The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have emphatically rejected claims by Al Jazeera that Israeli troops carried out a massacre of Palestinian civilians inside a school.
The story has been circulated by antisemitic groups as evidence of Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
Al Jazeera, which is funded by the Qatari government, claimed this week that Israeli forces attacked the Shadia Abu Ghazala school in northern Gaza, and that bodies were later found that had been “killed execution-style” by the IDF, including children.
The IDF responded Thursday to a query by Breitbart News:
The claims made in the article on Al Jazeera are deceitful, biased, and lack any truth or foundation. After allowing the evacuation of the Gazan population, the IDF forces operated within the area of the school, where they found a significant amount of ammunition and weapons – and even encountered armed terrorists who were using civilian infrastructure and the population as human shields.
Any allegation of deliberate harm to civilians is devoid of any basis.
Hamas has repeatedly used schools and hospitals, and grounds nearby, to launch attacks — both rocket attacks against Israeli civilians, and attacks against IDF forces in Gaza.
Al Jazeera has been accused of functioning as a Hamas propaganda outlet, amplifying false claims of atrocities against Palestinian civilians for which Palestinian terrorists were themselves responsible, such as an errant rocket that hit a hospital early in the war.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.