With every step Israeli soldiers take inside the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, the hysteria of Hamas propaganda goes up a notch. We are presented with a string of doctors talking about incubator babies, corpses being eaten by dogs, a lack of electricity, and medical procedures being performed without drugs.
Tragically western media simply parrots these messages:
Hamas’ finely tuned propaganda system is built upon decades of western media naivety, alongside a collapse of media integrity. When Israel is the subject, it seems as though basic media reporting standards are completely set aside.
Reports about what is happening in Gaza should be treated with similar prudence to those about Moscow at the height of Soviet power. You couldn’t just believe what ‘doctors’ and ‘health ministers’ said to you. The ‘doctor’ could be a loyal ‘party member’ – or not a doctor at all. And in any case, nobody dared speak ill of the Soviet regime or cooperate with the West. Soviet citizens had two basic choices – they did their patriotic duty or paid a price.
The Unclear Motives of the Media
From within Gaza, these ‘doctors’ are issuing ‘end-of-days’ statements in order to inflame public opinion and force a ceasefire. Outside of Gaza, the western media is doing real-world damage by giving their claims legitimacy. Reporters and presenters from the BBC to the New York Times see a man in a medical uniform and mistakenly act as if they are in their local surgery talking to an NHS representative.
People can decide for themselves the motive behind the west’s ‘respected’ media outlets turning themselves into Hamas puppets – but let us take a closer look at some of the doctors they rely on for their news from Shifa hospital.
Dr Ezz Lulu
In the updates on 11 November, CNN reported on ‘heavy bombing in the vicinity of Shifa. The Doctor inside Shifa that fed the CNN this information was Dr Ezz Lulu:
By his own admission Ezz Lulu is not a Doctor, he is a medical student. Nevertheless, some of his posts while working inside Shifa have 20,000+ shares.
Should he graduate one day, he is not the kind of doctor that any of us in the West would recognise. This is what he posted at 9:39am on 7 October – as terrorists were butchering, raping, and massacring Jewish civilians:
And for those in any doubt – a day following the atrocity – the ‘doctor’ that CNN use as a reliable source posted an image of a hang glider:
Dr Khaled Abu Samra
As the IDF entered Shifa, it began delivering humanitarian aid. Hamas propaganda immediately set about delegitimising the story. One of their stories even had the IDF stealing water from the hospital and then presenting it as aid:
The Doctor spreading those tales was Khaled Abu Samra. CNN also relied on him in their updates on Nov 15. This is what he posted on the morning of 7 October:
According to his FB profile – he is engaged to Nour Ashour. On October 7 she posted these on her FB page. Notice that the good Doctor ‘loved’ her post about resistance:
His celebrations did not begin on 7 October, however. On the evening of 27 January 2023, a terrorist massacred Jews outside a synagogue in Jerusalem. Both Abu Samra and his fiancé posted celebratory messages:
Dr Abu Samra has a history of supporting Hamas and terrorism. He is not alone.
Mohammed Abu Salmiya – Head of Shifa Hospital
Mohammed Abu Salmiya is the head of Shifa hospital. His name is spelt in various ways in the media, but I found him quoted everywhere from the BBC and the Guardian to CNN and the NYT.
On FB he spells his name ‘Abu Selmia‘. According to his own posts – his brother was killed by the Israelis in September 2004 in Gaza.
His brother was a leader of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades – the Hamas military wing. His death was a targeted strike.
Abu Salmiya has been the source of several of the most outrageous stories into the mainstream.
His own timeline is full of support for terrorism. In the image below is a celebratory attack following a terrorist attack in Jerusalem on 23 November (a better translation is ‘fight fire with fire’), and praise for terrorists Udai Tamimi, Ibrahim al-Nabulsi (Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade) and Khaled Mansour (Islamic Jihad).
It seems the BBC or NYT have a particular talent for finding hospital staff who openly celebrate when Israelis are murdered, such as when seven Israelis were murdered outside a synagogue on January 27 2023:
Munir al-Borsh: Director General of the Palestinian Health Ministry
Moving further up the food chain we find Munir al-Borsh – another one whose surname is spelt in various ways. He is Director General of the Palestinian Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas. So he is literally part of government and therefore a paid Hamas mouthpiece. Yet this does not stop every major news outlet from the Guardian to the Washington Post quoting him.
Given his status, al-Boursh is an important tool used by Hamas to demonise Israel and spread lies about what is taking place. He was actually the one that started a story about dogs eating the corpses of Gazan civilians.
He does not even try to hide his support for Hamas – so why the media fails to reference this connection is beyond explanation.
To illustrate this point, the left-hand image in al-Boursh’s post below is the Hamas ‘grandmother’ terrorist Fatma Omar An-Najar. On the right is ‘Ibrahim Muhammad Al-Shandaghli’ – another hero of Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas .
Dr Mohammed Ghneim
While Munir Al Borsh was spreading tales about dogs eating corpses, there was another story going around, about fetuses pulled from dying mothers
Dr. Mohammed Ghneim has an active Twitter account. In 2016 he commemorated Abdullah Ghaleb Barghouti, a bomb maker for the Hamas military wing whose bombs killed at least 66 people.
Here he is celebrating all of the ‘engineers’ of Hamas – including ‘the first’ –Yahya Ayyash.
Ghneim’s heroes were responsible for the murder of hundreds of innocent civilians. He made the post in honour of the Hamas ‘drone expert ‘ killed in Tunisia in Dec 2016.
On Facebook he was also found on his own brother’s timeline, liking posts celebrating the 7 Oct attack and the 27 January synagogue massacre:
Given Ghneim’s support for terrorism and the Hamas military wing, it is also notable he was the doctor sent to the Baptist hospital to spread the false rumours about the massacre:
Dr Kamal Kashko
Another Doctor at Shifa is Dr Kamal Kashko.
We know he is at Shifa because he tells us he is. More noticeably – and of use to us – he attacks those who were spreading rumours about the site.
Kashko’s ‘don’t believe the rumours post’ was published on Friday 10 Nov at 6pm (GMT). This is important. Mads Gilbert posted his viral ‘can you hear the screams’ video eight hours before this. It is odd that Mads Gilbert was asking world leaders if they could ‘hear the screams’ at Shifa eight hours before a doctor at Shifa told everyone to ignore the rumour mongers.
Sadly, Kashko is not a ‘good guy’ spilling the beans about Hamas propaganda. Like the other doctors at Shifa he also celebrated the attacks on 7 October.
And he spoke of the army of Mohammed returning (to massacre the Jews) on 27 January.
Other ‘Doctors’
These Doctors are not alone. Mohamed AlShareif says he is a medical analyst specialist at al-Shifa hospital.
This is what he had to say about the atrocities on Oct 7:
And this one:
Mohammed Ayesh is an Orthopaedics & Traumatology surgeon at Al Shifa:
He did a stint in Ukraine and his profile is a mixture of languages. On the 8th October he posted support for the attack – referencing it as revenge for the Muhammad al-Durrah incident that ignited the second Intifada.
In his own words he calls the attackers ‘heroes’ and wishes death to his enemies:
And he posted in celebration of the attack on January 27:
Abd Rahman Ahmed Husain works at al-Shifa and there are images of him on his page in medical gear – but it is unclear what specific expertise he has.
He posts ‘reels’ rather than images. And this includes footage from the 7 Oct attack:
He also posts pro-Hamas propaganda footage.
Samar Samy Abu Ouda – is a OB/GYN Doctor at al Shifa.
On 7 October Samar posted that it was a morning to remember:
And posted glorification of Mohammed Deif – head of the Hamas military wing:
Ezzedine Musa is a RN BSN at Shifa:
On 7 October he posted an image of a dead Hamas terrorist as a hero
And on the morning of January 28 – he posted in celebration of the synagogue attack the night before:
I have found others – but you get the picture.
These are the ‘doctors’ our media is relying on. These are the voices they are amplifying. Take Mark Stone from Sky News. On Friday he reposted this claim that ‘all the ICU patients’ at Shifa are dead:
The source? Mark Stone took it from ‘award-winning’ PBS correspondent Jane Ferguson. She took it from the Deputy Editor in Chief of Reuters Barry Malone. He took it from Al Jazeera – who in turn relied upon – you guessed it – Mohammed Abu Salmiya, Head of Shifa Hospital, for the story.
So the person that these juggernauts of media are all relying on as they spread this horror story around the world – is a terrorist supporter who takes joy in the murder of Jews – a man whose own brother was a leader of the Hamas military wing.
No Justification
There is no justification for this total breakdown of media standards. All of the material on this page has been publicly accessible to any journalist wanting to check their sources. It appears that not a single outlet has done its job properly. Some journalists – such as Mark Stone (Sky News) and Jeremy Bowen (BBC) have totally jumped the shark.
Media reporting such as this is culpable for the rise in antisemitism. It fuels the fire that has left Jewish families fearful of going out and scared of publicly identifying as Jewish.
The visible truth is that the media has chosen to promote the conspiracy stories and fake news fed to them by Hamas HQ. And it is a fair assessment to suggest that since Oct 7, much of mainstream media in the West has turned into a part of the Hamas propaganda machine. Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation. If Western media has become its mouthpiece, it is surely time that these outlets are held to account.
{Reposted from the author’s blog}
