Hamas's Control and Influence

Both within Gaza and beyond...

(This is a follow-on article to ‘Gaza and the Blitz’)

Watch any newscast or interview of people within Gaza and criticism of Hamas is very rare. There is a specific reason for this: criticism of Hamas is a dangerous business and those indulging in it risk being branded 'traitors' or collaborators with Israel, the punishment for which is death.

For foreign workers, aid or general, and journalists, this would normally mean being barred from the territory, unable to visit or report on it again. One of the most blatant examples of this recently came in the midst of the current Gaza war (with a due nod to the current ‘pause’ for release of hostages) over comments on the IDF's operations within Al-Shifa hospital.

First of all the IDF discovered in a hospital basement room a number of automatic weapons hidden behind a magnetic image scanner. Then in the weeks that followed, they uncovered a network of tunnels beneath the hospital. Through the course of this operation, Al-Shifa hospital staff and Hamas denied the existence of the tunnels or utilizing any part of the hospital for their operations - despite CCTV footage being found of armed Hamas militants walking into and out of the hospital's main entrance.

As this information was piece by piece revealed, the BBC and other major TV stations often wheeled out a British Doctor who had worked regularly at Al-Shifa hospital for the past ten years. He boldly declared that he had never seen Hamas operatives using any part of the hospital and doubted both their use of a 'secret' room in the hospital basement or the construction and use of any terror tunnels under the hospital.

In contrast, a French intern who had been at Al-Shifa for only one year said that he was fully aware of a room at the end of a basement corridor which he had been told strictly not to enter, that it was preserved for 'military personnel.' He even asked what would happen if he did enter that room, and was told bluntly, 'Then you would risk being shot.'

So why the stark contrast with these two accounts? Due to the fact that the British Doctor appeared on TV far more than the French intern and had also been going to Al-Shifa for over ten years, plus was a more senior consultant, it would have been easy to buy into his account as the more reliable.

But then one key factor struck me. The British consultant was a regular at the hospital, so no doubt intended to go back there after the war. If he spoke out against Hamas, the chances of doing that would be unlikely. Yet the French intern's visit was very much a one-off, with no intention of returning, so he had no vested interest in 'saying the right thing' and supporting the Hamas line.

One of the most blatant examples of Palestinian control of media coverage in fact came years back in the West Bank rather than Gaza, when two IDF reservists were bloodily lynched and their bodies ripped apart in the Palestinian town of Ramallah. An Italian film crew from Mediaset captured the incident, and as a result of their footage spreading worldwide, they were banned from future filming in the West Bank. British photographer, Mark Seager, attempted to film the incident and was physically assaulted and his camera destroyed. Similarly, an ABC crew were also prevented from filming and threatened at knife point.

Following the incident, Italian station RAI sent a grovelling letter to the Palestinian Authority, distancing themselves from the filming and making clear that they had 'nothing to do with it, nor agreed with the filming' so that their own journalists didn't risk being barred from future visits to the West Bank. The letter caused controversy, not only because it went against the interests of 'open and honest journalism', but more or less proclaimed that no reports would take place that might make the Palestinians appear in a negative light.

In Gaza, this stance of 'support Hamas no matter what' can be seen in the reports from Al-Jazeera. Despite overwhelming evidence from the IDF and numerous news channels of the construction of terror tunnels under Al-Shifa hospital, Al-Jazeera wheeled out a supposed 'construction expert' who poured doubt on these claims.

Al-Jazeera did the same with the Al-Ahli hospital explosion, continuing to blame Israel, when every other major news outlet and organization, including Human Rights Watch - hardly fans of Israel - had made it clear that a misfiring Islamic Jihad rocket was responsible. Of course, easy to find such 'experts' in Gaza, where saying anything else would gain them a death penalty; and in the general Arab world, this would come under the umbrella of 'showing solidarity with our Palestinian and Muslim brothers.'

When will Al-Jazeera and their like learn that toeing the Hamas line doesn't necessarily mean showing support for the Palestinian people. Indeed, when we consider the evidence that Hamas blatantly use their civilian population as sacrificial pawns in their conflict against Israel, this could be seen as an 'anti-Palestinian people stance.'

But it's not just Al-Jazeera. Organizations such as Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, Middle East Eye and Palestinian National Initiative pump out a constant stream of one-way anti-Israel news and information.

On these channels, every other week you will see reports of the IDF killing Palestinian civilians, often young teenagers, in cold blood, without provocation. Yet when the full story emerges, we discover that these Palestinians have been involved in knifings or car rammings, often with Israelis being severely injured or killed.

In one glaring example, Israel security guards at a Temple Mount gate were reported to have killed without prior assault or provocation two sixteen-year-old Palestinians, described (correctly in UN eyes) as 'children'. Yet the next day security footage emerged showing one boy rushing up and stabbing one guard twice before he was shot, and the other with his knife raised only inches away from plunging into the second guard's chest before he too was shot. Yet despite this after-the-event security footage, the incident continued to be described as an 'unprovoked killing', with no attempt to adjust reportage or apologize.

This is far removed from accurate or balanced journalism and is more akin to one way propaganda or hate broadsheets, with the sheer number of news channels, mostly online, pumping out a slough of anti-Israel hate diatribe not experienced by any other nation. In response, though, Israel has created its own 'information defence' news channels such as 'Honest Reporting', Camera and MEMRI. As well as an organization devoted purely to inaccuracies stemming from the UN, 'UN Watch'. The simple fact that Israel has needed to create these 'propaganda defence' organizations speaks volumes.

The extent to which facts are distorted in the current Gaza war is strongly illustrated by the fact that with the advent of Yahya Sinwar's death, he was portrayed in much of the pro-Palestinian and Arab press as a 'hero' - despite having pulled Gaza into an unwinnable war by calling for the massacre of 1,150 Israeli civilians which has in turn led to the death of 30,000 - 42,000 Gazans as Israel desperately try to hunt down the Hamas leaders and militants responsible.

To underline the absurdity of this, we must remind ourselves that Sinwar could have stopped the war at any time by releasing the hostages, at the point it had reached 5,000 or 10,000 Gazan casualties - but he chose not to, meanwhile hiding in numerous tunnels and bunkers while above ground the Gazan population continued to suffer. 'Callous' and 'cowardly' are the terms that spring more readily to mind rather than 'hero'.

If the Gazan populous had been alongside Sinwar and his militants in the tunnels, then it could be argued that he enjoyed the same risk and vulnerability alongside them - but we know that not to be the case.

I've also put the war stats ranging from 30,000 - 42,000, because a number of forensic stat reports put the figure closer to the 30,000 mark. Indeed, of this figure, the IDF claim to have killed 17,000-18,000 Hamas militants. This too seems a somewhat high figure as the ratio of Hamas militants killed in the 2014 conflict ended up at 45-50% versus 50-55% civilians. Though if we took a midline on the overall death toll and put it at 34-36,000, this would then become consistent with the 2014 stats of 45-50% militants killed.

This is still a remarkably successful ratio, as NATO and USA stats usually show a ratio of 1 combatant to 3.5 civilians killed - thereby demonstrating that the IDF's practice of prior zone warning, leafleting, phoning and 'roof taps' has helped keep this ratio low.

Regardless, it shows that the stats for women and children deaths has been grossly exaggerated by Hamas. Though to some extent the child death stats are real and derive in part from the murky area of 14-18 year-old combatants.

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(The subject of underage combatants in the 14-18 age range - though some are 12 and 13 - will be the subject of my next article on Israel-Palestine).

Notes from the edge - John Matthews

Regular articles and comments weekly on Israel-Palestine and global affairs and politics. If you like my articles, please recommend to friends, family and contacts you feel will also enjoy them.

John Matthews is an experienced writer and journalist. The author of 24 books, including two centred around WW2 and the holocaust in the name of J.C. Maetis (his father’s original Jewish name) his first experience of writing about the Middle East came as a war correspondent covering the last years of the Lebanese Civil War, which led to his second book, ‘The Crescents of the Moon’. He has since written on the subject for a number of journals, including The Times, Sunday Times, Newsweek, The Independent and The Spectator. He was also in the run-up to the millennium editor of European Brief, the main magazine for the European Parliament, editing the likes of Tony Blair, Al Gore and Henry Kissinger on subjects ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall and European unity, climate change and nuclear fusion to, once again, the Middle East. He lives in London with his wife and family.