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topicnews · September 8, 2024

Fake Hamas documents were leaked to the media to influence opinion about Israel

Fake Hamas documents were leaked to the media to influence opinion about Israel

An investigation by the Israeli military found that the terrorist organization Hamas leaked fake documents to foreign media that would negatively influence public opinion about Israel, according to a Sunday report by Ynet.

The aim of the investigation was to find out who manipulated secret Hamas documents that were seized in Gaza or that were only allegedly stolen from Hamas and passed them on to the international media in order to influence public opinion in Israel on the issue of the hostage-taking.

The results of the investigation have caused great concern and anger in Israel’s security apparatus, the report says, and will increase tension between the Israeli security apparatus and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has reached a new peak as a result of the deep disagreements between the parties surrounding the agreement.

Two articles published in recent days were part of the IDF investigation, one by The Jewish Chronicle and one from the German tabloid PictureBoth have claimed to have disclosed internal and top-secret Hamas documents that allegedly came directly from Yahya Sinwar’s computer.

In both cases, Sinwar’s strategy reflects exactly what Netanyahu claimed in his speech and in the interviews he gave last week: Ynet reported that the Hamas leader is trying to divide the Israeli public and is not really interested in the hostage deal. It was also stated that he plans to smuggle hostages through the tunnels under the Philadelphia Corridor to Egypt and from there to Iran. This became known during the interrogation of a captured Hamas official and from information from seized documents, Ynet reported.

Hamas terrorist leader Yahya Sinwar attends a rally in Gaza City last year. A Hamas document published in 2017 does not replace the Hamas charter; it simply offers a more pragmatic approach to destroying Israel. (Source: MOHAMMED SALEM/REUTERS)

With regard to the document containing the Jewish Chronicle claimed that an examination of all the materials collected since the beginning had shown that the Israeli intelligence service as a whole had no idea what was going on or who was involved.

An examination of the Picture The article revealed that it did not even belong to Sinwar, but was a proposal from a mid-level Hamas official. Ynet reported that the main part of the Bild article is that the newspaper allegedly quotes from the document saying that Hamas is not interested in the agreement – which it did not quote at all. The Israel Defense Forces said that the document in the Bild article is five months old.

“A very serious matter”

“This is a very serious matter,” Ynet quoted an Israeli official familiar with the investigation as saying: “There are systems in the Israeli army and other intelligence services whose task is to influence the ‘Reds’, that is, the enemy, but according to the law it is forbidden to try to operate such a system of influence, especially not with the help of secret materials that cannot be disseminated publicly at all.”

“This is an influence campaign on the ‘Blues’, the Israeli public. We are not involved in politics, but we are determined to find the person or party behind it.”

After Jewish Chronicle When reporter Elon Perry published the article claiming that Sinwar planned to smuggle the hostages to Iran, he used Israeli intelligence sources and claimed that one source told him the real reason Hamas could not release hostages was because only “20 of them were alive in Gaza, and many of them were handcuffed to Sinwar to act as human shields for him.” Ynet quoted him.

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However, Israeli security authorities doubt these figures. They assume that many more people are still alive and that the vast majority of them are at least not in the Hamas leader’s circle.



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