For over five months, Israel has been carrying on a genocidal war against the 2.2 million Palestinian people living in Gaza, with the full backing of the US. In order to justify this war in the eyes of peoples of the world, Israel and the US have carried out a coordinated campaign of lies, aimed at denigrating the Palestinian people’s just struggle. The allies of the US have repeated these lies. The leading newspapers of the US, such as the New York Times, have contributed to disseminating these lies on a global scale. The print and TV media in various other countries, including India, have repeated these lies, without even bothering to verify their authenticity.
Now these lies are becoming increasingly exposed.
On January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) gave its ruling on South Africa’s charge that Israel was carrying out genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza. The ICJ found it “plausible” that Israel is committing acts that violate the Genocide Convention. It called on Israel to stop such acts, and ensure that humanitarian aid reached the people of Gaza.
Israel had no intention of implementing this ruling. Within a few hours of this ruling, Israel launched a campaign to denigrate the United Nations Refugee Welfare Agency (UNRWA) and bring its work to a standstill.
Through the Western media, Israel spread the lie that it had convincing evidence that about a dozen UNRWA employees in Gaza had been working for Hamas and even participated in the October 7 attack on Israel. The leading print and TV channels of the US spread this news without any verification about its authenticity. Following this, the US and many of its allies suspended funding to the UNRWA. Strident calls were given for the UNRWA to be shut down.
The UNRWA was set up by the United Nations to provide relief to the lakhs of Palestinian people who had been forcibly driven out of their homeland when the state of Israel was established. It has been working amongst Palestinian refugees for the past 75 years. The mandate of the UNRWA is to do so until the refugees can return to their homeland. Israel refuses to recognize the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland, and has always wanted the UNRWA to be shut down.
In the US Congress, members accused UNRWA of having longstanding connections to terrorism, on the basis of the Israeli propaganda. They introduced a bill titled “UNRWA Elimination Act”, calling for the complete dismantling of the humanitarian agency.
However, investigation by journalists seeking the truth, soon revealed that Israel’s accusation against the UNRWA was nothing but lies. Israel then changed its story to first say that its information was based on interrogation of Palestinian prisoners. But Israel is well known for torturing prisoners to extract false confessions. This story therefore lacked credibility. Israel then further changed its story to say that its information was based on surveillance.
Britain’s Channel 4 concluded that the six-page-long dossier given by Israel “provides no evidence to support the explosive claim that UN staff were involved in terror attacks on Israel”. Britain’s Sky News came to the same conclusion. With the unraveling of Israel’s lies about UNRWA, many countries which had stopped funding the UNRWA have once again resumed funding.
Israel justified targeting Gaza hospitals by claiming that “terror tunnels” and “Hamas command centres” operated under these hospitals. This was repeated by most Western media without any attempt at verification. Several open source investigations, in-depth reporting by local journalists on the ground and extensive video evidence has proved this too to be a lie.
In February, Al Araby TV filmed what Israel claimed was a “Hamas tunnel” under Sheikh Hamad Hospital in northern Gaza. The film showed it to be nothing but a water well.
Earlier, the New York Times spread a report on Hamas’s weaponisation of sexual violence during the October 7 attack. Investigations showed this too to be a pack of lies. New York Times was forced to remove a podcast episode it had prepared on the subject. The New York Times story was exposed to be untrue by the Intercept investigative site and the Electronic Intifada, amongst others. The mass rape story was denied by family members of those who died in the October 7 attack, as well as key witnesses. The story was based on information fed by Israeli armed forces and its intelligence agency.
The Oct7factcheck project is an exhaustive collection of claims, where they originated, who propagated them, and whether the evidence confirms or refutes them. It was put together by the Tech for Palestine initiative. It includes the results of independent investigations into a dozen or so of the most dramatic Israeli accusations and reports about the Hamas attack, which were repeated by most of Western media, without checking their authenticity. Most of them have been shown to be untrue and lacking in evidence. They show that some of the evidence Israel submitted to the ICJ hearing – evidence republished by mainstream Western media without question – was false.
“Over the last four months, claims about October 7 have influenced the public narrative,” they noted. “Stories of atrocity, sometimes cobbled together from unreliable eyewitnesses, sometimes fabricated entirely, made their way to heads of state and been used to justify Israel’s military violence.”
The investigations carried out by journalists committed to bringing out the truth on what is going on in Gaza, has exposed the diabolical plans of Israel and the US imperialists to justify the genocide of Palestinian people, by spreading outright lies about the Palestinian resistance fighters.