Hassan and Ahmed

Conversations from a Jihadist back room - 10

Hassan and Ahmed are two mid-level backroom terrorist operatives in Gaza. Here we follow their observations and comments about how they see their ‘struggle’ and the outside world’s reaction to it. Think in terms of the past UK Bird and Fortune or current US Saturday Night Live political lampoons.

While being satire, these exchanges will generally focus on current ‘hot-button’ topics. This week the main subject is the GHF aid situation, famine reports and new moves towards recognition of a Palestinian State.

Hassan: Who would have believed such a gift? Such a turn of fate?

Ahmed: In what way?

Hassan: Well, you know before when we talked about this new GHF aid initiative and the path our brothers were taking?

Ahmed: Yes. Our brothers were keen to stop these new GHF aid moves, because it bypassed the past set-up we had with UNRWA whereby we would skim off much of the aid – sometimes as much as thirty or forty percent – to fund our own aims.

Hassan: Exactly right. We had to be hell-bent on stopping the progress of GHF – because no further skimming meant no income, therefore the danger of us being starved out and unable to operate. But what I didn’t foresee is how much the media and the UN would help our aims.

Ahmed: (Smiles gently) I know. We push out false stories every other day about the Israelis killing Gazans trying to get aid at these GHF outlets, and the media just repeat them without question.

Hasssan: (Nods keenly). We’ve even killed almost twenty GHF aid workers and their security in three separate incidents, and that doesn’t get reported by the mainstream media in the West. We couldn’t ask for a more subservient media if we paid them.

Ahmed: Maybe because some of this is coming from UNRWA workers, so the likes of the BBC and CNN don’t want to go against the word of UN officials.

Hassan: True. But they also neglect to report that UNRWA have refused to help distribute aid to the areas of Gaza that GHF is unable to so far. So, the UN is contributing to the problem of disorganized aid distribution – which is perhaps the only thing that the GHF is guilty of. They can’t reach much beyond four or five distribution sites.

Ahmed: (Chuckles lightly) I even saw the other day the BBC refer to them as the ‘so-called Gaza Humanitarian Fund.’

Hassan: Yes, it’s a beauty, isn’t it. In the same way almost that they referred to us as ‘so-called terrorist organization’. I think the exact wording was, ‘that the British government has proscribed as a terrorist organization’, refusing to term us one themselves.

Ahmed: (Shakes his head, smiling) Are you sure we’re not paying them?

Hassan: Pretty sure. Their new Chairman is a convert to Islam… so maybe that’s the closest allegiance we can hope for.

Ahmed: But it’s not just them, is it? That front page picture of a starving infant in his mother’s arms in the New York Times was a classic.

Hassan: Yes. But it was picked up on quickly by Honest Reporting and others as false – that the child had cerebral palsy and had little to do with starvation. Also, the fact that they’d purposely cut out of the picture his three-year-old older brother, perfectly fit, healthy and well-fed.

Ahmed: (Gestures). But then what do our media brothers here do? They realize the success of that New York Times picture, and they hit on the fact that there must be other children in Gaza suffering from other conditions which make them frail, unrelated to hunger. They then push out filmed reports of these sick and frail looking infants, along with the story that malnutrition is making it harder for them to recover – and the likes of the BBC and CNN lap it up.

Hassan: (Smiles tightly). Do they not realize that even if there was a shortage of food, which there isn’t – hospitals would be first to get full supplies. We might all turn our noses up at the blandness of hospital food, but at least it’s plentiful.

Ahmed: (Shrugs) We should worry? As long as it’s all getting blamed on the Israelis, as well as this GHF food initiative appearing a disaster, it’s all working in our favour.

Hassan: Indeed it is. Moreso than we could have realized at the outset. All these images of starving children, even though they’ve been largely invented or manipulated, have caused such international outrage that now leading politicians like Macron and Starmer have got involved. And their solution? Recognition of a Palestinian State. (Holds his palms heavenward) A gift from Allah that nobody could have foreseen.

Ahmed: In fairness, we had both the Irish and Spanish leaders do the same before that.

Hassan: Yes. But they were seen as nations so strongly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian that it was half expected. France and the UK joining that support came out of the blue, and they’re both G7 nations, so others – Canada, Australia, Finland, Portugal and New Zealand – are now taking notice and moving towards the same. We could have a bandwagon effect rolling here.

Ahmed: I see the opposition voices coming out strongly, though – saying it looks like a ‘reward for terrorism.’

Hassan: As much as I might feel duty-bound to disagree with them, they’re right. I mean, who would have thought that our initial action on October 7^th – massacring twelve hundred people in cold blood and kidnapping and holding hostage almost three hundred others – would finally lead to the recognition and formation of a Palestinian State. Incredible! The one thing that has always been elusive, and our actions might have finally led to it being all-but granted.

Ahmed: But when it comes to that, we might no longer be in power. That appears to be one of the conditions. Handing the golden prize to Abbas and Fatah.

Hassan: (Gestures) Maybe we won’t appear in power visibly on the surface, but in the background it will be a different matter. You think the Palestinian people will forget the main martyrs who allowed them finally to get that golden prize of State recognition? I don’t think so. And right now it’s all played marvellously into our hands by stalling the release of the final hostages. All we have to do is stall further, the Israelis keep trying to bomb us into submission… and each day and week there’s more international outrage and we move closer to getting Palestinian State recognition.

Ahmed: (Nods) I must admit, things have worked out far better than I expected. A few weeks ago, I thought we were all but finished.

Hassan: We might have been. But then we’ve always been winning the media war. And then Macron and Starmer handed us an extra Ace card in the form of possible Palestinian Statehood.

Ahmed: So, is that the gift and turn of fate you mentioned at the outset?

Hassan: Yes. Because it came as such a surprise. Nobody could have predicted that our media push to get GHF discredited by falsely depicting an aid crisis, people getting shot by depots and pushing out images of starving children could have ended with such a result.

Ahmed: (Head shake) One thing I don’t understand with the media – if they are so interested in famine images, why they don’t report on a region where there is real famine. One Israeli supporter writing about GHF aid in Gaza pointed out that there was thirty times the aid and food coming into Gaza than Sudan, which has a real famine problem. But Sudan gets largely ignored by the media.

Hassan: Maybe the fact that there’s such strong interest in this conflict – so all the journalists are already sitting in hotels in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, hungry for the next angle our health or information ministry want to feed them.

Ahmed: (Nods slowly) So they conveniently ignore that there are far worse cases of famine in Sudan. Doesn’t suit their agenda or the story they’ve been sent to cover.

Hassan: Exactly. And why should we bother to question the imbalances and oddities of the media when it’s all working so marvellously in our favour.

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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.

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