This morning two of the bigger international networks demonstrated how poorly they understand what is happening in Gaza.
Yesterday Israeli forces attacked the Jebalya ‘refugee’ camp. It’s a UNRWA facility originally set up to provide housing for Arab refugees. Almost all such camps, originally created to provide ‘temporary’ homes for refugees of the 1948-9 war have been turned into permanent homes for a population that is not allowed to seek better conditions elsewhere. The “host” country (in this case the Hamas government in Gaza) keeps them in the camp in order to maintain a displaced persons claim to return to their former homes. Just how false this claim can be is shown by what the inhabitants of similar Palestinian camps located in Syria did during the Syrian civil war. Those camps emptied, and the people in them fled to Turkey where they denied being Palestinians and claimed to be Syrian war refugees because Syrians (and almost every other displaced group since 1948) were taken in by the UN high commissioner on refugees (UNHCR) and were to be resettled if immediate return to their former homes was not an option. UNRWA was established just before the office of the UNHCR came into existence. The UN has cynically extended the UNRWA mandate and funding ever since, making the Palestinians a political pawn for the Arabs while turning the funding of this political tool into an international problem.
Returning to the case of Jebalya, Hamas used international funds for reconstruction in Gaza from previous violent confrontations to build an extended system of underground tunnels and fortifications. The tunnels could be used as bomb shelters, but Hamas terrorist refuse to allow the residents of the camp entry. Israeli air attacks used penetrating bombs to hit those tunnels. The bombs set off large munitions storage areas in the tunnels, resulting in the very large craters visible in the photographs recently shown of the area. Hamas even initially warned residents that there might be unexploded weapons in the craters, but quickly realized that this would be a propaganda mistake and suppressed later warnings. Both CNN and France 24 were taken in by this. Both networks are fully aware that no pictures or reports come from inside Gaza without the approval of Hamas,
CNN should consider changing its slogan to “More people get their disinformation from CNN than from any other source.”
Wetherhorn 