In Israel’s wars with its enemies, there has always been a built-in tension between public diplomacy needs and military considerations.
The diplomats want things to be exposed; the IDF wants to hold things back to not expose its intelligence-gathering methods or “burn” intelligence sources. The diplomats want the world to see; the IDF does not want them to see too much.
On Tuesday evening, soon after Hamas had blamed Israel for the bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, Hamas’s propaganda machine leaped into action and immediately circulated to the world that Israel had struck the hospital and killed hundreds.
Many in the mainstream media parroted Hamas’s line, and within minutes, it seemed that the whole battle for public opinion had been flipped on its head. Israel went from being the victim of an ISIS-style massacre to the perpetrator of a slaughter at a Gaza City hospital.
At a nightly recap of the day’s events, IDF Spokesman R.-Adm. Daniel Hagari, when asked about the report, said he would have to check.
In the meantime, the story continued to spread, triggering angry protests in the Arab world, including riots in front of the Israeli embassy in Amman.
Critics said Hagari should have denied the report on the spot to cast doubt on Hamas’s version. But that he waited until the incident could be checked gave Israel’s later denial more credibility.
Israel’s “case” was ironically helped by a real-time clip from the anti-Israel Al Jazeera network of the rocket launch, showing what appeared to be a rocket fired from Gaza reversing course and hitting the hospital.
Confirming the rocket was launched by Islamic Jihad
This was followed by senior Israeli officials saying that Islamic Jihad appeared to have fired the rocket, and many news outlets were forced to change their headlines. The story went from “Israel hits Gaza hospital, killing hundreds” to “Hamas, Israel blame each other for hospital explosion.”
President Isaac Herzog took the media to task for accepting Hamas’s version of events.
“An Islamic Jihad missile has killed many Palestinians at a Gazan hospital – Shame on the media who swallow the lies of Hamas and Islamic Jihad – broadcasting a 21st-century blood libel around the globe,” he posted on X.
But still more evidence was needed – not necessarily to convince those sitting at home, but rather those sitting in positions of power. Hagari provided part of that evidence in a press conference on Wednesday in which, in a dry and matter-of-fact manner, he presented some of the intelligence, including videos and a tape of a conversation between two Hamas terrorists admitting that the errant rocket had fallen short after being fired from a cemetery behind the hospital.
That the IDF was willing to release that recording shows the degree to which it understood that this event could have a profound impact on the waging of the war, and that releasing the raw intelligence material was worth the price of perhaps revealing intelligence methods.
And it seemed to have worked.
US President Joe Biden, during comments before he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, said: “I am deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday, and based on what I’ve seen, it appears that it was done by the other team and not you. But there are a lot of people out there who are not sure, so we have got to overcome a lot of things.”
There are some people “out there” who would not be convinced of Palestinian culpability if they were shown pieces of the rocket that hit the hospital that read, “Property of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”
But there are others for whom facts matter. And one way of, as Biden said, “overcoming those who are not sure” is by presenting the intelligence that proves the facts.
The IDF understood that this event could have strategic ramifications on Israel’s ability to wage this war, and this time it moved quickly to provide the evidence, overcoming an inherent institutional tendency not to reveal too much because of tactical considerations.