London/PNN/Roddy Keenan - With the latest murder of five journalists by Israeli forces at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis closely following the execution of four Al Jazeera correspondents in Gaza a fortnight before, more than 270 journalists and media workers have now been killed by Israeli forces since October 7th, 2023.The latest spate of murders signals an intensification in Israel’s targeting of Palestinian media staff and appears to be an effort to establish a media blackout as the IDF escalates its murderous assault on Gaza City.Following their attack on the four AlJazeera journalists, the Israelis had claimed that one of them, Anas al-Sharif, was a Hamas commander, and openly boasted about their killing of the Palestinian journalist. In recent months, the Israelis had stepped up their threats against al-Sharif, leading the Committee for the Protection of Journalists to call for the international community to protect al-Sharif only three weeks prior to his murder.On Sunday, August 10th, the Israelis carried out their promise and executed the journalist along with three colleagues. In reporting al-Sharif’s death, numerous western media organisations shamefully gave credence to the Israeli lies, taking the Zionist talking points and framing their reports accordingly.But the disinformation surrounding the Al Jazeera correspondent’s death was not the first example of mendacious Israeli efforts to distort and distract in relation to atrocities they have committed.Indeed, the leading Israeli news organisation, +972 Magazine, recently revealed that in the days following October 7th, the Israeli military established a special unit called the ‘Legitimization Cell’ whose purpose was to focus on propaganda and to cultivate a positive image of Israel in the international media.The cell has responsibility for finding any intelligence that can be employed publicly to counter criticism of Israel for the latter’s war crimes.‘The key task of the Legitimization Cell is to undermine the work done by Palestinian journalists and provide the excuse to kill them,’ said political scientist and author Ahron Bregman.The links Israel establishes between Palestinian journalists and Hamas are often weak, but in Israel’s Hasbara war, it is good enough to justify their killing,' Bregman explained.In Anas al-Sharif’s case, the ‘unequivocal proof’ offered by the Israelis was a photograph of him with Hamas' late leader Yahya Sinwar, and a screenshot of a supposed Telegram message, which was subsequently found to have been fabricated.Similarly, after Israel murdered journalist Ismail al-Ghoul in July 2024, the Israelis claimed to have proof that al-Ghoul was also a Hamas operative. Unfortunately, the documentation they provided listed al-Ghoul as receiving his Hamas rank in 2007 when he was just ten years old.Moreover, in March 2024, the IDF had released al-Ghoul after detaining him during the army’s raid on Al-Shifa hospital, a move which Al Jazeera said disproved the IDF’s ‘false claim of his affiliation with any organization.’In 2024, Forbidden Stories, an international network of journalists, investigated the killing of nearly a hundred Palestinian reporters by the Israeli army in Gaza."The Israeli army participates in disinformation around journalists to suggest that all journalists operating in Gaza are Hamas agents," Executive Director Laurent Richard told Radio France. ‘It usually starts with rumours and articles on sites close to the Israeli government, claiming a particular journalist is in fact a terrorist. Then, weeks or months later, that journalist is targeted by a drone,’ Richard explained.One of the Legitimization Cell’s earliest tasks was to look for information that Israel could use in order to claim that Hamas was using schools and hospitals for military purposes.Subsequently, it’s first major disinformation operation related to the Al-Ahli Arab hospital massacre on October 17th when 471 Palestinians were killed and 342 injured. The day after the explosion, the IDF released a recording of a conversation that the ‘Legitimization Cell’ claimed to have intercepted between two Hamas operatives blaming the incident on an Islamic Jihad misfire.When many media organisations took up the false claim, including Human Rights Watch, the Washington Post, the BBC, and AP, the Cell’s operation was deemed a major successHowever, this characterisation of events was to prove entirely false. Firstly, a Palestinian human rights activist told Israeli news organisation that he was shocked to hear his own voice in the recording, which he said was simply a conversation with another Palestinian friend. He insisted he had never been a Hamas member.But even more significantly, an investigation by London based Forensic Architecture (FA) established Israeli ‘misfire’ claims as untrue. According to their analysis, the missile was launched from outside Gaza, near to a known Israeli launch site that is part of its ‘Iron Dome’ air defence system. FA’s analysis led them to believe that a guided Israeli interceptor rather than a Palestinian rocket was responsible for the massacre.But the fact that the Israeli talking points had been swallowed and regurgitated whole by many western news organisations rendered the truth now irrelevant.As far back as 1984, Ehud Olmert, who would later become Israeli Prime Minister, explained that ‘the aim of Hasbara should be more modest, namely, to make the world reconsider its position — to raise doubts, to alter the approach taken toward our adversaries.’And that is precisely the point of units such as the Legitimization Cell. Their function is not necessarily to convince. To sow seeds of uncertainty is sufficient.For the waters have been muddied. Doubts have been created in people’s minds. And very soon, the world will simply forget and move on.In Israeli eyes, job done.Until the next atrocity, of course.ENDS