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The Rafah blood libel: Another murderous lie travels round the world before the truth gets its boots on - by Melanie Phillips
Once again, Israel has been accused of heinous and inhuman behaviour — a charge that has incited yet further global hysteria and exterminatory hatred against the Jewish state — which turns out to be a vicious falsehood
On Sunday, Israel’s air force carried out a strike in Rafah targeting two senior Hamas commanders whom it had tracked by aerial surveillance to a compound in the Tal as Sultan area.
Following this strike, a terrible fire broke out in a number of refugee tents where Gazans displaced by the war were burned alive. The Hamas-run health ministry says 45 civilians were killed here and many more injured.
This was clearly an appalling and horrifying thing to have taken place. But what happened next transformed a deeply regrettable tragedy of warfare into a malevolent blood libel.
The western media, politicians and “humanitarian” groups parroted the Hamas claim that the Israelis had wilfully targeted a refugee camp that Israel itself had designated as a protected humanitarian area. The BBC chose to report that the Irish deputy prime minister, Micheál Martin, had condemned an Israeli air strike on a camp for displaced Palestinians, describing it as “barbaric”.
The fact that Israel had done what the world had demanded but said was impossible, by moving almost one million Gazans for their safety out of the area of Rafah where the IDF was about to conduct its military operations, counted for nothing. The strike on this humanitarian area, said the world — from the UN to the EU to the French president Emmanuel Macron — showed that there was “no safe space anywhere”. This apparently proved that the IDF assault on Rafah, in the teeth of the global requirement to desist, demonstrated the Israelis’ callous disregard for human life and the rules of war and therefore that they were truly monstrous.
Except that this was totally untrue. The Israeli strike had taken place one and half kilometres away from the designated humanitarian area. The IDF’s target location was inside the Rafah combat zone. You can see this clearly on the IDF map above.
According to the Israelis, the strike was carried out in accordance with international law, was based on intelligence and executed using precision weaponry.
Israeli jets had used two small bombs to minimise civilian casualties. The IDF said it had taken steps ahead of the attack to ensure that no women or children were in the Hamas compound. The strike took place more than 100 metres away from the shelters that caught fire.
So what actually happened?
Earlier, Israeli officials told the Biden administration that shrapnel from the strike may have ignited a nearby fuel tank. Further information that has come to light, however, suggests that the tents were actually ignited by Hamas munitions.
This video footage, reportedly filmed by a Gaza resident in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli strike and obtained by the website Abu Ali Express, features an onlooker saying that what was hit was a Hamas Jeep “filled with ammo and weapons,” and he expressed a worry that “any moment a [Hamas] rocket can fly at us…”
The IDF says it now suspects that ammunition, weapons, or some other inflammatory material was stored in the area of the strike, causing a secondary blast and the fire that spread to the civilian tents.
The IDF has released an intercepted conversation between two Gazans suggesting that an ammunition store in the area had ignited. The first speaker says:
… and they say that they (the Hamas terrorists that were bombed) sat in a meeting and that there is a facility and in addition they had ammunition because all of the ammunition that started exploding. Bags of money were flying in the air, Abu Rafiq.
Second speaker: These (the ammunition that exploded) were really ours?’
First speaker: Yes, this is an ammunition warehouse. I tell you it exploded….I mean the Jewish bombing wasn’t strong, it was a small missile because it didn’t create a large hole.
Second speaker:
And afterwards a lot of secondary explosions.
The IDF has also released a satellite photo of the area indicating that there was at least one Hamas rocket launcher near the compound that was bombed.
So since this was not the designated humanitarian area, why were any civilian tents in this danger zone? Possibly these Gazans had been forced to remain there by Hamas; we don’t know. And we don’t yet know all the details of what actually happened, which await an Israeli military inquiry.
What’s now clear, however, is that Hamas was once again using Gazan civilians as canon fodder and human shields by situating amongst them terrorist leaders, rocket launchers and ammunition — incorporating civilians into what international law regards as legitimate military targets.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described the fire as “a tragic mishap”. Not, note, a “mistake”, as some media outlets have wrongly reported him as saying — which would have meant Israel erroneously bombed civilians. This was an event that was as unforeseeable as it was terrible. It was not Israel’s fault.
But of course, it has been turned into yet another weapon with which to demonise Israel by those wishing for its destruction, including the western media which promotes murderous blood libels about Israel as facts.
The day after the Rafah fire, this picture was published in various outlets purporting to show Gazans’ grief over one of the victims of the tent inferno.
Mourners at a funeral in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on Monday.
Now look at the video from which this picture was taken (it was apparently broadcast by BBC News last night). The Quds News Network reportedly uploaded it with the caption:
Two Palestinian brothers cry their eyes out as they take away the lifeless body of their sister — killed in the Israeli massacre last night in Rafah — for burial.
But you can see from the video that they are clearly not crying. They are trying to hide their laughter. And behind them a third man inside the car is also laughing — as the “corpse” underneath the sheet wriggles around (perhaps laughing too).
This is an example of what’s been called “Pallywood” — staged tableaux of alleged Israeli perfidy to feed to the reliably credulous western media, whose minds have been totally fried by hatred of Israel and who are routinely used by the Palestinian Arabs to help deliver their genocidal agenda against Israel and the Jews.
There were real Palestinian Arab victims in that terrible inferno on Monday night. But they were victims of Hamas, not of Israel. And the western media is busily helping feed Jewish victims to Hamas too.
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