SOB STORY JUSTIFYING BOMBING OF GAZA TURNS OUT TO BE FAKE

Weaponised grief/ anxiety

The war in Gaza is being fought on two levels, one military, the other purely propagandistic. This can be seen in the case of Thomas and Emily Hand.

One of the first "human interest" stories used to drive home the supposed horror and unrivalled atrocity of what supposedly happened on October the 7th was a short interview clip, showing distressed father Thomas Hand saying that he was actually glad that his 8-year-old daughter Emily had been "found dead" because it would have been much worse for her to be taken into Gaza as a hostage. 

Thomas famously told CNN in an emotional interview on October 12 that he welcomed his daughter's death.

"They just said, ‘We found Emily, she’s dead,’ and I went, ‘Yes’ and smiled, because that was the best news of the possibilities that I knew. She was either dead or in Gaza, and if you know anything about what they do to people in Gaza, that is worse than death… so death was a blessing."

The international audience who saw this clip was then left to imagine what terrors could possibly make a father say such an unbelievable thing.

As a piece of propaganda it was up there with proverbial tales of Belgian babies being thrown onto the bayonets of German soldiers in World War One.

But now we learned that this particular sob story, a story that was used to justify and sell the extreme Israeli retaliation against Gaza, was actually fake news.

As reported by the Times of Israel:

Emily Hand, an 8-year-old girl from Kibbutz Be’eri who was reported killed in the Hamas assault on October 7, is now believed to be alive and among those held hostage in Gaza. The family was informed of this by Israeli authorities five days ago, her older sister said on Sunday.

Natalie Hand said in a Channel 12 interview that the family had cried for Emily when they were informed she had been killed. “We were told that she had been murdered. We were in mourning,” she said. Then, “on October 31, they told us that it was highly likely that she had been abducted.”

Now that she is among the hostages, does this mean that she has been subjected to terrors worse than death, as her father initially feared? Possibly, but also possibly not. Some of the hostages have already been released, and others may be released in the future, but also some of them appear to have been killed by Israeli air strikes, and this is a very real possibility for this unfortunate child too, thanks to the constant bombing of Gaza that has claimed over 10,000 victims.

What this teaches us is to be very circumspect about any emotionalization of the narrative. Anyone mentioning dead children or beheaded babies (another piece of propaganda that turned out to be fake), should be treated with the utmost scepticism until the true facts are known.