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The deaths of dozens of Gazans on their way to collect aid have been met with increasingly familiar tactics by Israel – deny, deflect and control the narrative, as one historian describes it.
After a raid on Al Shifa Hospital and the shooting of Palestinian paramedics, the killings near Gaza Humanitarian Foundation food banks are the latest case where Israel has put forward several differing versions of the story to deny wrongdoing.
When reports of a shooting in Rafah emerged on Sunday, Israel initially denied any knowledge of casualties. The military took about 12 hours to release a further statement, which called the reports “false” after “findings from an initial inquiry”.
It then released a video showing unknown gunmen “shooting at Gazan civilians”. Although the footage was from Khan Younis, not Rafah, it was widely shared by Israeli politicians and spokespeople.
Aid charities meanwhile said they had treated people with gunshot wounds. By Monday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was calling for an investigation, which Israel’s Foreign Ministry said was a “disgrace”.
On Tuesday, Israel said its troops "carried out warning fire" before firing shots "near a few individual suspects" who swerved from official routes. It said it was examining reports of casualties.
The denials come only weeks after Israel claimed it had shot dead Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics because their ambulance had no markings. Video footage later proved that was wrong.
It was just one example in which Israel has acknowledged possible wrongdoing only after attempting to use the fast-moving media cycle, deflection and unsubstantiated counter-accusations to avoid holding its forces responsible, according to an Israeli professor who has been documenting potential war crimes in Gaza.
“It's not a question of evidence but the public backlash, before it begins to address the issue,” Lee Mordechai, a professor of history at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told The National.
Mr Mordechai said this was part of a wider pattern of deflection and failure to provide proof for the Israeli military's claims. It is also an example of Israel's practice of “hasbara”, or controlling the narrative, that manipulates the media cycle to bury stories, he said.
Paramedic killings
The Palestinian Red Crescent reported on March 23 that a crew of 15 medics and civil defence workers had gone missing in Rafah, after reporting that they had been attacked.
At first, Israel said it shot at several vehicles that approached the military without headlights. But the claim was refuted by a video taken from the mobile phone of one of the paramedics who was killed, showing ambulances with their lights on, that was published by the New York Times on April 7.
Shortly afterwards, Israel said it was conducting an investigation into the incident. It reported back on April 20 that “professional failures” were to blame.
A field commander was dismissed, but Israel continued to claim – without offering evidence – that six of the dead were Hamas militants.
Al Shifa Hospital
“You see lots of examples of this,” Prof Mordechai said. Israel worked up support for the military to make its first raid on Al Shifa Hospital in November 2023, he said, having initially denied striking the hospital.
"The army found more or less nothing and then the story just disappeared from Israeli media," he said.
Israel claimed that Hamas had a “command centre” under the hospital, but the only findings released from its raid were images of bulletproof vests and a small collection of arms that it said were found inside the hospital.
The army uploaded a new video of its haul from the Al Shifa raid after a laptop that was seen unblurred in the first version showed a keyboard with Hebrew letters, making it unlikely that it belonged to Hamas fighters.
It also showed what it purported to be a duty schedule for Hamas fighters guarding hostages seized from Israel that was actually just a calendar in Arabic.
“They are not a trusted source," Mr Mordechai said. 'They don't present enough evidence … somehow the public is OK with that if an [Israeli military] spokesman says something in an authoritative voice.”
Aid shootings
On Sunday, a similar cycle started, when reports emerged of Israeli forces firing on Palestinians trying to get humanitarian aid in Rafah.
The GHF issued a statement denying any incident at their distribution site. The Israeli military also denied involvement and went on to say that “Hamas does everything in its power to undermine food distribution efforts in the Gaza Strip”.
Shortly after the military statement was published, the Red Cross said its field hospital in Rafah had received early in the morning 179 casualties, 21 of whom were dead and most of whom had been trying to reach an aid site before suffering gunshot wounds.
Unrest at new Gaza aid sites – in pictures
The footage of unknown assailants released by the Israeli military showed footage of what appeared to be a distribution site, with people carrying white bags, possibly containing flour.
It then cut to a zoomed-in second clip, in which none of these bags could be seen and a masked gunman was shooting at a crowd. There was no way to verify it was from the same location as the initial clip, nor that the gunman was from Hamas.
Death toll
The Israeli army also maintains that the figures for war casualties released by the Ministry of Health in Gaza are unreliable because the ministry is “Hamas-run”.
However, these figures are considered largely accurate by the UN and international aid groups. Israel has called the UN anti-Semitic and accused employees of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) of being involved in Hamas violence.
UNRWA suspended a small number of staff members and launched an investigation. Israel later moved to ban UNRWA from operating in Israeli-controlled territory.
Mr Mordechai said this was another Israeli tactic to detract from an International Court of Justice hearing in the same month on whether Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
“By pointing the finger at UNRWA and pushing their policies against it, it allowed people to avoid discussing the big thing that happened – this landmark decision with regards to how serious the allegations were.”
