Aug. 11 (UPI) — After Israel killed more than 100 people sheltering inside a school in Gaza on Saturday, Hamas pushed back against what it called Israel’s false narrative that the facility had been used as one of its command centers.
“The narrative of the criminal occupation army about the martyrs of the massacre in the Al-Tabin school in the Daraj neighborhood that they are members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad is misleading and false,” Hamas said in a statement.
Hamas said Israel killed civilians sheltering in the school and noted that Israel incorrectly listed 19 names claimed by the Israeli military to have been members of Palestinian militias.
The militia asserted that Israel made the false claim in a desperate bid “to justify its heinous crime in light of the widespread international criticism to it.” Hamas added that those killed included children, university professors and clerics.
“We confirm that the aforementioned allegations of the occupation army are false and baseless,” Hamas said. “No one among them was a gunman, and they were all civilians who were targeted while performing the dawn prayer.”
Israel and its supporters have long lied or made false claims about Palestinians and Hamas amid an information war running parallel to the fighting in Gaza. In the 2008 conflict, Israel denied using white phosphorous in populated areas before evidence proved otherwise and it was forced to acknowledge using the controversial chemical warfare.
Other times, Israel makes accusations about the militia without providing concrete evidence to the public, making it hard to discern reality, such as in 2021 when it conducted a strike on a high-rise building in Gaza City used by international journalists that it said was used by Hamas, without providing evidence.
Hamas also hit out at British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, characterizing his comments about the school massacre as a “heinous alignment with the occupation’s false narrative.” Lammy had called on Palestinian fighters to “stop endangering civilians” without calling on Israeli fighters to do the same amid the conflict.
“It is a blatant attempt to evade his country’s legal, political, and moral responsibility for the continuation of this brutal genocide, by continuing to provide political and military support to the Zionist occupation,” Hamas added.
Hamas instead demanded that Britain and the United States “immediately back down” from making any statements or taking actions that would make them “actual partners in the war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide committed in the Gaza Strip.”