Israel’s official Arabic account affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a selfie video of a Palestinian nurse condemning Hamas for taking over al-Shifa hospital in the Gaza Strip on Nov. 11.
But some things about the video didn’t add up.
Everything about it smacked of high school theater—from the botched accent that sounded like it was straight out of an Israeli soap opera to the perfectly scripted IDF talking points rolling off her tongue.
ADVERTISEMENT
Hamas were stealing the fuel. Check.
Hamas were taking morphine. Check.
Then there was the pristine white lab coat looking like it had just come back from the dry cleaner, the audio track of bombs falling that sounded like samples from a late-’80s Casio keyboard, and the contrived stethoscope-waving you‘d expect from an extra on Grey’s Anatomy.
Hamas hadn’t stolen her makeup though, which was immaculate.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health logo slapped strategically in the background but visible over her shoulder looked like an OSINT honeytrap.
“This video must be authentic right, I can see the Health Ministry logo”—at least that’s what whoever made it would hope the burgeoning army of sketchy anonymous OSINT (open source intelligence) researchers might say.
The only thing missing was a degree hanging in the background saying Tel Aviv Upstairs Medical College.
Oh, and perhaps I should have mentioned this first, no one at al-Shifa had ever seen the nurse before.
Soon, the volume of ridicule directed at those sharing it reached such a pitch that the Israel Arabic account deleted their tweet. I guess they didn’t know the source either.
Forget Nurse Ratched, this was more like Nurse Hatchet-job.
It Gets Worse
If only it stopped there. But the IDF appear to be engaged in an internal competition to see who among them can drop the biggest disinfo bomb.
On Nov. 13, Daniel Hagari, the IDF’s spokesperson, appeared in a video. There were no nurses this time, but Hagari looked like he was standing in a nursery. Murals painted by children adorned the walls, and he pointed to a baby’s bottle and a bag of diapers.
Hagari claimed that he was standing in the basement of al-Rantisi Hospital in Gaza. He also claimed that this is where Hamas was keeping hostages. Among his evidence for this claim, a jerry-rigged toilet, and a pair of curtains covering not a window, but a wall.
Why have curtains in a basement right?
But he saves his most damning evidence for last, pointing to a piece of paper stuck to the wall. On the paper is Arabic writing. With mounting indignation, Hagari offered his translation: “This is a guardian list, where every terrorist writes his name, and every terrorist has his own shift, guarding the people that were here.”
The only thing is: It wasn’t a list of names; it was a list of days of the week.
Why Lie?
These disinfo whoppers aren’t anomalies, but rather a series of increasingly desperate attempts to try and justify the growing number of civilians killed in Gaza in response to the horrific Hamas attack on Oct. 7. Even Israel, which has enjoyed broad support from most Western allies, and particularly the U.S., is aware that President Joe Biden is under more and more pressure to push Israel for an end to the killing.
Yet this desperation is evident in a seemingly unstemmable tide of preposterous claims. Even the tactics appear to be shifting.
Israel’s usual strategy has been to try and claim Palestinians are exaggerating or making up their casualties—the so-called ‘Pallywood’ tactic. On Oct. 14, for example, the MFA-run Israel account claimed that Palestinians were trying to pass off a doll as a dead Palestinian child.
This was false. The boy, 4-year-old Omar Bilal al-Banna, was killed by an Israeli airstrike. He was real, not a fake nurse with a stethoscope.
As the war has progressed, the so-called ‘crisis actors’ trope has become harder to defend with the undeniable evidence of mass civilian atrocities.
This partly explains why Israel seems to be ramping up its disinformation.
But it also might explain why the disinformation is getting more sinister. On Nov. 12 the IDF claimed to have found an annotated and pristine copy of Mein Kampf in a child’s bedroom in Gaza. This came shortly after the Israel account also posted a cartoon showing how Israel brings up its babies with love while Gazans are brought up on hate.
All this on the back of Netanyahu’s now-infamous deleted tweet, where he stated that the current war was one between “the children of light and the children of darkness.”
A worrying aspect of though is how it seeks to dehumanize Palestinian children. Afterall, if you can’t deny killing them, maybe try and portray them as children worth killing.
In Israel’s increasingly desperate disinformation, we can see the foundations of a disturbing campaign attempting to try and justify or legitimize an impossible-to-justify statistic—that of the over 11,000 civilians killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Ministry of Health, over 4,500 are children.
