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Every good reporter knows you never bury the lede. You never smother the key point of a story with fluff and verbiage. And yet that’s exactly what much of the media is doing in its coverage of the Battle of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza. They’re burying, if not outright hiding, the most vital, most unsettling part of this tale — namely, that a neo-fascist militia is using a hospital as a base from which to plot the murder of Israel’s soldiers and citizens.
When I watch news coverage of the clashes in and around Kamal Adwan, I feel like I’m losing my marbles. This is very clearly a fight between Hamas militants cynically holed up in a hospital and IDF troops who want to stop this army of antisemites from attacking their nation and their people. And yet it is presented to us as a mad, bloodlusting invasion of a medical facility by that most psychopathic of nations, Israel.
Browsing the news sites, you get the warped impression that Israel is so insane it sends its troops into perfectly normal hospitals
Hacks are breaking every rule of reporting. They’re keeping readers and viewers hanging for the lede, the truth. The other night, the BBC’s News at Ten went on and on about the horrors unleashed in Kamal Adwan by the IDF’s supposedly brutish incursion. Eventually, more as an aside than a revelation, they deigned to say there were Hamas fighters in the hospital. And even then they said that this was “according to Israel.” So there might not be Hamas fighters in the hospital. Who knows?
I watched that report with a friend who doesn’t share my apparently outmoded belief that the Jewish state has a right to exist and to defend itself against the racist terrorists of Hamas. He groaned with revulsion throughout. Needless to say, the Beeb’s late and feebly stated caveat that there might be Hamas fighters in the hospital did little to quell his revulsion for Israel. He will have gone away thinking Israel lays waste to hospitals for sport. How many others now think the same?
Browsing the news sites, you get the warped impression that Israel is so insane it sends its troops into perfectly normal hospitals. “Israel forcibly evacuates Gaza hospital,” cries a BBC headline. In the body of the piece we’re told that Israel is “alleging the hospital [is] a ‘Hamas terrorist stronghold.’” Israel is conducting a raid on the “last functioning major hospital” in northern Gaza, says CNN. The cruelty! The Guardian reports that the World Health Organization is “appalled” by Israel’s attack on Gaza’s “last functioning major hospital.”
Quit your pearl-clutching, WHO. What’s really appalling is what Hamas has done. They have committed the war crime of hiding in civilian infrastructure to pursue their pitiless war on the Jewish nation. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, but the IDF has arrested more than 200 Hamas suspects in and around the hospital. It found weapons stashes in the hospital itself, including grenades and firearms. It has cleared improvised explosive devices from the vicinity of the hospital.
Tell me, what’s the real lede here — that there exists a terror outfit so wicked it will happily hide itself in a hospital, or that the army of a democratic nation has decided to clear the hospital of these killers? It’s the former, isn’t it? The media coverage of Kamal Adwan is not only flawed — there’s a sick moral inversion at play, too. The terrorists who brought war to a hospital are made invisible, and so rendered blameless, while the army seeking to liberate the hospital from the stranglehold of these Jew-haters is depicted as a monstrous destroyer of medical facilities.
This is something more than inaccuracy. It has the whiff of libel to it, with the Jewish State depicted as so uniquely barbarous that it will even visit war on the sick and frail. It is hard not to hear echoes of past defamations of the Jews as a perverse “bloodletting” people.
Sadly, such skewed reporting is the norm now. So we rarely hear that the IDF has lost hundreds of soldiers in Gaza, because that would mean acknowledging the existence, the stubbornness and the brutishness of Hamas. And we can’t have that. We can’t have anything that interferes with the juvenile chattering-class narrative that says Israel has gone on a historically unprecedented killing spree in Gaza. In truth, as the fierce clashes around Kamal Adwan confirm, Israel is fighting a war. A war it did not start.
Across social media, that cesspit of Israelophobia, the cry goes up: “Hands off Kamal Adwan Hospital!” It is high time we punctured the bloated moral pretensions of these noisy haters of Israel. The truth is this: in telling the IDF to back off from this hospital, these people are essentially saying the hospital should be left to Hamas. That this neo-fascist militia should enjoy free rein on the hospital grounds to plot their dark war on the Jewish nation. These “progressives” have become witless cheerleaders for Hamas’s war crimes.
