What’s it going to take for the western media to admit that al-Shifa Hospital was, in fact, a Hamas facility?
We already have video showing hostages taken by Hamas during its Oct. 7 atrocities being rushed into the hospital.
And video showing a 55-meter section of tunnel beneath the hospital, fitted with a blast-proof door and a firing hole — right near a shed filled with deadly weaponry.
There’s long-known eyewitness testimony, cited in a 2015 report by Amnesty International (no friend to the Jewish state), in which Palestinian victims of Hamas say specifically that the terror cadre used the hospital for torture, interrogation and detention.
That testimony was all but confirmed in a recent interview with a UK doctor, who said: “When I was first asked to work there, I was told there was a part of the hospital I was not to go near, and if I did, I’d be in danger of being shot.”
Indeed, as Jonathan Schanzer noted at Commentary a month ago, the mainstream-media evidence goes back to 2006.
Yet the refrain still rings out across The New York Times, The Guardian and other legacy outlets: Israel claims. Israel says. Israel accuses.
Funny, we don’t recall this grave, probing skepticism being deployed when Hamas pulled off its great agitprop coup around the Islamic Jihad rocket attack on al-Ahli hospital.
That, the terror group’s useful idiots were more than happy to blame on Israel, no if, ands or buts.
You’d think, given the massive and humiliating failure of the legacy media on the al-Ahli attack, that reporters and editors might finally be willing to give credence to the obvious.
Namely, that Hamas uses civilian facilities — and civilians — to shield its operations and drive up the casualty count amid any counteroffensive.
That’s why it was Israel, not Hamas, that made sure medical supplies reached al-Shifa, that hundreds of patients and staff were got ample warning to leave and that newborn and premature babies were transported out after Israel’s surgical incursion into the hospital itself.
That’s why Israel instituted regular “humanitarian pauses” in its Gaza counteroffensive.
But given the ugly reluctance now on display to believe tangible, incontrovertible evidence of Hamas’ al-Shifa presence, that seems most unlikely.
No longer up for debate, however, is the way these outfits willingly serving as press agents for Hamas, out of pure hostility to Israel.
The allegedly elite members of this profession shut their eyes and ears to the obvious the instant it fails to serve their precious narrative.
In this case, that’s “Hamas is the victim here; Israel is the aggressor.”
A precise inversion of reality.
Small wonder that trust in the media has sunk to historic lows.
