Sorting out truth from lies about the IDF attack on Hamas command center in a school

While Hamas’ version is uncritically accepted, the IDF’s claim is immediately dismissed.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage Magazine

As we know now, Israel fired three precision missiles at a control-and-command center that Hamas had set up inside a school complex in Gaza City.

Hamas immediately began, less than an hour after the attack, to put out claims about large numbers of “civilian” deaths.

The numbers the terror group asserted varied up and down during the first day — 100, then 60, then 80, until finally Hamas, which was the sole source of the numbers that were misleadingly attributed to a supposedly independent but really Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, settled on 93 as the number of civilians killed.

The IDF, in the meantime, put out its own figures, first identifying 19 Hamas members by name, then another 12 by name, for a total of 31, and then, in a final update, gave the names of another seven Hamas combatants killed, for a total of 38.

It has also said that the number of Hamas combatants killed may go higher.

Yet the British media gave short shrift to the IDF’s claims and evidence, while uncritically accepting the version of events, including casualty figures, put out by Hamas.

More on this disgraceful performance by the British media can be found here:

“Media Promotes Hamas Propaganda In Reporting On Gaza Attack, by Adam Levick, CAMERA, August 12, 2024:

One of the most disturbing elements of media coverage in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre is their willingness to accept at face value the claims of the proscribed terror groups which carried out that barbaric atrocity, while expressing far more skepticism over statements made by Jerusalem.

The latest example concerns coverage of an IDF’ attack on an active Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad command room embedded within a mosque in the al-Taba’een school complex, in Gaza City’s Daraj neighborhood.

The military said the site was used by the terror operatives as a hideout and to plan and carry out attacks against IDF troops in Gaza and against Israel.

The strikes began at roughly 4:40 am (IST).

By 5:45, the Hamas media office was already able to calculate the death toll, placing it at more than 100.

At 8:00, Associated Press (AP) claimed the number of dead was 60, based on a statement by the Gaza ambulance service,

Because this figure of 60 dead came not from Hamas, but from the Gaza ambulance service, after more than three hours of counting the casualties, it is likely to be the true number.

At 12:20 PM, the head of al-Ahli hospital, Dr. Fadel Naim (who promoted the al-Ahli hospital libel back in October) gave an interview and claimed the number of dead who reached his hospital was 80, among whom 70 were already identified….

Nothing Dr. Fadel Naim says should be believed. He is, after all, the man who in October claimed that an Israeli airstrike had hit Al-Ahli Hospital, killing “500 civilians.”

It later turned out that there had been no Israeli airstrike.

Instead, a missile fired at Israel from Gaza by Palestinian Islamic Jihad had fallen short, inside Gaza, not on the hospital, but on a parking lot nearby, and not 500, but 50 people were killed.

The media ought to have been skeptical about anything coming from Dr. Naim. But they wanted to believe him.

By Saturday evening, the IDF released the names and titles of of the 19 terrorists killed.

This morning, the IDF stated that the terrorist death toll was 31….

Within the same day, the IDF put out another, higher, figure, saying that it had confirmed the identities of 38 Hamas members. It provided their names and photographs.

The British media has paid scant attention to the IDF’s figures, often not mentioning them at all, but when it does so, it expresses skepticism about figures provided by the IDF, but not about those fluctuating figures supplied by Hamas, even though the IDF has a long record of telling the truth and Hamas a long record of lying.

Hamas’ version of where the attack took place, with the repeated claim that the IDF hit a “school,” is uncritically accepted, while the IDF’s insistence that it hit not a school, but a school building, which is a different thing, and that the large number of Hamas members who were killed — at least 38 Hamas combatants, their identifies and photographs supplied by the IDF — supports the IDF claim that one part of that complex, inside the mosque area, was being used as a command-and-control center by the terror group.