THE Israeli government is pumping out crude propaganda and fake stories to justify its wildly destructive war in Gaza — just as Britain and the US promoted fake tales to get the Iraq and Afghan wars going.

And just like the Iraq war, while some reporters have done a great job exposing this, a substantial and larger section of the press and TV news have actually transmitted the fake stories or even added to them.

Take the Israeli army (IDF) and its war on hospitals in Gaza. The IDF is systematically, surrounding, firing upon, invading and closing down Gaza’s hospitals and arresting key medical staff. It has made this shocking tactic seem normal with some pretty crass propaganda.

The IDF’s first major move against a hospital was a raid on Gaza City’s Al-Shifa in November. To make raiding a hospital look “normal,” the government made some fake stories that what might look like a hospital was secretly a kind of James Bond base of Hamas terrorists — treating sick people was just a cover for a terrorist HQ.

The first salvo in this propaganda war was comically crude. On November 11, the Israeli Ministry of Affairs official Arabic X account posted a video of a distressed nurse, saying Hamas had overrun Al-Shifa hospital and taken all the fuel and morphine. She claimed to be unable to treat a five-year-old with a fracture because of the Hamas morphine theft.

But the video looked staged, with unconvincing props, the nurse’s accent was wrong, and there was no evidence it was filmed in Al-Shifa. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs deleted the video after it received a day of mockery.

The significance of the “fake nurse video” is that if a government is found using a lie to promote a battle, then any subsequent “evidence” should be treated with great caution.

If the claim of a terrorist-run hospital is true, there is no need for forged evidence. However, while some journalists did a good job exposing this video — like France 24 who did enough work to confidently judge it fake — much of the media ignored it or just moved on.

So Israeli authorities moved onto another crude piece of propaganda, promoting an IDF “intelligence-based information video” released the previous month. This was a cartoon showing many underground passages, control rooms and Hamas fighters underneath Al-Shifa.

It was eerily like an old diagram of Osama Bin Laden’s James Bond-style HQ in the Tora Bora which was used to justify heavy bombing in the 2001 war on Afghanistan, and which also turned out to be untrue.

Alongside the fake nurse video, this cartoon evidence, with its echoes of fake “war on terror” stories, should send huge alarm signals. A CGI animation of a base isn’t really “intelligence” at all.

However, some papers — like the Telegraph — fully backed the IDF video. Others treated it neutrally. None were keen to try to expose the video as meaningless, not least because President Joe Biden backed up the claims.

On the eve of the assault on Al-Shifa the White House said: “We have information that confirms that Hamas is using that particular hospital for a command and control mode,” adding, “That is a war crime.”

After the IDF attacked and emptied Al-Shifa, the IDF showed the media one tunnel which led from one corner of the hospital to the outside world. The tunnel did not match its claim of a command base, but it was there.

This is a pattern in the Israeli government’s false tales: they are built on an element of truth. So, despite Israeli diplomats’ claims, Hamas did not “behead 40 babies” on October 7, but it certainly did murder around 36 children, including two babies.

Some of the press was clearly uncomfortable with the lack of substantial evidence for a Hamas base beneath Al-Shifa, but others kept banging the “underground base” drum.

Finally, in December, the Washington Post did a major investigation on Al-Shifa. It noted that the IDF claims “were remarkably specific” and that “five hospital buildings were directly involved in Hamas activities; that the buildings sat atop underground tunnels that were used by militants to direct rocket attacks and command fighters; and that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.”

But none of this was true. The tunnel in one corner of the hospital may indeed “point to a possible militant presence underneath the hospital at some point,” but it doesn’t match any of the elaborate claims.

Crucially, it spoke to many legal experts who pointed out that, while an active underground base might make an assault on a hospital a justifiable act of war, an abandoned tunnel in one corner was not good grounds for a hospital siege which killed many patients, including newborns.

Some papers still tried undermining the Washington Post story and hyped up the “Hamas base” angle. The New York Times splashed on a story on January 2 claiming: “Hamas Used Gaza Hospital as a Command Centre, US Intelligence Says.”

The Times insisted an anonymous US intelligence agent told them “the US government continued to believe that Hamas used the hospital complex and sites beneath it to exercise command and control activities, store weapons and hold ‘at least a few hostages.’”

However, it was forced to admit the “spy agencies provided no visual evidence” and that its assessment was partly “based on information collected by Israel.”

We also saw this during the 2003 Iraq war. Some papers tried their best to uncover fake propaganda tales behind the war. But others — the majority — not only uncritically reproduced government war propaganda, they also added their own untrue allegations about underground terrorist bases and WMD.

In some ways, the situation is worse now. In 2003, the left-leaning newspapers in Britain — the Mirror, Independent and Guardian — collectively tended to be sceptical of Iraq war propaganda. This doesn’t seem to be the case now.

The real-world effects are very serious. Since largely getting away with a propaganda battle for the takeover of Al-Shifa Hospital, the IDF hasn’t really felt the need to make much of an argument for subsequent attacks on hospitals.

Thanks to a few shonky stories, one abandoned tunnel and an often compliant press it has normalised the idea that armies can lay siege to hospitals, and that’s OK.