Media promote Israeli distortions as civilians dodge airstrikes in Gaza

Relatives of Zaina al-Amour, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike, mourn during her funeral east of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on 5 May.Ramadan ElaghaAPA images

Rania Khalek-7 May 2016

In recent days, has Israel launched a series of aggressive military actions in the besieged Gaza Strip, killing a Palestinian woman and injuring several other people, including three children.

And like clockwork, mainstream Western media swooped in to throw the narrative in Israel’s favor, brushing aside Israel’s relentless violations of the Gaza ceasefire and its killings of dozens of civilians in the besieged territory.

But first, the facts.

Israel started it

As is almost always the case, the Israeli military initiated the latest round of violence with ground incursions into Gaza as part of a supposed mission to destroy cross-border tunnels.

This is the same pretext Israel used to justify its ferocious military assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, which killed 2,251 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians, 551 of them children.

The independent inquiry commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council into the 2014 assault found that Hamas “tunnels were only used to conduct attacks directed at IDF [Israeli army] positions in Israel in the vicinity of the Green Line [the Israel-Gaza boundary], which are legitimate military targets.”

Despite this, Israel continued to whip up fears – often aided by pliant outlets such as The New York Times – about Palestinian “terror tunnels” leading into kindergartens, as a way to justify Israel’s cruelty towards Gaza.

The Israeli army claims to have located such a tunnel in recent days based on information it says it extracted from a captured member of Hamas.

It is also possible that Israel is using this as an opportunity to test out anti-tunnel technology it has been developing with a $120 million grant from the US administration of President Barack Obama.

Hamas insists the tunnel Israel discovered is old and predates the 2014 war.

The Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz cited senior Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk, explaining that Israeli forces had been attempting to “set new facts on the ground 150 meters inside Gaza which he said ‘compelled resistance forces to intervene.’”

The Israeli army said that Hamas fired “more than five mortar rounds at forces during operational activities adjacent to the security fence with the Gaza Strip.”

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