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Five months of clumsy Shifa Hospital HAMAS tunnel propaganda to justify Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s medical system and targeting of healthcare staff

28 March 2024 | Dishonest Reporting, Featured, Israeli Propaganda

Update 1 April 2024: The IDF has pulled out of the Al-Shifa Hospital Complex, leaving behind a wasteland. Video

As part of Israel’s obviously intentional destruction of Palestinian civilian infrastructure for the purpose of making Gaza unlivable, hospitals and clinics have been presented as HAMAS bases, with more weapons caches “found in them” than can be credibly claimed. Al-Shifa, the biggest hospital in Gaza, has been used as Israel’s poster child for this narrative.

On 18 March 2024, as part of its latest efforts to present Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza as a HAMAS base, during its second invasion and occupation of the hospital, the IDF reported having found a command office—located right next to the hospital director’s office!—that it strangely missed when it last invaded the hospital in November 2023.

In this most recent incursion and invasion of the hospital, the IDF displayed cash looted from the hospital’s safe in a video release framed as follows:

“Hamas terrorist funds found inside Shifa Hospital. Along with the funds themselves were notes thanking the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists for their ‘good work’.”

https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1769752899045687515

As reported on 18 March and pictured above right, the IDF video’s own subtitles show that the two envelopes that contained cash were merely donations from the groups to Al-Shifa Hospital.

Israel’s claims that the cash was ‘HAMAS payments to its fighters’ represent the most bare-faced gaslighting. Apparently, we’re at the stage in Israel’s war on Gaza where it has got away with so much lying, emboldened by America’s not just diplomatic hall pass but active help with its genocide, that it’s not even bothering if its claims don’t match its own video evidence. At this stage, Israel has been led to believe, no one cares enough to notice.

Israel has trodden along a road of propaganda fails to cast Shifa Hospital as a HAMAS base. All of the last five months of intensified hasbara effort to link this civilian medical institution to terrorism in order to provide a rationale, an excuse for its coming and long-planned destruction. The story for this planned atrocity needed to be good but its episodes have delivered the opposite—a series of amateurish, weak, repetitive, and ultimately unconvincing attempts to create a lie. Al-Shifa was not a HAMAS base. How did that ever make sense to anyone?

Propaganda fails: Tracking five months of baseless IDF claims about Al-Shifa through one gaping hole in its story—the tunnels

Israel has been relentlessly casting Al-Shifa as a HAMAS command center for weeks before the ground war even began. Here is an 27 October 2023 video animation of a supposed HAMAS HQ under Al-Shifa Hospital:

It never made sense.

Would you locate your “secret headquarters” in one of the biggest public buildings in Gaza?

Would you keep any level of operational presence in the exact place that the Israelis said it was, as Israel repeatedly made this claim to the world’s media for weeks before any ground war even began?

After knowing that Israel had begun its ground war and it was only a matter of time before your super secret hospital base was overrun, would you then leave multiple caches of weapons lying around for the IDF to “find”. This propaganda only works on those who haven’t considered the more obvious aspects of the story, as well as those racist enough to believe that Khamas are the Keystone Cops of insurgent groups, just really forgetful about leaving weapons everywhere.

Four months after weapons were discovered in Israel’s first invasion of the hospital, would you leave behind bundles of cash as the IDF claimed, with notes “thanking” your fighters for their “good work”? How dumb are you to believe such an obvious lie?

None of this was ever credible. Israel’s systematic delegitimization propaganda is an attempt to avoid the war crimes charges that will surely follow its documented destruction of the entire Palestinian healthcare system.

Much of Gaza has tunnels underneath, a necessity for maintaining a resistance movement after twelve previous seasons of Israeli carpet bombing of the Strip during the last two decades.

Israel’s attempts to demonize Al-Shifa by actually connecting a tunnel under the hospital to the hospital itself became a running joke on the Internet, after an early incident where we all learned the name of IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari.

Hagari was turned into a meme after the IDF released a video from mid-November in Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital, just before the invasion of Al-Shifa Hospital, with Hagari pointing at a hand drawn calendar and claiming that it was a ‘HAMAS hostage guarding roster.’

Hagari pointed at an unopened door in the hospital, claiming it led to a tunnel network.

The goal of Israeli propaganda was to demonstrate that HAMAS was using hospitals as civilian infrastructure shields—the best excuse it could come up with to justifying destroying them to make Gaza unlivable—and what better proof could there be than the smoking gun of a tunnel connected to a hospital?

Hilarity ensued, as Israel began to try to prove a literal direct connection, using Al-Shifa as a set for a series of terrible Zollywood productions.

That first video in which a tunnel in the hospital is shown

The first ‘video evidence’ the IDF released from its first mid-November 2023 invasion of Al-Shifa Hospital included brief footage of an hole somewhere in the grounds of Al-Shifa, claiming that it was a tunnel entrance. The international media were quick to release the limited footage, conveniently provided along with images of a large weapons cache purportedly also “found” in the hospital.

The IDF claimed to have “found” one weapons cache near a MRI machine, showing a bag filled with a few rifles:

This was the first of dozens of IDF weapons cache “finds”, conveniently always “found” in a hospital, clinic, or a school—for the maximum “evil terrorists stop at nothing” effect—later shifting to “near a hospital/clinic” or “near a school”, lest we begin to consider—30 or 40 “finds” in—that HAMAS must be the most forgetful guerrilla army in the world to be leaving all these weapons behind.

Yair Lapid finally got heard

All of this conjures up a 6 June 2010 article by Yair Lapid, published in English as “Our PR amateurs” on Israeli news site Ynet. In the article, which castigated Israel’s then Minister of Information, Yuli Edelstein, for PR failings around Israel’s violent Gaza Flotilla raid, Lapid made the following suggestion:

…Yuli Edelstein is not at fault. He is not at fault, because he is an amateur. Actually, I’m not sure he is even entitled to boast that title. Amateurs usually know something about the issue at hand; on the other hand, Yuli Edelstein has no idea whatsoever.

There is nothing in his training or in his biography that prepared him for that moment. He knows nothing about media, nothing about PR, and nothing about the way the global press works. He knows nothing about activating public opinion, television, blogs, Internet, fast response, or the dynamics of media events. He knows nothing about that, and his Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, knows even less. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, he of the stool incident, most certainly knows nothing about those issues.

You want an example? Had they knew something about it, the dozens of TV crews who arrived at the Ashdod beach Monday would have encountered, arranged right on the sand, the hundreds of missiles and other weapons we seized in the previous ships that attempted to reach Gaza. And do you know what the foreign TV crews would have done? They would have photographed that! And those would have been the only images aired during the first hours by all global television channels. Why? Because they had nothing else to air and TV stations usually prefer to air an image – any kind of image – than not to air anything.

The flotilla spokespersons would of course get upset and claim these arms did not come from their ships, but nobody would have listened to them. The millions of viewers would have automatically assumed that the Gaza-bound flotilla carried weapons. Why? Because this is television, you bunch of amateurs, and television is not a medium one listens to, but rather, something one watches.

The second tunnel video

Israel’s second video, released on 22 November 2023 after the Internet had spent a few days making fun of Hagari’s misidentifying the calendar at Al-Rantissi Children’s Hospital, featured the helmeted spokesman speaking from a tunnel “underneath the hospital”, again claiming the tunnel was directly connected to the hospital.

The tedious 9-minute production was a textbook case of #TrustMeBro, as Hagari kept pointing upwards and saying Al-Shifa was above him. The video never shows the actual hospital and tunnel connecting, which Hagari claims in the video was because the IDF had not had time to ‘check the entrance for booby traps’.

The version linked below has extra footage edited onto the end, after the 9-minute underground sequence of, again, a different tunnel entrance and a completely unconnected Al-Shifa basement room:

This, of course, elicited the exactly the same credulous mirth from the Internet as the his calendar video had.

After the ribbing about both the IDF’s lack of visual evidence of “a tunnel in Al-Shifa” or a tunnel actually connected to the hospital, this had become a lie that Israel could not back out of. The IDF doubled down.

The third tunnel video

Enter the third video on 19 November 2023, a “continuous” shot—aimed to scotch criticism of Israel’s disconnected claims—of a drone flying down a hole in Al-Shifa’s yard (note, through not the basement depicted as a tunnel entrance in the second video) and then leveling out into an actual HAMAS tunnel.

At the time, Hagari made a big deal of the ‘continuity’ of this new video because that had been the main criticism of the first videos, that they didn’t actually show a tunnel and hospital conneting.

This “tunnel entrance” was by a fence, right on the edge of the hospital’s grounds:

The hole looks like a standard Palestinian water well entrance. The main problem with this video was that at 1:12 in its short two-minutes, an obvious edit occurs. The video shows a drone descending into a common Gazan water well in the hospital’s grounds, which then cuts to separate footage of an actual HAMAS tunnel. No one was buying it.

This third video was met with more debunking and a veritable tsunami of mirth. No credible “tunnel in Al-Shifa” had been proven despite three separate video releases.

The fourth video: How the IDF dug itself out of its PR hole

At this point, the IDF had dug itself into a PR hole which it couldn’t dig itself out of.

Or could it?

In the end this was exactly how the IDF resolved their real life disconnect between hospital and tunnel. Around this time, reports began to leak out from staff in the now fully Israeli-occupied Al-Shifa Hospital that the Israelis had been ‘doing something with machinery’ in the hospital grounds. Construction equipment was being used for something, no one knew exactly for what.

The IDF literally dug itself a hole in the hospital grounds down until it connected with a real HAMAS tunnel that did indeed run under the hospital, but had absolutely not been connected to the hospital in any direct, physical way. Tunnels, of course, don’t need to follow street patterns, they go wherever it makes sense. The hospital staff didn’t even know it was there because there was no actual connection.

Of course, the IDF brought out a professional IDF purplewasher to introduce the “discovery”, claiming that “the shaft was right in the middle of the courtyard”, the best place to hide your secret tunnel entrances:

“The shaft right in the middle of the courtyard”

Here are screenshots of the IDF’s best “evidence” of “the shaft right in the middle of the courtyard”, taken from a 23 November 2023 IDF video released to the Daily Telegraph (UK) and other media at the time. Note that this “tunnel entrance” is in a completely different location than the third video, which depicted a water well entrance near the fence on the edge of the hospital grounds.

And then the IDF arranged media tours of its new hole for a variety of helpful idiot, embedded foreign journalists, none of which seemed to notice the obvious, freshly-dug hole down which they were all led.

In one of the reports from a tunnel tour by ITV (UK), as seen above, you can see an even closer view of the roof of the tunnel, clearly showing that a circular saw had neatly sliced through the roof, to create, finally, a “tunnel entrance”.

Note also that this the new tunnel “shaft right in the middle of the courtyard” is not the same tunnel entrance as we saw in the second video, pictured above.

Amazingly, 3 minutes into the ITV report, Hagari makes the claim that “we do not plant evidence in arenas. Israel does not do that. It’s a war crime. It’s against international law.” I suppose technically, they didn’t “plant” it, rather they dug it up. Either way, this was a manufactured connection.

Four videos, all of which were amateurishly edited or dependent on the credibility of Israel’s claims. All have failed. Israel has been caught repeatedly releasing fake news to create a fictional tunnel connection with Al-Shifa hospital.

“A tunnel near Shifa”

After that point, the IDF just began regularly riffing on the tunnel theme, casting every new discovery in relation to the hospital, even if it was blatantly unconnected.

On 22 November it released another video with the discovery of a tunnel entrance under a house. But this was no ordinary house, it was a house “near Al-Shifa Hospital”. Because that’s the same as a tunnel in Al-Shifa Hospital? If you can simply mention the words “tunnel” and “Al-Shifa” in the same sentence, that’s as good as a smoking gun!

Four videos and still no proof of Israel’s claims and artfully rendered animations of a giant HAMAS tunnel network connected to Al-Shifa. Game over.

Israel has clearly embarked on a mission to destroy all Palestinian civilian infrastructure, targeting universities, schools, museums, religious sites, graveyards, stores, homes, and agricultural land and infrastructure.

The destruction of hospitals and clinics is a much harder sell to the international community, as it goes so against the grain of the norms of war. Israel has tried to demonize these medical institutions as HAMAS military bases, HAMAS offices, and HAMAS weapons storage facilities in the hope the world gives it a pass for its obvious ethnic cleansing of Gazans.

Whether Israel will succeed depends entirely on how the world reacts.

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt on Israel’s targeting of medical infrastructure

Related links: Israel’s attacks on healthcare

April 2024: What has Israel done in Al-Shifa Hospital

Inside Al-Shifa Hospital after IDF pullout: Total destruction of medical facilities & supplies; zip-tied corpses offer evidence of executions; eyewitnesses say IDF bulldozers buried corpses

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