Israeli lies about massacres at US-run aid sites in Gaza crumble under scrutiny

By Robert Inlakesh

Israeli occupation forces have repeatedly shot Palestinian civilians near the new privatized US aid sites in Gaza, yet it wasn’t until last Sunday’s massacre that they began concocting false narratives in an attempt to redirect blame.

Even a basic inquiry into the events that transpired proves Israeli guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

“We don’t know who did it” is now the position adopted by corporate media commentators when addressing the series of massacres inflicted upon starving and unarmed civilians heading towards four aid points in Gaza.

This position is born of claims that, due to Israel having blocked access to international journalists, we can’t possibly know what is occurring inside Gaza. Yet, a basic rundown of the facts says otherwise.

On May 26, the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) opened its first aid point in southern Gaza’s Rafah city. The US privatized scheme, which has employed armed Private Military Contractors (PMC) to man its distribution points, has been widely criticized by the United Nations and international humanitarian organizations. 

The GHF’s CEO, Jake Wood, even resigned one day prior to the project's launch, citing ethical reasons as to why, and called upon the Israeli regime to allow the passage of more aid into Gaza.

That same day, Israeli airstrikes targeted the Fahmi al-Jarjawi School - turned shelter - in the Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City, killing at least 36 civilians and burning children alive in their sleep.

On May 27, the first day that the GHF began operating its ‘Safe Distribution Site 1’ (SDS-1) on a large scale, near the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah, the site was overrun by starving civilians.

The US PMCs fled the site as Palestinian civilians, who had been forced to take a single route along a coastal road called al-Rashid Street, poured in and were being herded in cages towards a limited supply of food boxes. 

Amidst the chaos of hungry crowds attempting to pry their way through to a limited number of aid boxes, the Israeli occupation forces were reported to have opened fire towards civilians in the area. The reported death toll that day, according to local hospitals, was set at 10, and 62 others were wounded.

The Israeli military put out a statement in which it claimed it had only fired “warning shots” into the air, while the UN condemned the incident and the Gaza media office described it as a war crime.

On May 28, the Palestinian Centre for Missing and Forcibly Disappeared (PCMFD) reported that dozens of families were requesting information on missing family members, who had lost contact with their loved ones who had travelled towards the aid site.

The next major incident occurred on May 31, when reported Israeli gunfire against Palestinian civilians in the vicinity of SDS-1 was said to have killed three more unarmed people.

Later that day, the Gaza Health Ministry updated its statistics to say that a total of 17 people had been killed, along with 86 who had been injured and 5 others remained missing. 

Hasbara Overdrive: The Witkoff massacre

On June 1, Israeli occupation forces opened fire on unarmed civilians heading towards the same site, committing a massacre which ended up killing 32 civilians and wounding at least 150 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

It was immediately dubbed the ‘Witkoff Massacre’, in reference to US West Asia envoy Steve Witkoff, who has repeatedly undermined a ceasefire deal that could end the genocidal war.

Due to the sheer scale of the atrocity, which began spreading like wildfire on social media, Israel began conjuring up a series of excuses. At first, the regime officials claimed that there was no such incident that they were aware of. Then the Israeli military outright denied that it had fired at civilians “near or within” the GHF site. 

However, it later changed its narrative and an Israeli army official claimed that shots were fired within a 1 kilometer distance of the site and that the shots were directed towards “suspects” who allegedly approached their troops.

Understanding that Israel was watching over civilians heading towards SDS-1 using a single road, why didn’t they follow up by offering a conclusion to the incident or even expand into details?

After this, Israel claimed nobody was hurt, as the GHF published video footage of calm prevailing at their site, but only at select times that prove nothing and in a clear attempt to back the Israeli allegation that all was well and no incident had even happened.

Then, the narrative changed once again as Israel released a video that they claimed to show Hamas members shooting civilians and looting aid in Rafah. This then led to Israeli propagandists and bots plastering their so-called evidence all over social media as a “gotcha” moment. 

It turned out that the video the Israeli military published was actually proof of their complicity in yet another war crime. Not only was the video geolocated, confirming it to have shown an entirely different incident in Khan Younis, not in Rafah where the massacre occurred, but it actually turned into a scandal of its own as it was identified as footage of Israeli-backed gangsters, linked to the Daesh terrorist group, opening fire on civilians.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society, Doctors Without Borders, Nasser Hospital’s emergency department, and even a CNN analysis using eyewitness testimonies and expert analysis, all corroborated what the Gaza Health Ministry had stated about the nature of the massacre and who perpetrated it.

Still, until now, Israel and their propagandists pretend as if its video served as proof that Hamas was responsible for the incident, allegations that were swiftly debunked soon after the video was published with a blatantly false description.

Another piece of so-called evidence cited by shameless Zionist propagandists is the fact that a number of mainstream media outlets corrected specific claims or language they used in stories covering the massacre. If you look at each outlet's corrections, they do not exonerate Israel at all; they just amend their pieces to give more light to Israeli claims and note that some information they cited turned out not to be correct.

None of them corroborated the official Israeli narrative.

As the Israeli propaganda continued to flow, Israeli forces continued to open fire on civilians heading towards the US privatized aid points. On June 2, three more civilians were shot dead and 35 others were injured near the SDS-1 aid zone.

Israel claimed that it had shot at suspects who approached their forces, but did not offer any other explanations for what occurred. That same day, the Gaza Health Ministry said that a total of 75 civilians had been killed and 400 others injured while trying to reach aid points since May 27.

On June 3, then came the next major massacre of civilians near the GHF aid distribution centre in Tal al-Sultan, Rafah, killing 27 more civilians.

A report published by the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor group stated that, based on eyewitness testimonies and its field researchers' work, it had concluded there was evidence of “Israeli army snipers deliberately targeting starving civilians with direct gunfire, mostly to the head, despite no apparent threat to Israeli forces.”

One eye witness testimony provided evidence that at around 3:50 AM local time, on June 3, a survivor of the massacre had witnessed Israeli quadcopters flying over the crowds of civilians on their way to the aid point, and that after this,s the Israelis opened fire.

Another eyewitness who spoke to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor testified to witnessing quadcopter drones opening fire on civilians. The death toll eventually rose to 32 from that incident alone.

Again, the only excuse that Israel had to offer for why so many civilians had been gunned down was that its soldiers had fired warning shots towards “suspects” approaching their forces. No proof has been offered for this claim, which has now become the go-to justification, before pointing the finger at Hamas and sharing that they are investigating the incident.

A pattern of outright lies

The tactics employed by the Israeli occupation to deny guilt have been consistent through the genocide that began in October 2023 and has so far claimed over 54,000 lives, mostly children.

Instead of trying to go with one single excuse, they invent numerous contradictory narratives, a strategy known as muddying the waters.

It is, in effect, an attempt to flood the media with so many different accounts of events that it becomes difficult for a journalist or commentator to say with full confidence that they know what happened.

This incident is a great example of how these propaganda tactics work. They invent so many narratives that it takes serious work for a journalist on broadcast media to say anything definitively, until the investigative work is done to disprove the treasure trove of disinformation.

In addition to this, Zionist propagandists are simultaneously deployed across social media to spread the various contradictory narratives and ambush influential accounts that are providing updates. The aim is to desperately try and sow doubt, not to win the argument conclusively.

Take, for example, the Israeli claims about the al-Ahli (Baptist) Hospital bombing on October 17, 2023. It is a perfect case study for how Israeli propaganda works. The first step was to claim no knowledge of the situation. Then the Israeli military claimed to have fired in the area, but that it wasn’t actually their missile that struck the hospital.

Yet, Israeli propagandist Hananya Naftali, who has close ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had published the claim that the Israeli air force “struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza”, before deleting the X [formerly Twitter] post as soon as it emerged that the Israeli military was denying involvement in the massacre. 

Next came the disputes over the reported death toll. Israel released claims that the death toll was a lie and even presented irrelevant footage to support this idea, posing the question of how it was possible that the initial claims of 500 dead could be possible.

Helping them make their case, due to the sheer scale of the dead, there was a mistake in the casualty count and the Gaza Health Ministry revised its estimate down. Others still disputed the figure presented, which sat at 471.

The lowest death toll estimate turned out to be around 200, which came from the US, which had nobody on the ground to corroborate this and was clearly biased in favour of Israel’s narratives.

Zionist propagandists also began spreading the claim that a Hamas weapons depot at the hospital had been struck by Israel, causing the civilian massacre. Yet this narrative didn’t stick for long.

Then came the official social media handles of Israel posting three separate videos, all of which were later deleted. Two of the videos featured no explosions at all, while the third was proven to have been from a separate incident that occurred in August of 2022.

Although the official Israeli social media handles deleted these videos, they continued to be uploaded by Zionist propagandists.

But the nonsense didn’t stop there, Israel’s official Twitter page published a live-stream clip from al-Jazeera, in an attempt to support their new narrative that a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket misfired and killed the civilians at the hospital.

Le Monde and the New York Times conducted investigations that disproved Israel’s claims about what the Al-Jazeera footage showed. Later, it was revealed by Al-Jazeera that the footage actually featured an Israeli munition.

It didn’t end there. The Israeli military spokesperson at the time, Daniel Hagari, addressed a media press conference and presented some videos, in addition to what he claimed was an intercepted phone call between Hamas fighters. A Channel 4 investigation proved that the so-called “Hamas phone call” was fake.

Despite all of this, to this day, Zionists still go back to the incident that remains “disputed”.

The real question here is this: Why publish videos that have no relevance to the incident, fake audio recordings and issue so many contradictory narratives if you are innocent? It is because the Israelis know they committed the massacre, but they simply want to muddy the waters so much that it takes investigative journalists time to figure it out.

The exact same strategy was used to try and cover up the infamous Flour Massacre, which occurred in March of 2024, when Israeli forces killed 120 civilians and injured 750 others.

First, they denied their troops fired on the civilians who were desperately attempting to reach bags of flour. Allegations came out that because the Gaza Health Ministry is “Hamas-run”, the casualty figures could be wrong. Then came the claims that Israeli forces had fired, but only in the air in self-defence. 

After this, another myth was added to the mix, that Israel had only opened fire defensively in a totally separate incident. But wait, there’s more. They ended up blaming Hamas.

Weeks later, investigative journalists pulled the whole thing apart and pointed the blame at Israel, but by then, it had faded out of the headlines.

Every single time Israel commits a new atrocity on a massive scale that ends up receiving international attention, which is pretty frequent, it follows the exact same strategy.  They construct at least three to five separate narratives, always contradicting each other. 

Then their conclusion is to blame Palestinians for killing themselves, admit opening fire but claim it was defensive and didn’t cause casualties, then tell the press that they are “investigating” themselves, which never goes anywhere.

By the time their lies are thoroughly debunked by multiple international media agencies, they have moved on to the next atrocity, and the cycle continues.

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