Friends,
Almost all
government officials tell a fib or a lie on an irregular basis. Of
course, Trump generates a lie every minute. Regarding the Israeli
government, it is a lying machine. There is no starvation, Hamas is
hiding in the hospital, Shireen was shot by a Palestinian, all Palestinian
journalists are members of Hamas, Bibi did not provide funds to Hamas and there
is no apartheid in occupied Palestine. There are not enough Pinocchios to
highlight the lies emanating from Tel Aviv. Kagiso, Max
Report: Israeli
Military Has Unit That Exists to Justify Targeting Journalists
The unit aims to
give the military leeway “so countries like America wouldn’t stop supplying
weapons,” one source said.
August
15, 2025
A
media spokesperson in Barcelona speaks at a press conference with people
holding portraits of the Al Jazeera journalists recently killed in Gaza by the
Israeli army.Paco Freire / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
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The Israeli military operates a special unit known as the
“Legitimization Cell” that exists to create propaganda justifying the
military’s targeting of civilian infrastructure and civilians, particularly
journalists, in order to ensure that Israel maintains its legitimacy on the
world stage, an investigation finds.
According to a +972 Magazine and Local
Call investigation published Thursday, the
Legitimization Cell is a public relations unit that is tasked with finding a
narrative to create cover for some of the most highly criticized actions by
Israel’s military.
“If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent
journalists, then immediately there’s a push to find one journalist who might not
be so innocent — as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable,” an
Israeli intelligence source told journalist Yuval Abraham.
“The idea was to [allow the military to] operate without pressure,
so countries like America wouldn’t stop supplying weapons,” another Israeli
source said.
Observers have seen this pattern play out numerous times,
including in the recent assassination of famous Gaza journalist Anas Al-Sharif,
who Israel killed along with five other Al
Jazeera journalists earlier this week. Israel has long smeared
Al-Sharif as a member of Hamas — claims that he always denied and for which
Israel has not provided any evidence that can be
independently verified.
Israel does this regularly. Last year, after killing Al
Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, Israeli officials claimed that he was given
a Hamas military ranking in 2007 — when al-Ghoul was only 10 years old.
“[T]hree intelligence sources said the army treated the media as
an extension of the battlefield, allowing it to declassify sensitive
intelligence for public release,” said the investigation.
+972 and Local Call report that the
Legitimization Cell is responsible for narratives like its denial of
responsibility for the strike on Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City in October 2023
— a high-profile strike that killed hundreds of Palestinians. The bombing
gained widespread media attention as one of Israel’s first strikes on Gaza’s
health care system that it has now destroyed, with Al-Ahli put
out of service by Israeli attacks.
A flood of disinformation sourced from the military — much of
which was later debunked by numerous investigations — followed the attack. The
day after, the Legitimization Unit put out a recording of a phone call that it
claimed was between two Hamas operatives saying that the hospital was struck by
a misfired Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.
But this claim was roundly debunked by analysts and
multiple news outlets. And the phone call, too, was fake — a Palestinian human
rights activist told +972 and Local Call that
it was actually a benign phone call between him and his civilian friend that
had been intercepted by the military. Israel keeps a huge database of Palestinians’ phone
calls as part of its vast surveillance network.
In response to the report, the Israeli military outright admitted
that Israeli military intelligence maintains “research teams” that have the
goal of “discredit[ing]” journalists reporting from Gaza who are supposedly
“Hamas members.”
But, despite supposedly being responsible for finding journalists’
ties to Hamas, the “research teams do not play a role in the selection of
individual targets to be attacked,” the report finds — meaning that they are
looking for justification after the fact.
“There was this phrase, ‘That’s good for legitimacy,’” one source
told +972 and Local Call. “The goal was simply to
find as much material as possible to serve hasbara efforts.”
Sources recalled a case where the Legitimization Unit falsely
represented a journalist as a member of Hamas’s military wing, saying that the
propaganda research cell was “eager” and “excited” about the narrative. “In the
end, they realized he really was a journalist,” and he wasn’t targeted, one
source claimed.
Israel has long had a robust propaganda operation — so robust, in
fact, that Israel has exported some of its
intelligence and surveillance technologies. Members of one of its well-known
intelligence units, Unit 8200, are trained in Israel but go on to work across numerous
sectors, including as journalists in the U.S. at
outlets key to shaping American opinion.
This article is licensed
under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are
free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Sharon
Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate
and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written
stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and
more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter and Bluesky.
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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