Over the past 18 months, a seemingly unending stream of horrific stories has emerged from Gaza, publicized across social media and in humanitarian reports.
These stories are inevitable considering the current conditions in Gaza. People there are suffering through unending Israeli bombardment (with the exception of two short-lived ceasefires), a massive civilian casualty toll including health workers, journalists, and more than 15,000 children, widescale destruction of infrastructure, and deprivation of the basics needed for survival, including food and clean water (at the time of writing, it has been more than 50 days since Israel has permitted humanitarian goods to enter Gaza). Now, in April 2025, this reality has become almost normalized by most international media outlets.
Occasionally, however, a story can be so shocking, so damning, that it breaks through. Most recently, the story that captured the world was that of the 15 paramedics—eight staff members from the Red Crescent, six from the Palestinian Civil Defense, and one from UNRWA—murdered by Israeli forces on March 23, 2025. It was the single deadliest day for Red Crescent workers since 2017.
The team went missing for days, with Israel blocking those sent to search for them. Eventually, their bodies were found in a mass grave, buried along with several of the ambulances that they were driving. Israel claimed the team was ‘advancing suspiciously’ toward them without emergency signals.
Days later, however, The New York Times broke a story with irrefutable video evidence that Israel’s version of events was not true. In fact, the ambulance lights were on and the vehicles and workers clearly identified. The video showed paramedics exiting their vehicles to respond to another ambulance that had run off the road earlier.
In the video, shots were heard ringing out in the background; autopsy reports found that most of the paramedics were killed by being shot in the head and chest. In between prayers, among the last words of the man recording the video, who would later be found dead in the mass grave, were “forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose—to help people.”
In addition to the New York Times report, multiple news outlets published investigations of the paramedic attack, including Sky News, which obtained additional audio that “contradict[ed] not only Israel’s initial account of the attack, but its subsequent accounts as well.” In damning succession, the Sky report found seven Israeli claims that evidence proved false. One such falsehood was Israel’s assertion that the vehicles were traveling in a combat zone without permission (the area was only declared a combat zone after the attack); another was that Israeli troops fired from a far distance (some shots were fired from as close as 12 meters). A Haaretz report found that soldiers reloaded their weapons multiple times as the workers tried to identify themselves and fired at them “indiscriminately.”
The Israeli military accused six of the paramedics of being “linked to Hamas,” with no evidence.
Once the indefensible reality of the story became public, the Israeli narrative quickly changed. While admitting to making “mistakes,” the Israeli military pivoted to accusing six of the paramedics of being “linked to Hamas,” with no evidence. The mass grave? Simply to protect the bodies from wild animals. Nothing to see here!
While it is impossible to quantify how often this type of incident occurs—the Israeli military killing Palestinians and then lying about the circumstances to justify the actions—many such event have come to light in just the past few years. It then becomes vital to interrogate how these narratives have been used to both obscure the (well documented) reality as well as to minimize outrage over harms against Palestinians.
The Importance of Narrative in Armed Conflict
What happens on the battlefield is just one aspect of war. For as long as conflict between groups has existed, defining the framing of what happened, why it happened, and who was involved has been nearly as important to battlefield success as the number of soldiers and types of munitions used. A well-crafted narrative builds nationalism, constructs an enemy that is perceived as deserving of punishment, brings the support of other nations and non-governmental groups, guides media coverage of developing events, and obscures potential violations. Indeed, the International Committee of the Red Cross has characterized information itself as a potential “weapon of war.”
In many instances, the use of disinformation is not even meant to convince audiences, but instead to cause confusion about reality such that the audience is unwilling to change their judgment even after the disinformation is corrected. Thus, it is vital to get a favorable story out quickly and to repeat a narrative consistently.
Frequently, disinformation and misinformation have successfully been used to propel warfare, including through documented propaganda campaigns as far back as the Roman empire and, more recently, through concerted efforts by American government officials used to push the United States into devastating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With the current state of technology and the ease of spreading information—both accurate and inaccurate—via social media, creating a narrative is more important than ever. Russia’s online disinformation campaign during its ongoing war against Ukraine is well known in its aims, as scholars have put it, of “amplifying political narratives and manipulating public opinion.”
In its own effort to shift narratives, Israel has increased its hasbara (public relations) budget by 20 times what it was prior to October 7, 2023—to 500 million Israeli Shekels, around US $150 million. According to Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, Israel is using the funds for “media campaigns abroad, in the foreign press, on social media,” and has “concentrated activity on US campuses to change their attitude towards Israel and its policies.”
Information Wars Against Palestinian Hospitals and Health Workers
Israel has crafted several levels of narratives against Palestinians. Some are all-encompassing, for example the false narratives that Israel does not occupy Palestine (it does) or that Israel uniquely has an unquestionable “right to defend itself” that permits the flouting of international law (it does not).
Among the deadliest narratives, especially in Gaza, is that Palestinians killed by Israeli bombing are all either Hamas members or “human shields.” This narrative essentially argues that Hamas purposely uses its presence in the dense setting of Gaza, including in hospitals, to force Israel to kill civilians.
The nonsensical logic behind the human shields argument is that, as one example of this viewpoint puts it, Hamas is aware of the “Israeli government’s aim to minimize collateral damage and is also aware of the West‘s sensitivity towards civilian casualties.” Decades of evidence demonstrate that neither of these assertions is accurate—there has been no consequence for almost any Israeli violation regardless of the Palestinian death toll. But this has not stopped countless politicians and pundits from repeating this dehumanizing narrative. Scholar Neve Gordon has pointed to the innate hypocrisy in these accusations. “When state actors kill civilians, it’s become standard to describe them as human shields. But when non-state actors attack military targets in urban settings, the civilians they kill are still recognized as civilians,” Gordon writes. While there is robust evidence of Israel using Palestinians as human shields, that evidence-based narrative has not proved nearly as influential.
Another narrative that has been widely used to justify Israel’s systematic dismantling of healthcare in Gaza is that hospitals are being used as military bases or command centers, and that most of the medical staff working in them are Hamas operatives.
Shortly after October 7, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released a computer-generated rendering of the underground labyrinth that it claimed was under Al Shifa hospital and that was allegedly functioning as “the main headquarters for Hamas’s terrorist activity.” After multiple raids and sieges, no such facility was found. A December 2023 investigation of the Al Shifa raid by the Washington Post found multiple Israeli claims that were not true; requests to the IDF for clarification or evidence went unanswered. The evidence that Israel did present was not allowed to be verified by independent sources and, according to the Post, “falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center.”
Israel used a similar narrative, and similarly, no evidence, to claim that the health workers kidnapped and detained by Israel were involved in “terrorist activities.” These detainees reported conditions of abuse, starvation, torture, and denial of legal services.
Israel went on to damage or destroy nearly every hospital in Gaza under the same narrative, often with no pretext of evidence. In early April 2025, Israeli forces bombed one of the few functional hospitals left in Gaza City, Al Ahli Hospital, again claiming that it functioned as yet another “command and control center used by Hamas.” This time, they provided no evidence at all.
There are countless examples of the use of false narratives to defend actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel used a similar narrative, and similarly, no evidence, to claim that the health workers kidnapped and detained by Israel were involved in “terrorist activities.” These detainees reported conditions of abuse, starvation, torture, and denial of legal services. In the IDF’s December 2024 raid of Kamal Adwan Hospital, which Israel again claimed was a “command center for Hamas military operations,” Israel detained 240 Palestinians, including hospital director Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who Israel now asserts, without evidence, is a member of Hamas. In March 2025, an Israeli court classified Abu Safiya as a “security risk” and extended his detention order for six months, refusing requests for evidence. His lawyer says that his client has been subjected to “relentless and brutal abuse, torture, and assault.”
The same narrative was adapted to accuse UNRWA, the main humanitarian agency operating in Gaza, of essentially functioning as a terrorist organization. The accusation caused multiple countries, including the United States, to cut funding at a time of dire need. (Israel leveled the same accusations against six Palestinian civil society organizations in 2022, also leading to a cutoff in funding, and also with no evidence.) An independent investigation of the UNRWA accusations, led by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, found “no evidence” to support them. Almost all countries resumed funding the agency after the investigation, aside from the United States and the United Kingdom. The executive director of the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières argued that in Gaza, there is a “whole machine that is looking to pick apart and cut down independent humanitarian action…in the case of UNRWA, you know, guilty until proven innocent.”
There are countless other examples of the use of false, yet often unquestioned, narratives to defend attacks and restrictions across both Gaza and the West Bank. It is not difficult to understand why. The human shields argument and the Hamas-related accusations have proved to be potent tools in providing cover for what human rights groups and experts have argued are Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity as well as violations of the protections afforded to civilians and medical infrastructure in armed conflict, especially considering the ongoing status of Israel as an Occupying Power.
Will There Be Justice?
History suggests that, as in many previous incidents, there will be little or no consequences for the murder of the Palestinian paramedics. So far, after significant global outcry, an Israeli investigation found “professional failures” in the incident that led to the firing of one deputy commander in the IDF. Despite calls by groups such as Amnesty International and nations such as Australia for independent investigations, it is unlikely this will occur except for media investigations, as has been the case for past high-profile incidents.
These include the murder of Palestinian nurse Razan al-Najjar, killed by an Israeli sniper in Gaza in 2018 although she was clearly identified as medical personnel. Despite initially claiming there were no “accidental shootings” that day, after a New York Times investigation found that it was an Israeli bullet that killed Razan, the Israeli military eventually admitted to killing her, but claimed that “no shots were deliberately or directly aimed towards her.” At the time, experts said that the sheer number of civilians being killed by Israel, even if “unintentionally,” with no change in rules in engagement could itself be a violation of international law. “You lose the right to say, ‘Oops,’” one expert on armed conflict law told the Times.
The circumstances of the murder of famed Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank in 2022 were similar. Shireen, wearing her identifiable press helmet and vest, was shot by Israeli soldiers outside the Jenin refugee camp. Israel initially claimed that she was killed by Palestinian militants or potentially by an Israeli soldier returning fire. Multiple investigations showed that there were no Palestinian militants in the area, and that the Israeli convoy had a direct line of sight to the group of journalists. Others in the area who attempted to help Shireen were shot. The Israeli investigation ultimately found a “high probability” that she was “accidentally hit” by Israeli fire, with no consequences for the soldiers involved.
Although the IDF receives hundreds of complaints every year, few are investigated. The investigations that do occur tend to be opaque. They occasionally claim that Israel’s actions were unintentional and almost always exonerate those involved. A review by National Public Radio found that of 1,260 complaints levied between 2017 and 2021 against Israeli soldiers for harming Palestinians and their property, fewer than one percent resulted in indictments. Many more incidents, often caught on video and publicized on social media, are never even formally reported.
The lack of meaningful justice has compelled Israeli human rights groups such as B’Tselem to stop referring cases to the military courts altogether. “We reached the conclusion that continuing to refer cases to the Israeli investigative bodies is not only counterproductive because it does not obtain any real accountability, but it also gives the veneer of a functioning system,” a B’Tselem spokesperson lamented.
External legal processes in the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, while more rigorous, are entirely too slow to make meaningful change in the lives of Palestinians today who are being killed, displaced, and terrorized. Other methods used by governments and activists to persuade Israel or its allies to change action or to push for accountability, such as protests, calls for divestment, sanctions, or boycott, or even labelling goods produced in settlements, have received heavy criticism, are subject to punitive action, or have been banned outright.
The excessive repression currently being inflicted upon Palestinians and their allies is a predictable development, as recent polling suggests that more than half of US adults (53 percent) now express an unfavorable opinion of Israel (up from 42 percent in March 2022). Preventing and even criminalizing Palestinian advocacy is a clear attempt to stop the reality of the Palestinian narrative from further eroding the broad support that Israel has long enjoyed from countries, especially the United States, that have prevented meaningful accountability in Israel’s actions.
The current moment is an exceptionally difficult one for the Palestinian people, both for those living in the occupied territories and those living elsewhere in the world engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy. With Israel annexation underway in the West Bank and clear support for ethnic cleansing in Gaza from both Israel and its most powerful ally, the United States, there has still been no substantive action to protect Palestinian life and prevent Israeli violations. What more will it take?
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Screen capture from video provided by Palestine Red Crescent Society
