Over the weekend, Hamas, the terror group which carried out the worst and most barbaric antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust, claimed that Israel has violated the ceasefire 47 times since the first phase of the US-led 20 point peace plan went into effect on Oct. 10th.
However, in line with the Guardian’s two-year campaign to erase the Islamist extremist group from their war coverage, the outlet’s correspondent Lorenzo Tondo reported, in an Oct. 18th article, that “Gaza’s media office” made the claim, without informing readers that the Gaza “media office” – like nearly all institutions in the territory – is controlled by Hamas.
Even the BBC was clear that in their brief post about alleged Israeli ceasefire violations that Hamas leveled the charges.
Yet, the Guardian’s coverage – which curiously mirrors that of the Turkish state-controlled media’s account of the accusations – continued, throughout the article, to use the same language seen in the headline, imagining both an independent “media office”, as well as an independent “civil defence” force.
Here’s the opening:
Gaza’s media office has accused Israel of violating the ceasefire with Hamas 47 times since the truce came into effect in early October, killing 38 Palestinians and wounding another 143. “These violations have included crimes of direct gunfire against civilians, deliberate shelling and targeting, and the arrest of a number of civilians, reflecting the occupation’s continued policy of aggression despite the declared end of the war,” reads the statement.
Hamas’ unsubstantiated claims, unsurprisingly, go unchallenged (and unscrutinised) in the article.
Further into the piece, Gaza’s “civil defence agency” is quoted making another allegation, that “Eleven members of a Palestinian family were killed by Israeli forces on”, without noting that – as even unfriendly outlets like the BBC make clear – that “agency” is also controlled by Hamas.
The report goes on to mention Gaza’s civil defence agency several times, again without noting that affiliation with the terror group proscribed by most of the West.
In fact, the Guardian quotes the spokesperson for the Gaza civil defence agency, Mahmoud Basal, without informing readers of an IDF statement several months ago reporting that – based on documents seized from Gaza – Basal is an active Hamas terrorist. Basal, the IDF claimed, “serves psychological warfare and propaganda purposes”, accusing him of “exploiting his position to disseminate false and unverified information to international media outlets, falsely attributing war crimes to Israel and presenting distorted data.”
Gaza’s civil defence agency is quoted twice more in the piece, including their repetition of the unevidenced claim that media outlets like the Guardian have been promoting for the past two years, that “the bodies of about 10,000 people are [still] trapped under the debris and collapsed buildings” in Gaza.
The Guardian reporter then writes that “Doctors at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis said 15 more bodies were returned by Israel and showed signs of torture and execution, including blindfolds, cuffed hands and bullet wounds in the head, according to doctors’ accounts“. The article, however, fails to include the IDF response, that was noted by other outlets, characterising the accusations that that bodies showed signs of torture as “Hamas’s false propaganda“, before adding that “all the bodies returned so far are…combatants within the Gaza Strip“.
In addition to the fact that the Guardian made no effort to corroborate these allegations of torture, researcher and journalist Eitan Fischberger revealed recently that the Nasser doctor quoted in the original Guardian article about the accusations, Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, is a supporter of Hamas, and Jihadism more broadly, and has expressed his desire for his children to become terrorists.
Finally, the report rounds off its terrorist-erasing coverage by briefly pivoting to Lebanon, where readers are told that, “in a separate development on Saturday“, an “Israeli strike on a construction vehicle in southern Lebanon killed a man, the Lebanese health ministry reported“. However, the “construction vehicle” according to an IDF video of the attack, and Israeli media reports, which were both available before the Guardian article was published, was being used by a Hezbollah operative to rebuild their terror infrastructure in south Lebanon – which the Iranian-proxy has been doing continually since the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon was signed last year.
What Lorenzo Tondo churned out was not journalism in the widely understood Western meaning of the word. Rather, it’s another example of the Guardian’s Hamas-friendly reporting on the war – the culmination of the outlet’s decades-long malign obsession with the Jewish state.
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