Cruel Pallywood: Hamas Health Ministry withdraws claim Israeli tear gas killed baby
“Like most of the Gaza assault narrative, this story/photo needed media skepticism but got heavy news industry promotion”
Pallywood is the industry of anti-Israel activists who spread fake images, stories and so on meant to portray Israelis in the worst possible light. Often the fakery is by western activists — you don’t have to be Palestinian to engage in Pallywood.
The purpose of the fakery is to push false narratives into the mainstream media, which already is biased against Israel.
Sometimes the fakery, once exposed, is almost humorous, as in our recent post, Gaza Pallywood miracle: “Wounded” man carried on stretcher gets up and walks!
Yet more often than not, the fakery is malicious and meant to dehumanize Israeli Jews as part of a broader international campaign to delegitimize Israel.
In all the dozens of Pallywood instances we have documented, I don’t think any has been as cruel as the claim that dominated headlines recently that a 8-month-old Palestinian infant, Laila Anwar al-Ghandour, was killed by Israeli tear gas during “protests” at the Gaza-Israel border. Those “protests,” as we have documented, were Hamas-led military-style assaults under cover of civilian protests, and almost all of the people killed were Hamas or other terror group members.
Of course, had the story of the infant death by tear gas been true, the logical question would have been why parents would bring an infant to a scene they knew would be dangerous. But that question was lost in the media condemnation of Israel.
Here is just a small sample of the media headlines:
The images run with the stories were dramatic and heartbreaking (see also Featured Image):
Al-Jazeera called the infant the “face of Gaza carnage”:
The Financial Times called her death a symbol of “Gaza’s life and death struggle”:
The story was widely shared on social media:
The narrative was set for celebrities and politicians taking their anti-Trump frustrations out on Israel:
The reporting on the story was almost completely unquestioning, with the notable exception of Associate Press, which reported that a doctor in Gaza had disputed that tear gas was the cause of death:
The IDF also disputed the claim, but that received scant news coverage and was set against “Gaza Health Ministry” claims:
A Gaza health official cast doubt Tuesday on initial claims that an 8-month-old baby died from Israeli tear gas fired during mass protests on the Gaza border with Israel.
A Gazan doctor told the Associated Press that the baby, Layla Ghandour, had a preexisting medical condition and that he did not believe her death was caused by tear gas. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to disclose medical information to the media….
The IDF disputed the Gaza Health Ministry claim, but that also received relatively little coverage:
Jerusalem (AFP) – The Israeli army on Friday disputed Palestinian accounts that a baby had died of tear gas inhalation during protests on the Gaza border.
“This is another instance of Hamas fake news,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus, an army spokesman, referring to the Palestinian Islamist movement which runs the Gaza Strip.
“We got reports… from a doctor that said that the baby had a preexisting heart condition and that was most likely the cause of death,” he told AFP, without naming the physician or explaining how the information was obtained.
“We don’t have any additional evidence, the body of that poor baby is in Gaza… There is no way of finding out for sure,” Conricus said.
The Hamas health ministry in Gaza reiterated on Friday that eight-month-old Leila al-Ghandour died after inhaling tear gas along the Israeli border on Monday as protests escalated into the deaths of 60 Palestinians, almost all killed by army gunfire.
But now even the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry has backed off the claim. The Times of Israel reports, Gaza health ministry removes baby from border clash death toll:
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said an 8-month-old girl has been taken off a list of Palestinians killed in border clashes with Israeli troops last week, while authorities await results of a pathologist’s report.
Layla al-Ghandour had originally been listed among the 60 Palestinians killed during massive border protests on the Gaza fence on May 14. The infant’s death intensified condemnation of Israel over the violence, though the health ministry has since signaled the child may not have been killed from tear gas inhalation but rather because of a pre-existing condition.
“Layla al-Ghandour is not listed among the martyrs, because we are still waiting for the report,” Dr. Ashraf Al-Qidra, director of public relations for the ministry, told The Guardian newspaper according to a Thursday report.
The Guardian further reported:
A copy of an initial hospital report seen by the Guardian said the infant had “heart defects since birth” and suffered a “severe stop in blood circulation and respiration”. It did not say if teargas inhalation had or had not contributed to her death.
As Arnold and Frimet Roth, parents of Malki Roth who was killed in the 2001 Sbarro Pizzeria bombing, tweeted from their This Ongoing War account, this correction will not change the narrative:
Like most of the Gaza assault narrative, this story/photo needed media skepticism but got heavy news industry promotion. The “correction” will undo little of the #LethalJournalism damage.
"Gaza health ministry removes baby from border clash death toll" https://t.co/hFVnQR9e29
Like most of the Gaza assault narrative, this story/photo needed media skepticism but got heavy news industry promotion. The "correction" will undo little of the #LethalJournalism damage. pic.twitter.com/jqTKcnMWGB
— This Ongoing War (@ThisOngoingWar) May 25, 2018
This case illustrates better than any the cruel effectiveness of Pallywood.
Exploiting the death of an infant was a “success” for the anti-Israel propaganda industry, even if based on a lie.
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Comments
I wonder why they admitted the lie. What could they possibly gain from doing so? Credibility?! Surely anyone who didn’t believe them before won’t start now.
What about the martyrdom of Little Saint Mohammed al-Durrah?
While not jewish, I have long admired their culture because they raise their children well and troduce a large percentage of humanities advances. Loss of Jews would be a staggering blow to all of humanity.
I hold this view because I have worked with many jews who are to put it mildly, high performers.
Because of this I took an interest in history of jews and specifically of what led to the creation of Israel. It was very clear that that Palestinian condition is mostly self inflicted. Yes, they have been used by other middle east players, but only because they are so dull witted that they allow it.
In my opinion,they should be expelled from Gaza and the West Bank, allowing the region to move on and prosper. Perhaps they should be driven into Iran?
remember, Israel had control of gaza from 1979 to
2005 Israel’s unilateral disengagement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip#1967_Israeli_occupation
I think that Palestinians should be unilatterally disengaged from Gaza. They have always been troublemakers, and there is no sign that they will ever be anything else. They only use Gasa and the West Bank to continue to cause Israel trouble.
I think that Palestinians need tough love, and who better to give it to them than Iran 🙂
During that time Israel did everything possible to try to improve the inhabitants’ lives, but they refused the assistance. Early in its administration of the strip it started building permanent housing for the Arab refugees, so they could resettle there and no longer be refugees, just as it had successfully done for its own refugees in the 1950s. In what seemed like a bizarre homage to a scene in the Israeli hit comedy Salah Shabati (which, by the way, I highly recommend), the refugees refused to move in to the housing, insisting on remaining in the refugee camp so they could continue to be counted as refugees and be used as political propaganda. In the movie, the IDF reacts to the immigrants refusing to leave the refugee camp by forcibly loading them and their possessions onto trucks and moving them into the housing whether they liked it or not (which was what the immigrants wanted all along). In real life the UN supported the “refugees” and Israel buckled under the pressure (as usual), let them stay in the camps, and demolished the housing.
JusticeDelivered: they should be expelled from Gaza and the West Bank, allowing the region to move on and prosper. Perhaps they should be driven into Iran?
You think ethnic cleansing is the solution to the Middle East conflict? Iran? Palestinians are primarily Arabic and Sunni, while Iranians are primarily Persian and Shiite.
I understood the implications of sending them to Iran, and it is not their ethnicity that is the problem, it is their shared psychosis. If they would play nicely in their sandbox, it would be different. They have not and they will not.
Doesn’t ethnic cleansing require death? Have we redefined the word so soon after its creation in the 1990s?
Mike H: Doesn’t ethnic cleansing require death?
Ethnic cleansing is not defined by death, but forcing people from their homes nearly always results in violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
No, “ethnic cleansing” has nothing to do with death. It’s the ’90s term for what used to be called “population transfer”.
I don’t know where you got the idea that it involves anyone’s death, but I wonder how many others think that too. I first heard the term during the Balkan wars of the ’90s, which was rife with language designed to manipulate the emotions of uninformed Westerners (much like the language used about the “Palestinian” cause), so if the general public got the impression that it means killing then the propaganda did its work.
Milhouse: No, “ethnic cleansing” has nothing to do with death.
While ethnic cleansing is not defined by death, it is almost always accompanied by violence and suffering. Examples include the Armenian genocide, the Cherokee’s Trail of Tears, and more recently, the Rohingya in Myanmar.
I’m sick of seeing ragheads.
If they don’t like where they are, they should apply to immigrate somewhere else, where they don’t feel the constant compulsion to bombard the Israelis.
Seriously, they need to get a grip and get over it.
Palestinians problem is that no one wants them, and for good reason. Jordan kicked them out.
Palestinians remind me of our inner cities, people who make all the wrong choices in life, people who doom themselves, their children, generation after generation, and then have the gall to demand that others support them while blaming others for the mess they have made out of their lives.
It is one thing to give deserving people a hand up, it is a waste to do anything for or to enable users.
Close the Fed: I’m sick of seeing ragheads.
May as well throw in an ethnic slurs along with the gross overgeneralizations.
Palestinians teach their children that they have a special fate to commit murder, and die in the process. Perhaps this teaching would die out if the Palestinian Authority and PLO would not pay the families to produce “martyrs.”
Valerie: Palestinians teach their children that they have a special fate to commit murder, and die in the process.
Not all. But sure, throw in some ethnic slurs with the other gross overgeneralizations.
The ethnic slur was uncalled-for, and I hope unwelcome here. But the generalization is not “over-” at all. It is a correct general statement about how “Palestinian” children are raised and educated. Of course, like all valid generalizations it has exceptions; that’s why it’s called a generalization. Please spare us the ridiculous (and literally insane) leftist meme that it is somehow morally wrong to generalize.
Milhouse: It is a correct general statement about how “Palestinian” children are raised and educated.
A thoroughly dishonest and unprofessional so-called “study”. The entire premise of this “study” seems to have been a false parallelism between the parties.
Israel is a country; when PA schoolbooks erase its existence they’re teaching the kids that it shouldn’t exist. There is no such country as “Palestine”, so what exactly should Israeli schoolbooks portray?
Then the “study” complains about Israeli schoolbooks referring to Judæa and Samaria by their names, instead of the made-up and nonsensical term “west bank”, which refers only to a 19-year period when Transjordan illegally occupied those areas and referred to them as the western bank of the river as opposed to the eastern bank, even the parts that are nowhere near the river. (It has since given up its claim to those areas, but hasn’t changed its name back. Interesting.)
The fact is that the PA, Hamas, and UNRWA schools relentlessly educate kids to slaughter Jews. Especially the Hamas schools, which this “study” didn’t even touch. They are trained and brainwashed to throw their lives away in order to kill Jews. They are openly proud of their nazi allies and promise to continue their work. How can such kids ever be rehabilitated?
Milhouse: A thoroughly dishonest and unprofessional so-called “study”.
The study analyzed 74 Israeli and 94 Palestinian books. Milhouse says “Is not!”
Palestinians love their children the way a soldier loves hand grenades: as military ordnance to be exploded upon the enemy.
Their use of children, their systematic brainwashing of their children for that purpose is one of the most damning things about them. I would not be at all surprised if we were to discover that they would kill a helpless baby just to use them for propaganda.
Little Saint Mohammed el-Durrah. At least, I assume that once he became a global cause célèbre they disappeared him PDQ, since it would be pretty embarrassing for him to show up alive and well.
The use their children for a lot of things besides human shields:
Mohammed Mansour, who treats Gaza’s victims of sexual assault, describes the dystopian nightmare that Palestinians are living:
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/MAGAZINE-gaza-kids-live-in-hell-a-psychologist-tells-of-sex-abuse-drugs-and-despair-1.5464038
Funny, having ignored the ny times for quite a while, seeing the front page above was like viewing the Onion. (The Onion’s better.)
So,inbreeding is worse than cousins. They need a one child rule, that is the solution to poverty. Their gene pool is so screwed up that their future is hopeless.
It doesn’t matter how many children they have. They are all being screwed up, turned into dangerous animals who will have to be confined for life. I seriously think the only possible solution is to forcibly take their children away and bring them up in orphanages. This is a dangerous culture that needs to be eradicated.