From Devil’s Island to Gaza: Lies, rage and late corrections no one reads

This abhorrent episode in French history revealed the dangerous power of misinformation. Of how false rumours, when wrapped in prejudice and shouted loudly enough, can override the facts and outlive the truth, causing irreparable damage even when debunked. That was long before the digital age of information-sharing. Before Twitter. Before the 24-hour news cycle.

In today’s world, news – whether false or true – is transmitted, consumed and disseminated at stratospheric speed.

When you add to that mix the fog of war, journalists’ innate rush for scoops and exclusives and the democratisation of social media, where anyone with enough of a following is delivering news bulletins, truth can sometimes become the casualty.Twenty months into Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, we have seen this phenomenon time and again. We have seen disturbing examples of the maxim that “a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on”. Of facts playing catch-up with lies. Of a head-turning story dominating news headlines and sparking outrage and condemnation (often pointed at Israel) followed by a quiet clarification or retraction that barely makes the news, let alone the front pages.

A case in point was the Al-Ahli hospital incident early on in the war, on October 17, 2023. When a rocket was reported to have hit the hospital complex, many journalists, relying solely on information from the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, rushed to accuse Israel of launching the attack.

Initial reports stated that casualties were in the hundreds. Global condemnation of Israel followed. When it later emerged that the rocket had, in fact, been fired by Palestinian terrorists aiming for Israel and that the death toll was significantly lower, retractions and clarifications started creeping in, albeit inconspicuously. But by then, the falsehood around Israel’s culpability was trending – and nobody was reading the story’s modifications in small-print. The damage was already done.

British journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti encapsulated this pattern best in a recent Spectator piece about the international media: “Faced with shocking claims, particularly when they implicate Israel, they rush to publish, to condemn, to headline. Rarely do they wait for verification. Even more rarely do they correct with the same urgency when the facts unravel.”

The cycle repeated again in May. At a United Nations Security Council briefing on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, I sat across from under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, Tom Fletcher, as his speech was making headlines in real time. For all the wrong reasons.

Rather than focus on the despicable role Hamas has played in igniting and perpetuating this conflict that has brought suffering to both Israelis and Gazans living under Hamas tyranny, he peddled unsubstantiated claims of genocide and starvation.Fletcher followed these claims with a chilling “revelation” to the BBC that 14,000 Gazan babies would die within 48 hours. The UN would later retract these absurd claims and Fletcher would subsequently say he “regretted” what he said.

However, as with the Al-Ahli news debacle, the damage was already done. Every major television network and news publication beamed this headline. And it was in this climate of heightened emotion, animosity toward Israel and unchecked misinformation that appalling acts of antisemitism took place.

Two Israeli diplomats were shot dead by a crazed terrorist shouting “Free Palestine” outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. Less than two weeks after that, in Boulder, Colorado, an Egyptian national shouted “Free Palestine” as he hurled Molotov cocktails at a group of demonstrators calling for the return of Israeli hostages, injuring 12 people, including 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Barbara Steinmetz. Irresponsible headlines and irresponsible headline-making statements by senior officials can ignite real-world hate.

The United Nations was created in the wake of the Second World War to ensure international stability. Eighty years on, though it continues to be the world’s premier forum for global diplomacy, the UN has fallen short of some of its founding principles. UN special rapporteurs likening Israel to the Nazis and minimising the horrendous massacre on October 7, 2023 do little to strengthen international peace. As does Unrwa staff’s involvement in the bloodiest day in Israel’s history.

To combat these hostilities, we at the Israeli Mission to the UN are continuing to raise awareness about the plight of the hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza – and set the record straight around how this conflict began. One way we’ve done this is by bringing families of hostages and recently released hostages to the UN to share their harrowing stories and refute some of the lies told – to platform the voices who do not always make the headlines when they should.

The Dreyfus Affair taught us that antisemitism thrives on lies, and that even when the truth prevails, it often arrives too late. More than a century on, if the journalistic reporting around the war in Gaza has taught us anything, it is that in the rush to be first, don’t let the truth come last. Because when the truth does come last, it may never catch up at all.

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Jonathan Harounoff is Israel’s international spokesperson at the United Nations