Israel acknowledges killing aid worker in strike after initially accusing UN of ‘baseless slander’

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1. Article discusses how an airstrike which hit a UN guesthouse in mid March (2nd day after Bibi broke the ceasefire) caused the death of a Bulgarian UN aid worker in central Gaza. The strike also wounded six others. Israel initially denied that they hit the UN guest house multiple times and its foreign ministry specifically called it “baseless slander” when the UN accused Israel of being behind the strike a handful of weeks ago. The media did not accept these denials and investigative reporting was conducted by CNN and Washington Post which they had different conclusions. And then, Israel reversed its stance and acknowledge they were behind the strike.

2. IDF under Netenyahu are just denying all negative stories outright. It takes them a month to fix these stories. It’s extremely weird. At times the right-wing movement is a bit loose with the truth as if just saying something nationalistic is enough.

   I suggest media wait a month after each event before doing interviews. They keep pressuring IDF. Keep getting denials. Keep printing false stories. Then keep correcting these stories. It’s bad journalism as they know that all interviews the first few weeks are pure propaganda.

   Also, IDF at times trick the journalists by saying truthful stuff that’s still misleading and journalists are not sharp enough or wise enough about the conflict to catch on. One IDF commander was interviewed about the ambulances and told the media station that there were 6 Hamas fighters in the group so IDF killed soldiers. This may be factual according to the IDF database. But note how it doesn’t actually answer the question. It avoids the question and a critical in-depth interview would have spotted this easily. But it’s like they don’t want the truth they just want talking points so they avoid asking too many questions.

   Those Hamas fighters were not always in ambulance uniform, but they didn’t carry any weapons either. And furthermore what the journalist failed to get from the IDF commander is that they were not shot after being spotted as Hamas fighters. They were shot because the IDF soldier shooting didn’t have a clear view so he was just guessing those were Hamas fighters with rifles. The fact that they were Hamas was just a happenstance as Hamas uses ambulances to get around Gaza. But they were still unarmed.

   The viewer is doing 90% of the work when Western media stations refuse to read up on the conflict and military doctrines. So we need to look up everything ourselves and then string together a story as they never once printed the full story.

3. This is what you get when the truth hasn’t mattered to anyone in a long time. Regardless of what Israel does, the UN will find a way to accuse it of atrocities anyway. So Israel reflexively denies anything, even when there has been an atrocity. When the truth doesn’t matter to the accuser, it becomes meaningless to the accused.

   The fact that they even bother to correct the record afterwards is the most surprising part, because it does nothing to help their image, so why bother? But it’s a good thing that they do it, because it means that we can look back and actually have a record of what happened in this conflict.

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