Shabbat was an emotional rollercoaster. We had the dream-like rescue of the four hostages, including Noa Argamani, who had become so familiar it felt like we knew her personally. Then, in short order, we had videos of celebrations on Tel Aviv beach; clips of elated parents rushing to be reunited with their children amid crowds of singing neighbours; footage of the meetings themselves, enough to make the hardest heart weep; details of the courage and skill of the IDF special forces who carried out the rescue; then the heartbreaking news that one of the commanders had lost his life in the fighting.
As surely as night follows day, alongside this came the rising darkness. As usual, Hamas released implausible numbers of civilian casualties with implausible speed, an implausible number of whom were apparently “women and children”. In recent months, acres of newsprint have made clear that the terror group’s statistics are not to be trusted.
Yet the media trusted them anyway, at best burying a get-out-of-jail disclaimer about the “Hamas controlled health ministry” deep in their stories. Some outlets even mischaracterised the rescue as a “release”, as if the terrorists had welcomed the IDF with knafeh and mint tea. It is true that the operation claimed the lives of innocent civilians, every one of which was a tragedy.
But in its appetite for the narrative of Israeli blood lust, the media succumbed to collective amnesia. What about the fact that Hamas started the firefigh.