Reading news about the Middle East is a skill—and one very much worth acquiring. Once you’ve done so, you can read even the most biased story about Israel and still glean the facts from it.
Israel’s strike on a Hamas command center over the weekend is the perfect story for this activity, and CNN’s report on it works well as an example of the Da Vinci Code-ification of Mideast reporting in America.
“At least 93 Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli strike on a school and mosque in Gaza sheltering displaced people, according to local officials, sparking international outrage,” CNN reported on Saturday, immediately following the strike and well before any of this information could be known by those on the ground let alone confirmed by editors and fact-checkers.
The reported “facts” in that sentence are false. And we know that, believe it or not, by simply reading it.
Was it a school or was it a shelter? No, they’re not mutually exclusive, but in this case we know that it wasn’t a school at all. It was a building that has, in the past, been used as a school. All of Gaza’s schools have been on break since October 7, and there has been no announcement as to when that might change even as we approach the start of the traditional school year.
So that is the first thing to note: All of the accusations of the IDF striking schools are false, by definition. This is important, because later in the piece CNN says: “Saturday’s strike is the fifth on a school in Gaza by the Israeli military since last Sunday, according to CNN’s previous reporting.”
That, too, is false. And that sentence helpfully points out that all of “CNN’s previous reporting” is unreliable.
How many people were actually killed? Although there was no way to know the number at the time CNN reported it, the very fact that CNN used such an exact number—93!—tells you that whoever is feeding CNN those numbers is making them up. Who’s feeding CNN those numbers? “Local officials,” meaning Hamas.
The purpose of this initial 93 number is to fool news organizations into reporting a tally that will soon be revised downward. The initial reporting is the one that will make the rounds and draw outrage and inspire denunciations from foreign ministries around the world. After that, the numbers will often be adjusted so that in the future, when someone objects to relying on Hamas officials for their statistics, Hamas’s defenders will say “ah but you see, they correct their own numbers as soon as more information is available.” This will continue the pattern: After the next strike, Hamas will release fake numbers which will be published by news organizations with the justification that Hamas’s revised numbers are accurate, therefore their initial numbers must also be based on the best information they have at hand at that moment. Lather, rinse, repeat.
So what’s the updated number of casualties? Hamas says 40. After the strike, Israel released a detailed photo dossier of the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists killed in the strike—19 of them. That leaves 21 possible civilians and proves that, yes, it was a command center after all and without any doubt a legitimate military target. (Israel also used smaller, more targeted bombs for the strike so it could hit the command center directly.)
Then Israel released another dossier with an additional 12 Hamas officials identified among the deceased. That brings our total number of terrorists killed in the strike to 31. (There is another report claiming that number can be raised all the way to 38, but it’s unclear at the time of writing if the level of detail available can definitively back up that number.)
There are, at most, nine possible civilians among the dead.
So let’s review. We went from 93 killed (“all” of them civilians, according to a source quoted by CNN) in a school and shelter to 31 Hamas officials killed in a targeted strike on a confirmed command center, with anywhere from two to nine possible civilians killed.
Those civilians should be mourned. Any innocent life lost is a tragedy. And now that we know it was a command center, we also know Hamas is to blame for their deaths.
Obviously, it would be much better if the media would report accurate information. But once you understand how these pieces of propaganda are put together, you can disassemble them yourself and construct the reality.
