Motive, motive... motive?

If news outlets bothered for a moment to examine the motives behind the news stories they spread, they’d likely come to different conclusions.

Gazan child happily collecting aid from GHF depot

For the past three weeks, major news outlets such as the BBC, CNN, New York Times, Sky News and others have pumped out false stories about Gazans being killed by Israeli forces while collecting aid. However, the GHF – Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – controlling this new aid operation, has reported no such incidents. Indeed, the only incidents they’ve reported are Hamas firing at some Gazans collecting aid in Khan Younis, and 8 of their own aid workers killed by Hamas on a bus. This latter incident, though reported by GHF, never appeared on the BBC or CNN – which indeed GHF complained about in an interview on Fox News.

Meanwhile, the BBC, CNN, New York Times and Sky News seem perfectly happy to repeat these accounts direct from Hamas’s Health Ministry, despite the fact they are obviously false. Indeed, a strong message was shot across the bows of news outlets over two weeks ago by no less than Mike Huckabee, US Ambassador to Israel, with the following statement:

‘Without verification of any source other than Hamas and its collaborators, the New York Times, CNN, and Associated Press have reported that a number of people seeking to receive humanitarian food boxes from the Gaza Humanitarian Fund were shot or killed by the Israeli Defense Forces. These reports were FALSE. Drone video and first-hand accounts clearly showed that there were no injuries, no fatalities, no shooting, no chaos.

It is Hamas that continues to terrorize and intimidate those who seek food aid. The only source for these misleading, exaggerated, and utterly fabricated stories came from Hamas sources, which are designed to fan the flames of antisemitic hate that is arguably contributing to violence against Jews in the United States. Media sources who willingly parrot these libelous allegations should recant their fake news stories, apologize, and pledge to practice actual reporting of fact instead of engaging in dangerous propaganda that assists the terror group Hamas as they continue to hold innocent hostages for over 600 days after butchering over 1,200 people on October 7th.

The efforts of GHF have resulted in over 5 million meals to civilians without incident. For the New York Times, AP, and CNN to be part of a Hamas-fed false narrative is reprehensible. It represents more than mere sloppy journalism. It’s feeding and inciting violence against innocent people in the United States.

We are demanding an immediate retraction of the lies and are appealing to all media sources to act with objective professionalism to cover actual events instead of being a partner of terrorism by blindly following Hamas news releases.’

However, despite this strong message, these stories spread from major news outlets have continued with abandon. Every other day there have been reports of Israeli fire killing Gazans as they desperately try and get aid, yet when examined deeper – particularly when sourcing GHF worker accounts, who are directly on the spot distributing the aid – there have been no such incidents of the IDF killing Gazans. The only verifiable action has been of the IDF firing in the air to warn off a pressing crowd, who it appeared were trying to loot aid.

So, why these terribly polarized accounts? It turns out this new aid organization, GHF, has been set up to get aid directly to the Gazan people, rather than it be distributed through UNRWA, who are heavily controlled by Hamas. As a result, historically, Hamas have been skimming off 20-30% (and sometimes more) of all incoming aid to sell on the black market and support their arms and terrorism efforts. So, of course, Hamas has an enormous vested interest in seeing this new aid operation collapse, so that things return to their past skimming operation in league with UNRWA.

So, we have seen a vast number of false stories pumped out about this new aid distribution being chaotic, with every other day reports of the IDF firing on and killing people trying to collect aid, which has rightly caused international outrage. UNRWA, also with a strong vested interest in aid control returning to them (let us not forget their close ties to Hamas, with a number of UNRWA workers caught on camera taking part in October 7^th), have also joined the fray, insisting this new aid operation isn’t working. The UN has refused to co-operate with GHF's plans, which they say ‘contradict humanitarian principles’ and appears to ‘weaponize aid’.

Quite a staggering paradoxical claim, given that armed Hamas gunmen could be openly seen riding on top of many UNRWA aid trucks, and their skimming operation is quite widely known, even among local Gazans brave enough to speak out. So, the main complaint appears to be purely that Israeli forces are backing this new GHF aid initiative, and are offering protection rather than Hamas. It comes to something when an organization like the UN would favour aid protection from a terrorist group rather than a recognized armed force. So, each day that fresh false reports arise of Gazans being shot and killed at GHF aid centres, UN spokesmen repeat their assertion about GHF’s operations ‘obviously not working’.

It took me hardly any time to get to the root of these stories and determine they were likely false, by asking myself two key questions, a: Why on earth would the IDF fire on civilians at an aid operation they 100% supported? and b: Who has the biggest motive in disrupting this new aid operation and seeing it fail – the answer to which was Hamas and UNRWA.

Possibly, I have an advantage over other journalists in that my other career involves writing crime thrillers. And a crucial element in any crime plot is ‘motive’. If I created a plot in which a killer had absolutely no motive for killing his victims, readers would throw the book aside in disgust halfway through. But I would have hoped this element of ‘motive’ was something any half-decent investigative journalist would also question. But from the slough of repeated false reports, apparently not. Do none of them have even the most basic analytical skills?

But we have seen this lack of basic analysis and questioning motive with various other factors of the Gaza war. For several months we have seen claims that casualties in the war have been ‘mainly women and children’, repeated with abandon by major news agencies, without questioning how this was at all possible when Hamas fighters have been the main target, and the IDF has dropped 18 million leaflets and sent 42 million text messages getting civilians to move to ‘safe areas’. In the final analysis, it turns out that 72% of casualties have been males over fifteen – and that in wartime male casualties are usually 2.4 times higher than females – yet still this (now shown to be false) claim of ‘mainly women and children’ is repeated by news outlets.

Now also we’ve see reports from Iran claiming the same, that many civilians have been killed, ‘mainly women and children.’ Despite the attacks in Iran being specifically targeted at nuclear instillations, missile launch sites and the military. The BBC and other news agencies are not allowed into Iran to probe this claim, but the truth came out from some leaving Iran close the other side of the Armenian border. They were quizzed by a BBC reporter whether they left because they were frightened, and were any friends and relatives or other civilians they knew of killed? A man with his family answered that they had concerns, but had seen only some soldiers and military killed, ‘but no civilians harmed.’

So, it seems this ‘mainly women and children killed’ is a de-rigueur response from Islamist groups, with little or no factual support. You would have thought that news agencies would have cottoned onto this by now, rather than just repeat it without question, when it has been proven to be false so many times before.

Another report which looked highly suspect was that of ‘hundreds of children’ being found dead with head and neck wounds. Given that the IDF had gone to such trouble with millions of leaflets and text messages to move civilians from the firing line, combined with strict instructions from unit commanders to avoid civilian casualties wherever possible and the fact that every child death inflames an already burgeoning ‘Israel demonization campaign’ – this made no sense. Why would Israeli forces shoot numerous Palestinian children through the head?

But in my search again for ‘motive’, it took me a little while to uncover the truth – finally hitting a ‘eureka’ moment when I found an article in a Saudi newspaper claiming that Hamas had recruited 30,000 child soldiers to replenish its heavily depleted ranks. Now I knew from a past article, ‘Suffer the Children’, that historically they’ve used child soldiers in the 12-17 range (In the UN’s eyes, anyone under 18 is a ‘child’) – but from this article, it appeared they’d gone as low as 11. Though in checking with my contacts, they felt 30,000 was unlikely, it probably fell more in the 14,000 – 15,000 range.

Of course, raising up above a window-ledge or parapet to fire at Israeli soldiers, the head or neck would be the first thing to get struck by return fire, with Hamas’s standard ski masks making age difficult to determine. The Gaza Health Ministry would obviously never admit that Hamas use child soldiers – far better just to paint the picture that the IDF is simply shooting children in the head and neck willy-nilly. All part of the regular media-demonizing process.

But, again, why weren’t the media applying this same basic analytical process and questioning ‘what possible motive?’ Even a nano-second spent examining that would have exposed the claim as obviously false. Or have the media got so used to believing the worst about Israel that all other rational thought goes out the window.

If we lived in Gaza, Qatar or Iran, we might expect news stories angled against Israel with numerous extreme demonizing claims made. But in the West, historically we’ve come to expect better of our journalists and media – though increasingly over the past three decades they’ve come up short on those expectations. Is it too much to ask that they apply basic analytical ‘motive questioning’ skills to news stories before disseminating them? If not, they become little more than complicit mouthpieces for extreme radical groups and Islamists.

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John Matthews - Notes from the Edge. If you like my articles and wish to receive them regularly - 2-3 a week on Israel, Middle East and World Affairs, plus now a comedy spoof and two thrillers in serial form - then I look forward to getting your subscription.

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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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