“AP’s bureau has been in this building for 15 years. We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building. This is something we actively check to the best of our ability.”
I believe they are lying and absolutely knew Hamas was in the building.
The words “to the best of our ability” are a clue as to their lie.
Former @AP reporter Matti Friedman wrote this all the way back in 2014:
“The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—
and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it.
Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying.
Colford, the AP spokesman, confirmed
that armed militants entered the AP’s Gaza office in the early days of the war to complain about a photo showing the location of a rocket launch, though he said that Hamas claimed that the men ‘did not represent the group.’”
The AP “does not report many interactions with militias, armies, thugs or governments,” he wrote. “These incidents are part of the challenge of getting out the news—and not themselves news.’”
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“In late October 2003, when I got to see the original raw footage that a Palestinian cameraman had shot three years earlier at Netzarim Junction on Sept. 30, 2000.
It was a peek through the lens of Talal Abu Rahma, the Palestinian cameraman who had filmed what journalists later depicted as a day of riots that killed many in the Gaza Strip, including the 12-year-old boy, Muhammad al Durah.
Hamas is no match for the IDF and could be quickly and much more cheaply defeated by blunt and crushing military force were it not for one thing — the Israeli need to minimise loss of civilian life. Hamas know that. gatestoneinstitute.org/17372/turning-…
▪Over many years of conflict in Gaza, the majority of the world's media have enthusiastically reported the deaths of Palestinian civilians as though they were the deliberate object of Israel's callous and uncaring way of war.
This blatantly false propaganda has been taken up by Hamas supporters and "useful idiots" in the West.... Human rights groups around the world have been doing the same.
▪The wilful ignorance combined with malice has always been breathtaking.
But because Israel knew that civilians would be inside the buildings, the IDF and Shin Bet created a new operational doctrine. Before attacking, it would take the extra precaution of contacting the building owner or occupant.
The callers had a standard text they read in Arabic that went something like this: “How are you? Is everything okay? This is the Israeli military. We need to bomb your home and we are making every effort to minimize casualties.”
The military launched strikes against “Phase B,” Hamas’s Metro tunnel under north western and central Gaza with tens of planes and some 100 precision munitions.
According to IDF Spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Hidai Zilberman, Hamas spent tens of millions of dollars on constructing this strategic asset.
“... Hamas has been fully and foolishly assisted by the anti-Israel obsessives of the West.
Westerners’ hyper-moralisation of the current tensions, their depiction of the conflict as a black-and-white story of Evil Israel vs the plucky defenders of the Arabs of East Jerusalem, has enormously benefitted Hamas in its intra-Palestinian conflict of legitimacy with Fatah.