Shabbat was an emotional rollercoaster. We had the dream-like rescue of the four hostages, including Noa Argamani, who had become so familiar it felt like we knew her personally. Then, in short order, we had videos of celebrations on Tel Aviv beach; clips of elated parents rushing to be reunited with their children amid crowds of singing neighbours; footage of the meetings themselves, enough to make the hardest heart weep; details of the courage and skill of the IDF special forces who carried out the rescue; then the heartbreaking news that one of the commanders had lost his life in the fighting.
As surely as night follows day, alongside this came the media narrative. As usual, Hamas released implausible numbers of civilian casualties with implausible speed, an implausible number of whom were apparently “women and children”. In recent months, acres of newsprint have made clear that the terror group’s statistics are not to be trusted. Yet the media trusted them anyway, at best burying a get-out-of-jail disclaimer about the “Hamas controlled health ministry” deep in their stories. Some outlets even mischaracterised the rescue as a “release”, as if the terrorists had welcomed the IDF with knafeh and mint tea.
It is true that the operation claimed the lives of innocent civilians, every one of which was a tragedy. But in its appetite for the narrative of Israeli blood lust, the media succumbed to collective amnesia. What about the fact that Hamas started the firefight in the heart of a residential area? What about the realities of being an infantryman under fire in an urban environment in the chaos and terror of war? What about the much higher numbers of civilians commonly killed by British and American troops in combat? What about the way in which Hamas refused to distinguish between dead combatants and civilians? What about the fact that Hamas was holding the Israelis in a busy part of town to use their own people as human shields? What about the basic truth that Hamas could have avoided all this by not taking the hostages in the first place? All this was swept away in a torrent of Israelophobia.
Before long, the heroic rescue had been fashioned into another Israeli atrocity. A BBC presenter asked former Israeli spokesman Jonathan Conricus why the Israelis had not warned the enemy that the IDF was about to carry out the raid. Because Hamas would kill the hostages and this would “defeat the purpose”, he drily replied. Then came the BBC News alert that has since become notorious: “Blood stained the walls – Palestinians describe horror as Israeli forces freed four hostages in Gaza.” The horror of freeing Noa Argamani!
