COMMENTARY: By Jonathan Cook
Let’s say it again: The BIGGEST fake news comes from the establishment media. When the stakes are high, it barely bothers to hide its role as mouthpiece for Western propaganda.
This is another Iraqi WMD moment. We are being gaslit. Believe your eyes and ears, and the laws of physics, not the lies being peddled by our leaders and media about Tuesday night’s missile strike on the Baptist hospital in Gaza:
1. No Palestinian group has a rocket that can hit a hospital, killing hundreds. What they have are glorified fireworks that can cause minor damage and the occasional death or two. If Hamas or Islamic Jihad could cause the kind of damage that happened last night, you would hear about it happening in Tel Aviv or Ashkelon too.
You don’t because they can’t.
- READ MORE: ‘Free world, where are you?’ Gaza hospital chief pleads amid Israel attacks
- Al Jazeera live news feed
- Other War Against Gaza reports
2. Israel’s apologists (and there are lots of them) are sharing all sorts of videos unrelated to the hospital strike. But the video of the strike itself shows that an incredibly large and powerful weapon is used. Listen to the noise the missile makes just before the hit — that whooshing noise is caused by its phenomenal velocity as it cuts through the air. That is *not* the noise of a falling Palestinian rocket.
If you watch videos being shared of Palestinian rockets being fired, notice how slowly they travel. Almost at a snail’s pace. If they fail, they drop at free fall speed, not the near-supersonic speed of the missile that hit the hospital. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the laws of physics.
3. Israel’s apologists are trying to further muddy the waters by suggesting that either a Palestinian rocket fell, or was intercepted, and the rocket or fragments of it hit a very large ammo dump in the hospital. Let’s just accept the racist premise that hundreds of families were quite happy to seek safety next to a huge stash of explosives in the middle of a relentless Israeli bombing campaign.
Let’s also accept the fantastical idea that a falling glorified firework or fragment of it could penetrate the hospital’s strong walls and set off such an explosion. If all this was true, you would still see a series of secondary explosions as the arms were detonated by the initial explosion.
You don’t because there is only one explosion — from an enormous missile.
Israel told over 1 million Palestinians in occupied Gaza to flee south, then bombed them in their sleep.
Hours later, at least 500 people were killed in an attack on a hospital in central Gaza, say Palestinians. pic.twitter.com/Yc9zJfIQj1
— AJ+ (@ajplus) October 19, 2023
4. It’s a desperate psyop, so Israel has now released a recording of two Hamas militants conveniently having a chat after the missile strike, discussing whether they or Islamic Jihad did it.
This is the same Israel that did not detect months of planning by Hamas that was needed to organise its breakout 10 days ago. But Israel got lucky this time, it seems, and just happened to be listening in when Huey and Louie decided to self-incriminate.
Remember Israel has a whole unit of “mistaravim”, Israeli Jewish undercover agents trained to pose as Palestinians and secretly operate among Palestinians.
Israel produced a highly popular TV series about such people in Gaza called Fauda. You have to be beyond credulous to think that Israel couldn’t, and wouldn’t, rig up a call like this to fool us, just as it regularly fools Palestinians in Gaza.
Most of the people spreading these lies know they are lies, including the media, and most especially the Middle East and defence correspondents.
At least a few, like the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen and Jon Donnison, are trying cautiously to suggest it’s unlikely a Hamas rocket could cause damage on the scale seen at the Gaza hospital.
But it’s not unlikely. It’s impossible, and they know it. They just don’t dare say it.
Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
