Israel Damaged by False Media Reports

Israel suffered from two major incidents this week in which international news organizations reported things about the Jewish State which were later shown to be inaccurate. On Monday, Al Jazeera released a horde of what it described as “secret documents” from the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, claiming to reveal that the agency doesn’t believe the threat from Iran’s renegade nuclear program is as serious as it is being represented to be by Israeli government officials. The story was picked up and repeated by many news agencies around the world, but when the documents were actually examined, they revealed little new information and fell far short of the “smoking gun” revelations that had been hyped.

Also this week, an Al Jazeera report that Israel had flooded Palestinian communities in the Gaza Strip by “opening a dam” in a nearby river was picked up by AFP and other major news agencies and widely repeated before Israeli officials, who were not even asked to comment on the original story, pointed out that there are no dams or even any major waterways in the Western Negev region adjacent to the Strip and that the flooding experienced there this winter was an annual event due to increased rainfall and the failure of Hamas to build drainage infrastructure. Al Jazeera eventually retracted the story, but Israeli officials lamented that the damage had already been done.