This is an unusual exercise undertaken by the Directorate of Military Intelligence on the evening of Friday, October 20. Three days after the strike on the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, which caused “at least 471 victims”, according to a report published by Hamas and relayed (too) quickly by certain media, intelligence agents French authorities went beyond their usual discretion, at the request of the Elysée, to try, in an effort to be transparent, to correct the media frenzy caused by the bombing. In an AFP dispatch titled “Gaza Hospital, the DRM clarifies: ‘nothing allows’ to designate ‘an Israeli strike'”.
Too late, the blast effect of disinformation had already taken place, with immediate repercussions among international opinion, in France and elsewhere. In the age of social networks and post-truth, “the war between Israel and Hamas is taking place in two theaters: the information field and that of military operations”, recalls David Colon, researcher at Sciences Po*.
Nothing new for Hamas, long accustomed to the strategy of the victim doctrine. Lying, lying, lying: all that matters is the story you believe. Have we already forgotten the lessons of the Battle of Jenin in April 2002? At the time, Palestinians launched a media campaign accusing Israelis of carrying out a “massacre” in the West Bank refugee camp, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians. International excitement, resolution of the UN Human Rights Commission condemning the “mass killings perpetrated by the Israeli occupation authorities against the Palestinian people”… It will be necessary to wait almost four months before a report of the UN does not set the record straight, explaining that there was no massacre in Jenin…
Two decades later, the war of stories rages again between Israel and Hamas, aimed at world opinion. Since October 7, the date of the terrorist attack in Israel, the Jewish state has invested millions of dollars in online propaganda videos to denounce Hamas atrocities. On October 23, Israeli authorities showed videos of torture and decapitation scenes taken from GoPro cameras worn by the terrorists on October 7 in front of 200 foreign journalists. A laudable effort at transparency, but which cannot make us forget that the current war in the Gaza Strip is taking place without sound or images from an independent source, due to lack of access for foreign journalists. Telling the truth is undoubtedly the best weapon of democracy. You still have to be able to see it.
* The Information War: States conquering our minds (Tallandier)