Like almost everything else coming out of Gaza at the moment it is built upon a pyramid of lies.
It was this specific false narrative I chose to investigate.
I took the 107 names that had been presented to me and searched social media for the truth. Using every open-source intelligence tool imaginable, I managed to trace 100 (93 per cent) of these people online.
What I found brings the entire false narrative crashing down.
Half of those named worked for Hamas or Islamic Jihad channels. They were terrorists with a public face. Evidence was found that some shared directives on their own Telegram channels, calling for “everyone” with a gun to take arms on October 7.
More than 70 per cent celebrated the death of Israeli civilians in terrorist attacks. I lost count of the number of posts I saw with laughing emojis or love hearts posted on 27 January 2023 as seven Israelis lay slaughtered outside a synagogue.
On top of all this are non-journalists — builders, engineers, drivers, administrators, accountants — whom Hamas “promoted” to media roles posthumously.
And because of their visible support for terrorism, most of these people would be arrested if they ever stepped foot in the UK. It is disgraceful to call them journalists. They are there to promote and protect Hamas.
We all know Hamas lie— but instead of starting from scratch (as I did), western NGOs appear to have been using Hamas lists and working backwards. The less evidence available, the more likely the Hamas story will not be disproven, and the person will be accepted as a journalist.
How do I know? Because these NGOs clearly never accessed the social media accounts. Had they done so, many of the mistakes they made would not have happened. Almost every conceivable error is in there. And the one-dimensional blindness is caused by the method used.
Ahmed Shahab is a good example. He was killed at his father’s home and is listed as a journalist. Had anyone accessed his social media they’d know his father was a key Islamic Jihad figure. If that house was targeted, it had nothing to do with journalism.
And this was a repetitive picture. Time after time, the “journalist’s” brother, cousin, father or son was happily sharing images of himself with weapons and Hamas insignia. There are a lot of terrorist families in this puzzle.
My 150-page report details all my findings, but the bottom line is simple. The charge that Israel is targeting journalists is an unsupportable lie.
For the full report, go to david-collier.com
