This is War on Several Front

The war where real humans are killed for no good reason, and the war where the real opinions are killed for a very good reason.

Israel armed with internet savvy

The thermal imaging footage shot from an Israeli drone hovering over Gaza shows eight Palestinian militants loading rockets on to a lorry. Within seconds, the drone’s sights are locked on to the vehicle and it and the ghostlike figures nearby are incinerated in a missile blast.

Or so tens of thousands of visitors to the popular video-posting internet site YouTube have been led to believe. The clip was one of several dramatic scenes uploaded to the site by the Israeli army last week, the first time a national army has created its own YouTube channel.

A subsequent investigation by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem attracted less attention. It suggests the rockets were in fact gas canisters and that the supposed militants were civilians moving welding equipment after their workshop had been damaged in one of the hundreds of Israeli air strikes on Gaza over the past week.

But facts appear to have been the first casualty in a public relations war that is being conducted as vigorously by Israeli defence officials as the fight against Hamas.