For years, Israel has had the largely undeserved reputation of being an exemplary exponent of propaganda. Many think of its slick, well-trained spokespeople with well-honed messages, but how has Israeli propaganda fared since Oct. 7? The Israeli information war is very much part of its war on Gaza. It devotes huge resources to this and to owning the story. Israel, as the occupying power, determines much of what we get to see. It was able to control the reporting of the Oct. 7 attacks and their aftermath in Israel. International journalists have only been allowed entry into the Gaza Strip when embedded alongside the Israeli army. Last week, CNN did get independent access, producing a devastating report that basically just reinforced what Palestinian journalists have been telling us. Israel has turned off telecommunications, including the internet, in Gaza. Who knows what stories have yet to be told? What evidence of possible crimes have been buried under the mountains of rubble? The Israeli military knows that, if you cannot kill the story, kill the messenger. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed at least 57 Palestinian journalists in Gaza and possibly as many as 90, according to some reports. Who can forget all the lies and misinformation surrounding Israel’s killing of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022? The Israeli propaganda machine is amplified by trained spokespeople, well-staffed embassies across the globe and satellite organizations capable of backing up the propaganda. Those who challenge the Israeli media line are often hounded. Even UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was a victim of this after he dared to give context to the crisis in Gaza by referring to the crisis situation in the Strip before Oct. 7. Typically, the messaging portrays all Palestinians as Hamas. When massive numbers of Palestinians were seen arrested, bound and stripped to their underwear, it was stated that these were all militiamen, even when there was no evidence of this. To bolster this line, Hamas is portrayed as being identical to Daesh, which it is not. Far from providing an accurate and credible flow of information since Oct. 7, official Israeli stories have often unraveled under even basic scrutiny. On one occasion, prime ministerial spokesperson Ofir Gendelman posted an image claiming to show Palestinians faking injuries for the camera. The only problem was that this was from filming for a Lebanese drama called “The Reality.” You would think this would be deleted immediately, but it was left online. Gendelman has form — two years ago, he posted a video claiming to be of Hamas firing rockets, but it was actually from Syria. Far from being accurate and credible, official Israeli stories have often unraveled under even basic scrutiny Chris Doyle Israeli propaganda loves to portray Arabs as duplicitous. Take the doll story in October. Official Israeli social media accounts claimed that footage of a Palestinian man carrying an injured Palestinian boy trapped in a shroud was actually a doll and that Hamas had posted the image before deleting it. Fact-checking by the media demonstrated that there was no doll and it was in fact a boy. From the outset, Israel has been challenging the number of Palestinian fatalities. It has successfully managed to ensure that even the White House, as well as most mainstream media outlets, have also indulged in this, including stating that the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza is just an arm of Hamas propaganda. However, assessments of previous Israeli bombardments of Gaza show that, in the end, the official Palestinian figures end up closely matching the Israeli ones. One of the most egregious areas of Israeli propaganda is on the humanitarian front. The Israeli ambassador in London denied there was a humanitarian crisis at all. Others will treat this as merely a humanitarian crisis rather than a political one with humanitarian consequences. Even after Israel has killed close to 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, 61 percent of whom were civilians, Israeli spokespeople routinely say this should be laid at the door of Hamas, as if it was not Israeli bombs being dropped on schools, hospitals and bakeries. Were the 8,000 Palestinian children victims to blame for their demise? UNRWA is a favorite target of Israeli propaganda, as it is the UN agency that essentially keeps most Palestinians in Gaza alive. An official Israeli social media account claimed that “dozens of rockets found in northern Gaza (were) hidden under UNRWA boxes,” as if the boxes provided evidence of UNRWA complicity. One Israeli ambassador even blamed UNRWA for destroying “the future of generations of Palestinians.” There is also the claim that a teacher in a UNRWA school held a hostage, but the Israeli journalist who posted this has yet to share any details with the agency about the claim. Zero evidence has been produced to support it. Israel’s targeting of hospitals has been a huge area of contention, with only eight of Gaza’s 36 hospitals now functioning. In all but the most exceptional of circumstances, bombing hospitals is a war crime. Israeli propagandists claimed Hamas had its command and control center under Gaza’s largest hospital at Al Shifa. To back this up, its special effects department created a mocked-up video of what this was supposed to look like. As yet, no such command center has been found. The fake Palestinian nurse TikTok video was comedy gold in its ineptitude, but still it went viral as a piece of disinformation. A supposedly Palestinian nurse appeared in immaculate makeup in the middle of what was meant to be Al-Shifa Hospital and claimed that Hamas was running the place. The accent was dreadful. The background explosions sounded fake. It was soon deleted. All of this is a distraction. Israel has bombed scores of healthcare targets, including hospitals. The latest was Kamal Adwan Hospital, which was effectively destroyed. Israel has not provided sufficient evidence to justify them being targets. The question is, does this propaganda work? Has it served to cement a particular narrative? Israeli talking points do get a lot of traction but perhaps, as this chapter of the conflict continues, Israeli credibility has been questioned more than ever. Yet, as in every war Israel perpetrates against Palestinians, despite all the slick and not-so-slick propaganda, one factor shatters and undermines all its efforts: the monumental scale of the destruction visited upon Palestinian areas. Even just a few images of the mass urban rubble, the giant craters and the pancaked cityscapes tell the neutrals all they need to know. This is not a targeted act of self-defense but a prolonged, merciless mass bombardment of a captive civilian population that is as brutal as any this century. • Chris Doyle is director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding in London. X: @Doylech Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News" point of view