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The Washington Post writes:
Palestinian officials said Tuesday that Israel had returned the bodies of 80 people it had held during the Gaza war via the Kerem Shalom border crossing. The Hamas-run government media office said Israel had not identified the bodies or said where they had been taken from. They had been “mutilated,” the media office said in a statement, and there were “clear” indications that organs had been “stolen” from the corpses.
The claims could not be independently verified. The Israel Defense Forces referred questions about the bodies to the Israeli agency for civilian coordination with the Palestinians, which did not immediately respond. The corpses, wrapped in blue body bags, were buried Tuesday in a mass grave.

This is not journalism. This is a blood libel pretending to be journalism.

It is impossible to use organs like hearts and kidneys from dead bodies.   Tissue donation must be within 24 hours after death and requires a full medical evaluation of the donor beforehand.

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In short, it is not just a lie, but a lie that is easily proven to be a lie. Yet the Post didn’t bother to take that extra step and actually inform their readers that it is indeed a lie.

Which would also prove that one cannot trust anything Hamas says. That is a real story, and it is one that the news media is loathe to tackle.  It continue to give Hamas statements the same gravity that it gives to the IDF.

Israeli officials are (too) professional. They have to chase down these stories and disprove them. It takes time to do that – they need to find and contact the departments that were responsible for the return of the bodies, find out the circumstances of their return, the circumstances of their deaths, what happened to the bodies in between – in short, they need to do an internal investigation to responsibly answer even the most absurd charges, because respected news media is asking for the information and they need to ensure that they don’t misstate anything.

It takes minutes for Hamas to make up a lie. It takes dozens of man-hours to debunk them properly. This is an asymmetric cognitive war that Hamas has a huge advantage in – as long as it knows that journalists will take their lies seriously.

A real journalist doesn’t simply parrot what a terror organization says. Saying “the claims could not be independently verified” is a way to claim journalistic integrity but in reality it gives the obviously false claims validity. That vaunted journalistic respect for “science” that proves Hamas is lying is missing from this story.

An NBC News tech editor named Ben Goggins posted the organ stealing charges without any skepticism, to the delight of hundreds of antisemites who reposted or “Liked” it.
The same blood libel had surfaced a month ago, when the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor claimed that Israel was stealing bodies from mass graves and said there were “signs of possible organ theft.”  It was again uncritically repeated in the media, without any journalists checking to see that this NGO has a history of anti-Israel lies.
I can only find a single example where a mainstream media outlet actually did reporting on the “organ harvesting” lies – showing its origins and how there is zero evidence that it is happening. (Even they didn’t mention the medical impossibility.)
Another part of the story that professional journalists missed is that the bodies were transported from Israel. This means that they are very likely the bodies of terrorists who murdered, maimed and raped Israelis on October 7 – those were the only Gazans in Israel itself, unless you want to believe the IDF is kidnapping Gazans and then killing them for their organs.
Treating Hamas statements the same as Israeli statements is not journalistic integrity. It is an abdication of journalistic responsibility. Instead of informing, it is being used as a means to spread hate.
Beyond that, the respect that the media gives obvious Hamas lies encourages Hamas to make up morel lies.
If reporters would do their jobs, and note that these charges are obviously false and part of a pattern of proven lies that goes back decades, then Hamas would have no incentive to use these slanders. Journalists are supposed to hold people to account – but Hamas terrorists get a pass.

{Reposted from EoZ}


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Elder blogs at http://elderofziyon.blogspot.co.il/