• barsoap@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    The “500 people killed” thing isn’t actually due to Hamas but Al Jazeera: Directly after the explosion, before the dust had settled, a Health Ministry spokesperson spoke about “500 casualties”. In the context of “there are killed and wounded”. And as it was so early, and it’s a round number, obviously an estimate, and not an official number. Al Jazeera turned that into 500 killed in its English edition, and the whole fucking western media ran with it.

    Now I dislike Hamas like I dislike any fascists but the Health Ministry is not just Hamas, plenty of Fatah and generally people from the PA in there, and their numbers have generally been pretty accurate (even if they don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants, they simply count the dead). Possibly not as accurate in this case though as once Al Jazeera put that number out there it’s probably hard to correct them down while Hamas’ propaganda finger of the military arm is holding an AK to your head.