Israel Attacks Hamas — Here Comes the Hamas Propaganda Attack

As late as Friday, many Israeli citizens were pulling out their hair. Hamas rockets were falling like rain on Israeli civilians. What was Israel waiting for? Why was Israel allowing the delivery of supplies into Gaza? Why were Israeli hospitals treating Palestinians hurt by errant Hamas rockets?

Now we have some answers
* The humanitarian assistance also served to lull Hamas into believing that Israel was going soft.
* The attack on the Jewish Sabbath was also unexpected by Hamas.
* Israeli intelligence was tracking, following, and marking the Hamas leadership, terrorist camps, and rocket crews for months. Hundreds of Hamas soldiers were caught in their bases. It can be assumed that aerial surveillance was able to retrace the steps of rocket crews to observe the locations of rocket warehouses and factories. As a result the Israeli Air Force attacks were remarkably accurate.

Now the Propaganda Counterattack
The blood libels against Israel have already begun. A British defense writer, Sean Rayment, blasted Israel in a Telegraph (UK) blog today, “The attack on the Gaza strip is proof that Israel is addicted to violence. Slaughtering 155 civilians, many of whom are women and children, can not be justified.”
An absolute blood libel. No military force in the world is as careful as the Israeli Defense Forces in differentiating combatants from the civilians surrounding them. Note this report from Bloomberg: “Most of the Palestinian dead were members of the Hamas security forces, including police chief Tawfiq Jaber and the head of the organization’s Security and Protection Service, Ismail al-Jabary, said Taher Noono,
a spokesman for Hamas. “
Pictures from Gaza indicate this fact. Note these photos of Palestinian security forces hit in their bases. These are uniformed combatants of a force that declared war on Israel, and they are very legitimate targets according to international law.
But now comes the “fauxtography” so prominent in the Lebanon war.
A Washington Post photo essay posted the two pictures above of the Palestinian combatants along with a picture of Palestinian wounded in a Gaza hospital. The picture was accompanied by this caption: Palestinian children and a man wounded in Israeli missile strikes are seen in the emergency area at Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Saturday, Dec. 27, 2008. Israeli warplanes demolished dozens of Hamas security compounds across Gaza on Saturday in unprecedented waves of simultaneous air strikes. Gaza medics said at least 145 people were killed and more than 310 wounded in the single deadliest day in Gaza fighting in recent memory. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra) (Khalil Hamra – AP)
The children appear healthy. Would the photographer and caption writer, Khalil Hamra, fake a picture?
Yes.
Khalil Hamra is the credited AP photographer for many of the pictures of the International Solidarity Movement activities in Gaza, including those of Rachel Corrie. To recall, Rachel Corrie was an American activist who attempted to stop an Israeli bulldozer from destroying Gazan tunnels in 2003. Corrie slipped under the bulldozer, was killed and became a shaheed of the left. Hamra’s pictures include this one of Corrie burning an American flag (left).

A search of Google images shows hundreds of Hamra’s pictures of grieving Palestinians as well as Palestinian dead and wounded. His many pictures of Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters and military exercises suggest that Hamra could almost serve as Hamas’ official photographer.

Lenny Ben-David
I*Consult
Business and Government Relations
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