Israel’s Military Begins Social Media Offensive as Bombs Fall on Gaza
By ROBERT MACKEY
Last Updated, 8:44 p.m. Almost as soon as the Israeli military began bombing Gaza on Wednesday, with residents of the Palestinian enclave documenting the strikes in real time on Twitter, the Israel Defense Forces initiated a social media campaign to defend its actions and goad its enemies.
As my colleagues Fares Akram and Isabel Kershner report, the Israelis “coupled the intensity of the airstrikes with the threat of another ground invasion and warnings to all Hamas leaders in Gaza to stay out of sight or risk the same fate as the Hamas military commander, Ahmed al-Jabari, who was killed in a pinpoint airstrike as he was traveling by car down a Gaza street.”
Those warnings were broadcast in a series of updates to the official @IDFSpokesperson Twitter account, along with links to YouTube video of the strike on the Hamas commander and a Facebook-ready poster with the word “eliminated” stamped over over his image.
Israel’s military also distributed images of Israeli civilians sheltering from Hamas rockets and links to its own live blog on Operation Pillar of Defense, and even made an effort to tap into the “Keep Calm and Carry On” meme, asking supporters to retweet a poster defending the offensive that was clearly designed to resemble the viral emblem of wartime Britain.
As the Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf reported, the military wing of Hamas was active on Twitter too, issuing threats, detailing its own strikes and even responding directly to the Israeli military’s warning from its @AlqassamBrigade account.
Mr. Sheizaf called the Twitter dialogue, “A window into the childish, murderous thinking of the leaderships of both sides.”
As the two sides used social networks to trade barbs and attempt to shape public opinion, bloggers and journalists in Gaza documented the impact of the shells on the population.
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Among those killed, the BBC foreign editor reported on Twitter, was the 11-month-old son of a BBC journalist in Gaza.
The blogger who writes as @RanaGaza described shelling from Israeli warships and posted audio of what she described as explosions and the sound of Israeli jets and drones overhead.
As the NPR journalist Andy Carvin noted, perhaps the most horrifying images of the day were in a video clip posted on YouTube that showed a man displaying the horribly burned, mangled body of a dead child at a sort of news conference. The graphic and deeply distressing video was posted online above a warning that read: “Watching this is not recommended for the faint-hearted. Zionist missiles of hate aim at the children of Gaza and pour their hatred upon them. Are you not ashamed of your humanity, which has become meaningless and illegitimate? Have you no shame, Arabs?”
The video was uploaded without any description of where it was recorded, but the location looks like the lobby of al-Shifa Hospital and the man holding the body appeared to be an official. (A Reuters photographer captured an image of a doctor who resembles a man at the official’s side in the video, also holding the small body of a dead child bearing similar burn marks. More video of the same awful scene, shot from a slightly different angle, was posted on YouTube by the Palestinian Al Aqsa TV channel.)
As the man held the body out for the television cameras to record, he said in clear, formal Arabic: “I submit to Europe and the secretary general of the United Nations and all the Arabs who have not contributed to the defense of Palestine, I submit this smiling child — a martyr — and I invite you to join the sorrow of her mother and father. This child has gone to God, who will protect her in death and who will protect your country and mine.”
Still bearing the small corpse, the man added: “The Palestinian people submit what none of us should have to submit and what no other people in the world would be able to submit. We see the true burning, the burning that happens in the year 2012. This is the burning, and not the burning of the Holocaust.”
