“A pregnant woman in Southern Israel was found by Hamas terrorists. They dissected her body. Her stomach was cut open and they took the fetus out with the umbilical cord. And let the unborn child die slowly out of his mother’s womb. This is what inhuman savages Hamas do to people.”
Aditya Raj Kaul, the executive editor of TV9 Network, tweeted this on October 10. Seen in battle fatigues in his X (formerly Twitter) profile photo, Kaul has over 4 lakh followers on the platform. This tweet racked up over 32000 likes and more than 10 million views. Given the ghastly nature of violence ‘reported’ by Kaul, it was only expected. However, there’s a problem. If one goes through the comments under Kaul’s tweet, one would find several users expressing doubts over the veracity of Kaul’s claims. The tweet was flagged by Twitter’s community notes which stated that there was no proof of Hamas inflicting such violence upon an Israeli woman. The note pointed out that the said incident was similar to a report of the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian people by Israelis in 1982. Some accused Kaul of mirroring the violence inflicted on Kausar Banu during the 2002 Gujarat riots.
However, Kaul seemed quite nonchalant about the questions over the veracity of his ‘reporting’. “The context is given by Hamas terror supporters and not Twitter. Where does it say that if some crime has happened in 1992 it can’t happen again?”, he responded to a user, asking them not to become a supporter or spokesperson for Hamas. Kaul went on to assert that he didn’t need to present evidence of the incident because he had no obligation to “satisfy any politician.” In another tweet, he claimed that his friend Avishay, who is on-ground, had reported the incident to him. Avishay had also apparently shared photos with him but unfortunately, he couldn’t post the images.
It is practically impossible for journalists or fact-checkers to independently verify this sort of information amid a war that has seen such scale of violence as the present Israel-Hamas conflict. All that can be reasonably stated about this particular claim is that there isn’t enough evidence in the public domain to back it up. However, there is a tested appetite for such sensational claims which results in the type of traction that Kaul’s tweet got. We looked up the text from Kaul’s tweet on Twitter and found that over ten handles had used what is known as ‘copypasta’ – a tactic where a block of text is copied and pasted by several people to amplify a certain narrative. Upon looking up relevant keywords, we found hundreds of tweets with the same claim in November itself. None of them cared for the fact that the claim was unverified and unverifiable and that amplifying it essentially amounted to creating atrocity propaganda favouring Israel. What is more, those expressing their doubts were labelled by Kaul as supporters or spokespersons for Hamas.
Over the past one and a half months, Indian social media influencers who align themselves with the political Right have been on an overdrive sharing and amplifying pro-Israel propaganda on social media — misleading claims, unverifiable narratives, false quotes, old and unrelated photos and videos: misinformation and disinformation of almost every kind. This report will delve into the whos, the whys and the whats of this propaganda ecosystem.
This story was originally published in altnews.in. Read the full story here .
