Hamas Media Training Program | How BBC & Mainstream Media Fall For Lies
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You know, if you were an innocent person in Gaza or in Israel, at 6:40 in the morning you hear red alerts going off, you know, you hear something happening, right? You may be feeling some tension in the air, but you don't know what's really going on unless you're involved. So at about 6:40 a.m. Ismail Abu Omar writes, "Our children will play with their heads. Hold on for a few minutes."

Hello and welcome to State of a Nation with me, Alon Levy. Listeners of this podcast will be aware that since October 7th, there have been two wars raging. There's the physical war in the battlefield and there is also an information war. And they are interlinked. They're interlinked because, as you know, Hamas designed the battlescape, designed the cityscape of Gaza for battle. It rigged it for battle.

Hamas dresses up as civilians, fights out of civilians' clothes in order to create negative headlines that will force Israel to back off and leave Hamas in power, free to plot another October 7th massacre. Both of those are interlinked. And what's crazy in this war is the way that journalists have been taken for a ride by Hamas, not realizing they're dealing with a genocidal jihadi death cult, treating it as a legitimate actor, running with the information that it is going with, and not

Uncovering, not uncovering the way that Hamas is deliberately operating in disguise, deliberately trying to violate the rules of international law to get the protections of international law. The fact that Hamas thinks that the whole world are suckers. You know what? I think Hamas are right. My guest today is not a sucker. He's one of the people trying to show up the suckers. Eitan Fischberger. When the war started, he had about 2,000 followers on Twitter. It's now soared to...

How many? 42? Over 42,000 followers on Twitter because you're doing something really special and providing incredible value, which is doing the work that journalists aren't doing. Simply looking through the open source information, OSINT, we'll talk about what that is in a little bit, and trying to find out, hang on, what is the evidence that is right there in plain sight?

about how Hamas is treating everyone as suckers, how Hamas is dressing up as civilians in order to try to tug on people's heartstrings. Eitan Fischberger, I know you from Twitter. Who are you? Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It's good to meet you. Good to meet the crew. I

I am an Israeli-American, been in Israel for about 20 years. I have a background in pro-Israel advocacy, working for a couple of great organizations like Camera and NGO Monitor, which everyone should follow their work, obviously. And since October 7th, I have been sort of moonlighting. I'm in tech, but I've been moonlighting as a OSINT analyst.

and I've basically just been sort of scouring the interweb looking for evidence of Hamas embedding itself in civilian infrastructure in schools and hospitals and the media apparatus in Gaza to try to sort of uncover the truth about what's going on in Gaza and some of the stories and the narratives that we see emanating from there and that's kind of what I've been up to and I've had some, thank God, minor successes and

That's what brings me here. Yeah, we'll talk about all those case studies in a moment. I want to find out and unpack in this episode the evidence you've uncovered of Hamas operatives moonlighting as journalists, moonlighting as doctors, really managing to play the world for fools. But we mentioned a word just now, OSINT.

For those who don't have an intelligence background, what is OSINT? So OSINT stands for open source intelligence, and it's sort of a catch-all term to just mean everything that's online. Everything that's online and is readily available that you don't need some sort of super secret hacking spyware software to find. It just means everything, any PDF file that's been uploaded, anyone's social media account, anything.

Really anything, anything online that you can just type into Google and find or on Facebook and find that's OSINT. OSINT is just information you can find on Google. It is information you can find on Google. And it's funny that they abbreviate it like OSINT, like it's some sort of super secret thing. It just means using a keyboard.

So it's so simple, which is part of my frustration, which maybe we'll also get to, is that it's so easy to identify a lot of the evidence that me and other amazing investigators have been uncovering that it begs the question, why isn't anyone else looking for it? Okay, so there are different types of intelligence. There's VISINT, which is visual intelligence, HUMINT, human intelligence, when you've got a mole inside a terrorist organization. There's SIGINT, which is signals intelligence. And what you're doing is literally...

just googling and trying to connect the pieces together and doing the detective work that you really think the media would be doing in treating the claims from a genocidal terrorist group with a pinch of salt and they don't always. The media has blind spots. Hamas exploits those blind spots and I wonder from the work that you've been doing, what do you think those blind spots are? What do most journalists just not get about the way that Hamas has

prepared this battle for media consumption? What are the blind spots? How is Hamas manipulating them? Give me a spiel. Sure, so I'll try to keep it brief. But basically, the West has a certain perception of what media is and what media is supposed to be, which is to provide information about what's going on, to clarify certain facts, and

They view it as sort of just like a normal, it's almost a narrow, almost naive view of what media is. And it's a view that I sympathize with as well because I like my media, media, right? Just give me the facts. Just facts, yeah, just give me the facts. I don't want your spiel, your spin, whatever. Just give me facts. But Hamas and other forces that are like Hamas, terrorist organizations, militant guerrilla organizations,

You know, they see it differently. They see it as part and parcel of the battlefield, right? The overall war that they're fighting. So, you know, they don't see it as just, you know, we're going to give you facts. They say, okay, well, we don't have the firepower to defeat Israel. That's what Hamas says. And they're right. And they know that. And they know that. And we know that they know that. Everyone knows that they know that.

But the thing is, OK, so then how do they mitigate that difference? How do they offset that lack of firepower that they have? They say, we're going to rig the media apparatus against everyone, against Israel. They say, we're going to concoct these certain narratives. We're going to doctor footage. We're going to set up and stage certain, you know, quote unquote war crimes that they'll invent out of thin air. And then, you know, those can be easily debunked. And they just they see it again. There's a lot to say about it, but make a long story short, they just see it differently than we do.

And they know, okay, well, if we can get the international media and international fora like the UN and the ICC to be sympathetic to our cause and view Israel as this malign actor on the world stage that's just committing genocide and war crimes, that'll make up... That'll, again, mitigate their... Yeah, that's right. I mean, the Israeli side also wants to get positive media coverage in order to... Everyone does. Everyone does. But there's something that's... There seems to be this blind spot that Hamas is exploiting that the way I look at it is...

I get the impression that many people are not only willing to believe the worst about Israel and the Jews, they want to believe the worst, and that's what Hamas is. They give them the permission structure to do it, you know? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, there's a reason that...

UNRWA will not provide the list of names of aid workers who have allegedly been killed by Israel. And that's because Israel can then run them against the database of known Hamas operatives and show how infiltrated it has become by terrorists. Or people on social media can go find their Facebook pages and see what's going on there. And the evidence is all in plain sight. Exactly. Okay, so I want to get into the case studies in a little bit, but what you are doing is sort of what you would expect

Israel, the state to be doing and the army. And often, you know, the IDF will say, we took out this Hamas operative who was moonlighting as a journalist.

And there's initial skepticism. And then it takes maybe 24 hours for you and the other sleuths to do some digging and expose the evidence. And by then, the story's already gone. And it must be incredibly frustrating that the IDF isn't producing this OSINT as part of the dossier that it puts out internationally to justify a strike in the first place, because then you're just doing damage control and it's too late.

Yes, it's very frustrating. So the way that I interpret why it happens the way that it happens is that the IDF and various intelligence agencies, they have capabilities that me with a keyboard doesn't have, right? I don't have the ability to hack emails and listen in on phone calls and I don't have you mint. We don't either. We don't either.

But, you know, because they have all these sophisticated abilities that are beyond what civilians have, they've kind of neglected the power of OSINT and what's online. Right. They don't understand. OK, well, we put out evidence and we say, here's a document that says that this journalist is actually a terrorist in the in the NUCBA force. Right.

People don't believe what the IDF says. What might help is if they had a picture from that journalist's Facebook page where he says, I love October 7th, and then here's a picture of me in a terrorist uniform. That might sort of help their case a little bit. But that's not what the IDF is putting out when it puts out the initial press release. Okay, well, should we dive into some case studies? By all means. Let's start with journalists. The Committee for the Protection of Journalists, really the CPJ, Committee for the Protection of Jihadists...

throws out a number, I don't even know what it is, about the number of journalists who've allegedly been killed in the war. And it turns out that according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, own lists!

A third of them are Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or Hezbollah. All you have to do, I know I do a little bit of OSINT myself, right? And I had to do Control-F. You go to the list, you do Control-F, Hamas, and you see how many of them work for Hamas-affiliated, Hamas-controlled, Al-Aqsa TV or whatever. I'm sorry. Which, by the way, some of them are designated as U.S. terror groups. Even specifically designated as specific terrorist groups. I'm sorry. You cannot take a salary from a terrorist group and be a journalist at the same time. Anyone who...

who claims that someone who works for Hamas TV is a journalist, is doing an immense disservice to real journalists and putting real journalists in danger by conflating them with terrorism. And I think it's completely unacceptable and an insult to my friends in the media. But,

But that's even before we get onto the question of those, one third of the journalists who've been killed have formal, are formally working and taking a paycheck from Hamas, Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah media. That's even before we get onto others who have some other more murky ties or are literally just moonlighting as journalists.

as journalists. So, spoiler alert, we're going to talk about some of the Hamas operatives who've been moonlighting as journalists and think that wearing a press vest gets them some immunity. But let's look first of all at some of the murkier connections. Hamas runs media training workshops for journalists. Do I get that right? Yes, sir. So basically the story is that... Give me the scoop. What's the scoop? Give me the tea. So the scoop is that

Hamas has the Ministry of Information, and within the Ministry of Information... That's so Orwellian. Right? So within the Ministry of Information, they have these media training workshops where all the various journalists in Gaza, some that also work for established, you know, very, very ostensibly reputable media institutions like Reuters, the AP, CNN, and whatnot, they have them teaching courses to people, to, you know, aspiring journalists in Gaza, but through the Ministry of Information, right? Which isn't like you're going on...

What's that course, the website you can do courses on? I don't know. There's a website that you can do courses on. You can just sign up to a free online thing. It's not like that. If you're getting a media training course from a terrorist organization, that's not the same as just going online, right? And this is another blind spot, right? The way that Hamas is treated as just a random terrorist group rather than the government of Gaza. It is the regime in Gaza.

Exactly. You know, you use the word murky before. So there are this murky line between like the governing entity, but also a terror group. Right. So they're kind of trying to play both sides. But, you know, with this media training department and you guys can all Google it and you can, you know, find... You can do some OSINT yourselves. Exactly. You know...

Some of these, like one week they'll have an instructor who is a journalist for CNN or Reuters or the AP. And the next week they'll have the head of the media department of Islamic Jihad giving a course. So that guy is not a journalist and he's teaching journalists how to do journalism.

That's wild. And so then when people say, well, you know, how does Hamas really dominate the media apparatus and the journalist apparatus in Gaza, you know, or is it just sort of like an Israeli Hasbara talking point? Yeah, they train the journalists. They have their ministry of information. The IDF has uncovered documents showing open collusion between, let's say, Al Jazeera and Hamas, where Hamas says you can't cover certain developments in the strip of

certain way. And then Al Jazeera gets the scoop on the hostage release parades and somehow gets exclusive rights. Or the exclusive footage of Yaya Sinwar, you know, rummaging through the tunnel. How did they get that? What did Al Jazeera have to do to get exclusive footage from Hamas? It's almost as if Al Jazeera and Hamas were both Qatari assets. This media training, what

What are they training them in? So there's no footage. So OSINT does have its limitations, right? So if the footage isn't online, then the footage isn't online. So I didn't get my hands on what exactly was being taught there. But again, if the Islamic Jihad spokesperson is giving you a course in media...

You can imagine that he's not teaching you like the ethics of fact checking and, you know, you know, verifying sources and, you know, showing both sides and being unbiased. And we have the names of the Gazan journalists who have been through Islamic Jihad training courses.

No, unfortunately not. We just know that these courses are taking place. Yeah, you know, they have a Facebook page. This was actually an expose by Honest Reporting, so hats off to them. They found, you know, this Facebook page of the courses. It's a Facebook page that just goes through all the courses. You see faces, you see, you know, random names that we couldn't, you know, figure out. So Hamas is actually running training programs for journalists. Exactly. And I think...

anyone who has been through a professional training course by a terrorist regime

not a journalist to the extent they're implementing any of the lessons that they've learned there. But it gets worse than that because it's not just media training that they've done by Hamas. There are Al Jazeera journalists who are also affiliated with Hamas, some actually Hamas members. So I've got a list here. I mean, run me through some of the, run me through some of what you've been able to rummage. We have a chap called Ismail Abu Omar. Oh, sure. The IDF,

confirmed that he was a deputy company commander in Hamas. Let me be skeptical and say the IDF claimed he was a company deputy company commander in Hamas while being... Is this Ismail Abu Omar or Al Ghul? Ismail Abu Omar. The IDF claims he was a deputy company commander in Hamas, but what evidence do we have to back that up? Sure. So basically what we have is various social media posts of him, you know,

October 7th. We have him, you know, photographed with Ismael Ania, Yaya Sinwar. I have specific quotes from this guy, which I can pull up right here.

Okay. On October 7th, he wrote, this is at like 6.35 in the morning. So before anyone knew what was going on, he somehow knew- What time? Sorry? What time? 6.35, 6.40 in the morning. So right when everything was happening. So if you were an innocent person in Gaza or in Israel at 6.40 in the morning, you hear red alerts going off, you hear something happening, right? You may be

feeling some tension in the air, but you don't know what's really going on unless you're involved. So at about 6.40 a.m., Ismail Abu Omar writes, our children will play with their heads. Hold on for a few minutes. Okay? He has posted footage of himself invading Israel on October 7th, him crying tears of joy, him praising the taking of hostages, and

You know, this is not someone who's engaging in... This is not journalism. When the IDF says he was a deputy company commander, none of this OSINT that you are uncovering directly supports that claim, but it's circumstantial evidence that... Certainly the claim that he was a deputy company commander is not outrageous at all. I mean, for this guy, it would sound like a promotion. Yeah, I mean, it's contemporaneous evidence, right? So in other words, if the IDF says something and then they...

unfortunately on some occasions don't provide the evidence to back it up and international media is skeptical which they have every right to be and they should be

It doesn't explain to me, and I think some other observers, why they don't entertain or they often don't entertain the additional open source evidence that is then provided. And at minimum, what you can say from the open source information is this man was a terrorist sympathizer supporter of October 7th, and therefore all of his coverage should be understood through that lens. Exactly. But they don't even give that disclaimer, right? So even if they want to say, OK, well, we don't think this guy is a terrorist. We don't think there's enough evidence.

But they don't even mention the fact that, like, okay, well, he invaded Israel on October 7th. He, again, was crying tears of joy. That's not something that, you know, an unbiased, neutral observer would do. Sure. What about this chap, Anas al-Sharif? The IDF identified him as a Hamas rocket squad commander in the Nusayrat battalion. Sure. So that's a good one. Early on the morning of October 7th,

He posted, no, sorry, this is the afternoon of October 7th. He posted, nine hours and the heroes, referring to the Kassan Brigades terrorists who were massacring Israeli civilians, nine hours and the heroes are still roaming the country, killing and capturing. God, God, how great you are. And there's loads more evidence where that came from. But, you know, this is just, this is, again, this is not a journalist. Yeah.

Yeah, but it seems like extremely sloppy. Like if it's the Hamas rocket commander, why are you being so sloppy in trying to glorify terrorism instead of covering up the link, you would think? I just think that they've grown accustomed to international media not, you know, asking the right questions or not trying to verify the facts themselves.

And so they think they can get away with it. And by the way, they've gotten away with it. What about this chap, Hossam Al-Shabbat, who was taken out in an IDF airstrike recently, attracting a lot of global attention because he was a prominent figure, especially since several months before the IDF had already made the allegation that he was in fact a Hamas terrorist.

What did you find that wasn't in the original dossier that the army puts out to show these terrorist connections? Sure. So again, same story. He promoted lots of glorification of October 7th. A lot of these posts I can't read on the podcast, I think.

There's pictures of him with Hamas leaders. He started his Telegram channel at 6.32 on the morning of October 7th. Oh, come on. Right, so it's very on the nose, right? So all of a sudden, some guy who has virtually no media footprint, you can't find anything on this guy, the morning of October 7th, at 6.30 in the morning, he starts a Telegram channel? What a coincidence, right? It's all very meticulously planned out. And again, they just figured they can get away with it because they have.

Right. Of course, saying he publicly glorified October 7th doesn't mean that it was a Hamas operative because, hey, Moskos and supported October 7th. But it does give more credence to the IDF's allegations. It certainly means the IDF allegation that these are Hamas is not crazy. And, you know, I get the point, something we would say very often in media interviews at the beginning of the war that, you know, if these journalists are not, these journalists are either Hamas or they are

cowed by Hamas. Like, either they are Hamas, they're sympathetic to Hamas, or they're cowed by Hamas because they're not free to report. And unfortunately, many of these journalists are more than sympathetic. There is this evidence that they have really been moonlighting. One such chap, Mohamed Ouisha, an Al Jazeera journalist, but turns out he was also a Hamas weapons specialist. What did you dig up? Exactly. So this is, to me, one of the most...

you know, damning instances because the IDF put out its claim. And for the one of this is one of the few times where the IDF actually provided really good evidence. They provided photos of him with members of the Kassan Brigades and he himself wearing military uniform operating an RPG launcher. It looks like he's teaching someone how to use the RPG. Maybe it was a Purim costume. Maybe it was a Purim costume. Maybe not. But you know who would be able to try to find out the international media.

So in addition to that, I figured, okay, well, what more can I add to that? Because that's pretty damning, right? But I did find him, you know, pictures on his Facebook of him hugging Yaya Sinwar, Anis Melhania, posting photos of children wearing Kassam Brigade's costumes, also maybe on Perm, I don't know, holding weapons and glorifying that. You know, this is...

And what happened was, is that when the IDF put out, it's very good evidence in this case. And then me and a couple of other really talented investigators put out their supporting evidence. There was no follow up. There was no like, oh, you know, maybe the IDF was right on this one. There was none of that. And yet we have more and more and more. Hassan Asli eliminated just a couple of, just a short while ago, was one of the October 7th

I mean, one of the journalists was embedded, right? Except it's not really a regular embed. What was he up to on October 7th? He, just like some of the other guys that we mentioned, was busy invading Israel on October 7th. Again, posting footage from there saying, you know, God is great. This is amazing. Wow. Just really having a blast. Literally. Literally. Literally.

There's the infamous photo of Hamas leader Yair Sanwar giving him a nice big old kiss on the face. Right, and the IDF, the IDF, gross. The IDF confirms he was, you know, a member of Hamas Khan Yunus 3rd Battalion Media Platoon. I mean, he was like the equivalent of what, Dovazal, the IDF spokespersons or like some sort of

propaganda unit at the same time? Like, he's in Hamas, but he's moonlighting as a journalist. Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of what I said before in the sense that the West has a very narrow view of what media is. So even within the spokesperson's division, so, you know, what do the spokesperson's unit do in the IDF? They provide facts. They try to provide the evidence in an accessible way to various audiences. That's not what...

Hamas is doing. That's not what this guy, Hassan, was doing when he invaded on October 7th. That's not trying to bring the facts, right? That's terrorism. That's invading a sovereign country. That's laughing it up when, you know, civilians are being slaughtered. I found in addition to that, again, not that this is sort of like, you know, this isn't a reason that, you know, he should be eliminated by the IDF, but again, it's supporting evidence. I found that... Circumstantial. Circumstantial. Back a few years ago, he...

He posted on... I'm laughing because it's so morbid. He posted, it started with running over and now with stabbing over stab, stabbed, bruised, bruised. The reasons are many, but the goal is one, killing the Jews. So that's not journalism. No. What?

Well, it's Sky News. It's Hamas journalism. No, it's Hamas journalism. No, these are Hamas content creators. And it gets worse and worse. I mean, there was the Abdallah al-Jamal, the contributor to the Palestine Chronicle on Al Jazeera, who held three Israeli hostages at his home. I can't remember whether he was even on the Committee for the Protection of Journalists list. He wasn't, but he was on some other ones. He was on some other ones, right. I think even for them, the evidence there was so, so overwhelming. And I wonder, why do you think that

Why do you think that journalists in the legacy media don't take this seriously? Why do they not want to uncover the story of how Hamas is infiltrated and dominates Gaza's media landscape? Is it because they've basically made this

packed with the devil, this omata that in exchange for silence about the quality of the information they're getting from Gaza, they have access, they have sources, they have images from a conflict that's grabbing global attention. Is that just the dark underbelly of how the media works? Look, I mean, your guess is as good as mine. Sure, but you spent time thinking about this as well. Yeah, so this is one of the things that frustrates me the most because I'm not a journalist, but I have a lot of respect for the profession of journalism. And

It's upsetting to me that more of these organizations like CPJ... Committee for the Protection of Jihadists. Exactly. Why are they not more upset? These Hamas journalists are besmirching the integrity of their profession that they should care so deeply about, and they literally, it seems like, don't care. In terms of why they allow this to happen and why they don't call it out, I think...

My guess would be that it implicates them because it's just sort of a tacit admission on their part or a not so tacit admission that they've been duped. They have been completely bamboozled, right? Like they've been working with these guys for years. They use them as stringers. They have relationships with them. And then it turns out, oh, wait, these guys are terrorists. That is very, that does not reflect positively. Right, because you're saying for the journalists to admit that

their counterparts or their colleagues or their clients. Look, I mean, it would be easy to say, oh, anti-Semitism, but it's just, it's such... Oh, there's a professional reason here as well, which is that it exposes them. It exposes them. And then you end up with this weird duality where they say the IDF must let international journalists into Gaza to independently report. And you go, but hang on, you have journalists in Gaza. Yeah.

No, no, no, no, no. But these need to be international journalists. Well, hang on. The journalists you have in Gaza, are they free and independent or are they not free and independent? Exactly. If the journalists you have in Gaza are free and independent, then there's no rush to let international journalists into Gaza. You don't need a white guy if you've got a Palestinian guy. And by the way, I think that they, you know, I'm sort of torn about this, but I think they might have a point. Like, let the journalists into Gaza. I mean, the fact is that Hamas will obviously stage incidents and manipulate footage and do all these things to try to, you know, hoodwink these international journalists. Right.

There is a case to be made. Israel's argument at the time, I mean, it came up in the Supreme Court. I'm personally also divided about the question of whether we should let the international media in. But what the Supreme Court said at the time, they accepted the state's argument that it could expose IDF troop movements. And it wouldn't just endanger the IDF, it endangers journalists. I mean, any real war correspondent knows there is no such thing as free and unfettered access to a war zone. When there is a shootout in a neighborhood, you are embedded...

with one of the sides. You don't just stand in the middle of the street while snipers are firing over your head trying to get the best shot. There is no free unfettered access in the war zone and the whole place is a war zone. But again, it's not just journalists. We have a problem with hospitals as well. Hamas, a line I've been saying since the beginning of the war, terrorists don't get immunity just because they hide in the basement of a hospital. Hamas,

hides in hospitals it tries to exploit their humanitarian protections to gain the protections of international law even though by hiding in a hospital you're stripping the hospitals of their humanitarian protections you are making them potentially legitimate they care more about the propaganda and the narrative than they do about protecting the people but it's but it's not just it's not just the hiding hamas terrorists hiding in hospitals sometimes they hide in

white doctors gowns as well. There was a case a while ago of the... Hossam Abu Safia. He was the director of which hospital? Kamala Dwan Hospital. Kamala Dwan Hospital. Again, huge international attention. There was a movement of doctors. We are all Hossam Abu Safia. This is outrageous. Why has the IDF arrested...

the doctor, the director of a hospital. And, you know, just imagine if Hamas had, you know, taken the director of a Shiba hospital, not Shifa hospital, right? In Israel, it would indeed be outrageous, except Husam Abu Safiyyah, and this isn't information the army put out, it's the information that, you know,

People sitting in their basement with an internet connection. It's not my basement. It's not the basement. You're not sitting there with a tinfoil in your basement. Not yet. People sitting at home with a decent internet connection are able to work out. Osama bin Safi'i was not just a hospital director. He was, in fact, a colonel in Hamas. Okay, give me the case file. Sure. So when the headlines started breaking that the IDF is committing massacre upon massacre in Kamala Dewan Hospital, obviously, you know,

I know that that's not how the IDF operates, and I wanted to get to the bottom of where this narrative and this propaganda is coming from. So I started to look into who's running the hospital. So they're all talking about this director, Husam Abu Safia. He's amazing. He's a hero. Everyone in Gaza loves him. I

I looked into him and it turns out that he is in fact a colonel at this hospital. Sorry, a colonel in the Hamas military medical core, whatever they call it. He has been a veteran of the Hamas medical infrastructure for decades.

Obviously then on October 7th and before October 7th, he's posted tons of pictures on his Facebook page. The same old story, right? Of terrorists killing Jews and boasting and praising and glorifying people in the Kassan Brigades and terrorists. And then I found out something else, which is that the entire media apparatus was referring to it as Kamala Dwan Hospital. But in fact...

If you look at the Arabic media, they refer to, and by the way, and Hamas itself on their own websites, they refer to it as the Kamal Adwan Military Medical Complex. So it is a military hospital, which makes sense, right? The IDF arrests the director of a Hamas military hospital and Canadian doctors are getting themselves in a tizzy.

And by the way, it's also, you know, the IDF has found scores of weapons and ammunition and grenades and firearms. Jeremy Bowen says there isn't a hospital in the Middle East that doesn't have Kalashnikovs. So they found it in the hospital, you know,

This may be Kamal Adwan Hospital or maybe a different hospital. I don't even remember at this point, but there was a Kurdish doctor last year who volunteered. I think it was Kamal Adwan, but someone will fact check me. And he said in an interview with Kurdish media, yeah, you know, the IDF is doing horrible things, but also Hamas is in the hospital.

And he says, Hamas is in the hospital. You couldn't walk five steps without running into Hamas. Like, they're there. Because it's a military hospital. Because it's a military hospital. So, of course, they're there. Right? So, that was one example. So, Husam Abu Safiyah is not the saint that they paint him to be. It is not just a hospital. It is a military hospital. And there's more hospital directors where that came from. Which is really extraordinary. Eitan, you...

We've been dealing with this problem for nearly two years now since the... I mean, look, it's old. It's an old problem of Hamas embedding itself in Gaza's civilian landscape, deliberately endangering civilians for the propaganda win. Managing to take people for a ride, passing off Hamas content creators as being journalists, passing off Hamas colonels as being hospital directors. I mean, it's almost boring. It's really almost boring, right?

how standard this is and therefore so frustrating that no one in the legacy media takes this seriously. And I wonder, do you see any prospects for that beginning to change? Do you think that maybe there's something that Israel can be doing to push journalists to understand how deeply Hamas has infiltrated Gaza's society and landscape and stop pretending that Hamas is some

You've got Hamas, this terrorist organization that can be separated from the rest of Gaza. And understand how, as the regime, the jihadi regime for 17 years, it is completely... It's got its fingers in all the pies, though. Obviously, the IDF, in my opinion, should do a better job at providing some of the supporting evidence that me and other investigators have been finding. Does it make a difference, though? Does anyone care? I think...

People in the middle do care. I think people in the middle do care. But the journalists who need to communicate it. The journalists, I'm not sure they care.

I'd love to be proven wrong. I'm a pessimist to some of these things, which means that unfortunately I'm always right eventually. But, you know, I'm not sure the media's mind can be changed. I think if something were to change, it would have to be sort of a gradual cultural shift and a cultural understanding of how these forces are using the media, how Hamas uses the media. I'm not sure it's as simple as like if we provide enough evidence, then, you know,

Right, it's not that one more piece of evidence, another piece of evidence. It's a paradigm shift in the understanding of how Hamas operates. And I'm glad we have people like you, sleuths, who are putting together the information because...

the democratization of information on social media has its pluses and minuses and on balance, a lot of minuses because anyone can make up anything online and it will go viral, especially if it sounds true and happens to be about Israel. Um, but there are a few voices like you, Salah Eisenberg, we've had on the podcast as well, who is, who is outstanding. Um, Andrew Fox as well, who's also been on this podcast. You can look through the back episodes and watch the episodes with, uh,

with Andrew and with Salo Eisenberg. Sleuths who are doing this information, piecing things together and doing what, I mean, I have certainly learned a lot from you, Salo, and other figures who are doing the hard work the media should be doing.

So first of all, thank you. Sure. Thank you for your service to the truth. I appreciate it. And enriching our understanding of this fiendishly difficult battlefield that is fiendishly difficult, not only the physical battlefield, but a fiendishly difficult information battlefield that Hamas has so deftly manipulated. And I'll say, Kol HaKavod.

kudos thank you props no to you to hamas as well for so so so so elegantly manipulating the international media but for you for doing such a fine job um of uncovering it etan fish burger where can people follow you and your work uh they can follow me at etan fish burger on twitter slash x that burger with a neo burger with a u f i s c h b e r g e r okay what's your what's your twitter

It's E. Fishburger. Okay, well, let's get that from 42,000 to 42,000. And however many tens of thousands of people are watching this episode. E. Ten Fishburger, good to have you in the studio. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

And that brings us to the end of this episode of State of a Nation. As always, if you are enjoying this podcast, then please share a link with a friend. Give us a good review. It really does help us. And subscribe on whatever platform you are watching us from. Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you're watching. We really do appreciate it. And follow us on social media. State of a Pod on Twitter and on Facebook.

Instagram as well. We cut these episodes into reels as well. Short, bite-sized chunks that you can share with people who don't have the patience for a full 45-minute, one-hour podcast. I'm Elon Levy, and thanks for joining us.