israel achieves a level of impunity for its actions, which by all accounts amount to war crimes,” says Nadia Ahmad, an Orlando-based law professor and a fellow at the Center for Security, Race and Rights.
But she warns that the US military’s actions around Palestine will be watched closely, so Washington needs to act in alignment with the rule of law and respect for human rights.
“It's imperative that we do not indirectly facilitate any form of violence against innocent lives in Gaza. The international community must stand united in condemning any act of aggression and must demand full accountability for any war crimes committed by Israel," she tells TRT World.
Are all Palestinians fair game?
Last week, Herzog gave a controversial explanation to support Zionist state’s rationale for killing so many Palestinian civilians saying, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” for Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
Herzog says Gazans should have “risen up” and “fought against” not Israel, a colonial settler state occupying Palestine, but resisted groups like Hamas.
This shows that Israelis have a problem with all the Palestinians as those living in the occupied West Bank —where Hamas has no control— also suffer at the hands of the Israeli military on a daily basis, says Abuaita.
“They are arguing that they are killing civilians because Hamas is using them as human shields. But how about the West Bank?” she asks.
In reality, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which happened long before Hamas’s emergence in the 1990s, killed thousands of Palestinians, displacing hundreds of thousands of more as it’s happening now, she says.
“They are killing not because Hamas is here. They want to kill as many Palestinians as they can because they are war criminals.”
The Israeli leadership has reinforced this impression with their inflammatory statements.
“Israel has made it clear from the beginning of this war that it wants to wipe out Gaza. Either kill everyone or force them out. Israel had told the world it is fighting “human animals”, and Netanyahu described the children of Gaza as the ‘children of darkness’,” says Abir Kopty, a Palestinian writer and academic.
“This is a genocidal language, anything that Israel does should be put in that context,” Kopty tells TRT World.
In a dirty propaganda war, some Israelis are also trying to identify Hamas with Daesh, trying to create a perception that Israelis are fighting a self-proclaimed religiously inspired movement, which is out to kill innocent people.
But Abuaita, a Christian-Palestinian, does not buy that argument. It’s not about Jews against Muslims or Christians, she says.
“This is not a religious war. Israelis are trying to create a religious war perception. But it’s not about Muslims against Jews,” she says.
“It’s Israel against Palestine. It’s about Israel occupying Palestine. It’s not a religious conflict at all.”
