The British government lists Hamas, in its entirety, as a proscribed terrorist group, which means that it’s illegal in the UK – according to the terrorism act – to express support for or praise their attacks. So, publications like the Guardian, which consistently engage in pro-Palestinian advocacy under the guise of journalism, have to be careful not to cross the line to explicit support for terror groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
So, while careful not to express outright support for Hamas in the aftermath of the Oct. 7th murder, rape, torture and mutilation of 1,200 Jews, the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust, their reporters and, especially, their op-ed contributors, have consistently published content which diverts attention away from Hamas’s ISIS-style barbarism, and cruelty towards the hostages they took, focusing instead of narratives of putative Israeli ‘war crimes’ in the military response to the massacre.
Whatever their intention, the material consistently approved by Guardian editors serves Hamas’s propaganda goals, by, for instance, ignoring the terror group’s genocidal antisemitism – enshrined in their charter and their very reason for being, which explains the savagery and mass murder they engaged in two months ago – while perversely accusing Israel or genocide or ethnic cleansing.
Days since @guardian (following the worst and most barbaric antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust, carried out by a genocidal terror group) obscenely accused ISRAEL of planning, or carrying out, a genocide in Gaza: 0⃣
Attached are snapshots of the last three times.… pic.twitter.com/D1FksX4JDK
— CAMERA UK (@CAMERAorgUK) December 10, 2023
Their narrative also focuses heavily on the destruction in Gaza, and the civilian casualty numbers provided by Hamas. Yet, almost always erased from these pieces are obvious facts about how Hamas’s tactics – such as illegally placing military sites within schools, mosques, hospitals and residential buildings, and fighting from within densely populated civilian areas – inevitably lead to these horrible outcomes. This omission is in line with their institutional inability to assign Palestinians – even the leaders of Palestinians terror groups – agency.
Instead, Guardian readers are led to believe that Israeli cruelty and malevolence explains all such outcomes.
One such article demonstrating the outlet’s eagerness to impute the worst motives not to the the butchers in Gaza, but to the IDF, is an analysis by the Guardian’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour (“Widespread destruction in Gaza puts concept of ‘domicide’ in focus”, Dec. 7) which accuses Israel of a crime that, by the journalist’s own admission, is nowhere to be found in international law. Rather, it’s a term popular within academia/ Wintour employs the term to describe what he calls “the mass destruction of dwellings [in Gaza] to make the territory uninhabitable”, which is another slightly more subtle way of accusing Israel of ‘ethnic cleansing’.
Thought the piece includes two sentence to Israel’s disagreement with his assessment, writing that “Israel says all damage to buildings and loss of civilian life is regrettable but made necessary by Hamas deliberately hiding in schools and hospitals and by its refusal to surrender [and that] it is making every effort to warn citizens of imminent attacks”, the clear take-away of the piece is that Israel is deliberately making Gaza uninhabitable.
Of course, it isn’t just a ‘claim’ that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure to launch attacks and store weapons. As journalist Jonathan Spyer, imbedded within the IDF’s 36th Division in Shejaia, reported, every damaged or destroyed building that received fire is one in which we located terrorists.
“Most of Hamas’s infrastructure is based on schools, mosques, hospitals, international structures of various kinds,” said Lt.-Col. Tal Turjeman, commander of the 906th Infantry Battalion. “We find ammunition boxes hidden under the beds of children, rocket launchers placed outside of kindergartens. 95% of the buildings we’ve entered contain military materiel of one kind or another”, he told Spyer.
Underneath Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital complex. pic.twitter.com/NO2TdOwaJX
— Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) November 22, 2023
https://twitter.com/cogatonline/status/1733100878259700162
IDF published documentation of troops discovering weapons inside a school in the Gaza Strip. pic.twitter.com/F1bwpYfPaK
— Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) December 9, 2023
Footage published by the IDF shows Hamas operatives opening fire at troops from an UNRWA school in northern Gaza's Beit Hanoun, and a strike in response. pic.twitter.com/eNpNsTsJJ4
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) December 9, 2023
Finally, just a few days ago, the IDF released a video showing terrorists firing rockets from Gaza safe zones
A separate article by their world affairs editor Julian Borger (“Civilians make up 61% of Gaza deaths from airstrikes, Israeli study finds”, Dec. 9) picks up on the same theme, and is based on a deeply flawed Haaretz analysis which is based on Hamas casualty figures, the reliability of which, the author admits, is “suspect”.
In fact, as our colleague Tamar Sternthal demonstrated last month, not only does the Hamas-run health ministry fail to distinguish between civilians and combatants, but, as reported by Associated Press (AP) last month, they’ve stopped counting fatalities altogether. So, after the last death toll it announced on Nov. 10, which claimed 11,078 Palestinians had died, there’s bee no reliable numbers provided by the government. Subsequently, figures have been released by the Hamas Media Office. But, how the terror group’s PR office is able to gather data that the Ministry of Health cannot is a question nobody seems to be asking.
Let’s also remember that the Hamas health ministry figures – even when they were providing them – didn’t count the number of Gazans killed by errant Palestinian rockets (reportedly 10% of the total rockets launched), and that the ‘children’ (which they suggest are all civilians) include fighting age teens, many of whom, as we’ve learned in past wars, are Hamas and PIJ fighters. It’s also unclear how many of the so-called civilian deaths were Hamas fighters dressed in civilian clothes.
New videos of Hamas men surrendering in Jabalya have them laying down their AKs. Every single person who told you they were civilians should never be believed again. pic.twitter.com/EpValw5HlX
— David Hazony (@davidhazony) December 10, 2023
Further, the IDF consistently puts the lives of its own soldiers at risk to protect the lives of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, by usually warning civilians and neighborhoods (and hospitals) before troops are sent in, thereby also alerting the terrorists, and allowing them either to escape or to set up booby traps and kill zones targeting the soldiers, and facilitating civilian corridors.
As CAMERA’s Alex Safian demonstrated in a detailed analysis of civilian casualties in US wars in recent decades, “Compared to the battle to liberate Mosul from ISIS terrorists, where most of the work was done by US air attacks, the UN’s battles in Somalia, largely carried out by US forces sent by President Bill Clinton, and the US intervention in Panama during the administration of the first President Bush, it seems inescapable that in comparison the IDF has acted with relative restraint as it tries to avoid as much as possible civilian casualties while fighting an enemy that does its best to hide behind civilians and to cause civilian casualties, whether Israeli or Palestinian”.
However, the most egregious example of dishonesty in the Guardian’s two reports is their failure to report on Hamas’s clear disregard for the lives of civilians in the territory they control. In addition to their use of human shields, and their diversion of humanitarian aid to fund the construction of hundreds of kilometers of military tunnels, Hamas launched their savage attack on Oct. 7 knowing full well that Israel, like any nation faced with such an attack against civilians on their own soil, would launch a fierce counter-attack that would bring ruin on Gaza.
Yet, they launched it anyway – and made clear, even after three weeks of war and mounting casualties, that they would do it again, again and again, until Israel was annihilated.
Hamas Official Ghazi Hamad: We Will Repeat the October 7 Attack Time and Again Until Israel Is Annihilated; We Are Victims – Everything We Do Is Justified #Hamas #Gaza #Palestinians pic.twitter.com/kXu3U0BtAP
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) November 1, 2023
The central cause of Hamas’s misery is Hamas, and it’s the group’s fanaticism, and not Israel’s reaction to their psychopathic hatred for and mass murder of Jews, that’s the real story of the war, one that outlets like the Guardian, in an apparent need to avoid owning up to the moral consequences of their full-throated support for the Palestinian cause, are loath to acknowledge.
