The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and the Israeli government have possibly the most formidable public relations operations in the world.
They’re used to being criticised and are adept at getting on the front foot with their messaging, where other nations would simply flounder with mixed messages, and a lack of joined-up thinking.
In Israel, their spokespeople are always on message. They’re fighting a war every bit as important to the nation as their soldiers fighting on the frontlines.
We can’t see what the Israeli forces are doing with our own eyes, so we are dependent on a feed of pictures from the IDF.
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They’re heavily edited – the soldiers and locations pretty much unidentifiable. But they do give us a glimpse of what the invasion of Gaza looks like.
I write my stories clearly identifying the images from the IDF, and “purportedly showing” what their press office says it shows.
But Israel doesn’t have complete control of the information.
We have our own colleagues in Gaza sending us eyewitness information of developments there – but just as we aren’t with the IDF, they aren’t with Hamas.
And the Middle East info wars have a new player in the form of the Hamas PR machine.