US won’t punish Israel for Rafah op that doesn’t protect civilians

Okay, this is Qatari state media, not a legitimate source of news. If you didn't know you could tell because if it was legitimate reporting they would seek and publish comment from the subjects of the story, and if it came from a single source, as this did, it would say that it hasn't been independently verified, or, instead of just making an horribly outrageous claim and leaving it at that, just not run it. I haven't run down one of these instant outrage stories in a while so just to make sure I'm not the one that getting tricked, here goes.

IDF's public comments as to these two innocent victims: that the IDF was engaging a Hamas target armed with a rocket launcher, "in the vicinity" of the church and that they they are investigating the claims about these two women, fully; this is after at first stating that they were unaware of military action in that location, which adds to the IDF's credibility, IMO. Okay, fine, maybe you don't find the IDF credible, that's reasonable given the statements and actions of individual Israeli's toward Palestinians at times; I don't think that's any way to judge the sum of democracy. I note that the ICJ's preliminary order found Israel continuing to prosecute its own citizens and soldiers for incitement to genocide and war crimes. I'm not sure if the Israeli military justice customs are more or less stringent than my own country's (US), but they exist and there's definitely people sitting Israeli military prisons right now because they were convicted of war crimes against Palestinians, which is wkthe polar opposite for I can say for Gaza, where the people in charge, Hamas, have an ideology in which war crimes are celebrated, intentional as a primary strategy, and not ever punished. Also, in my country, if you say nice things about either side, nobody is going to stone you to death as a collaborator, which is way more than I can say for Hamas.

Anyway, if you read this and other stories about this shooting the details are immediately and obviously sketchy. Articles say differently that the two people were walking into the church, that they were walking out of the church, that they were on their way to the church, that one was coming and one was going, one was coming and the other ran to help, or that they were both inside the church compound (this is what the church itself stated in its press release). That doesn't mean the reporting is not accurate, but it does mean the basic facts of the story are unknown. This is likely why certain more credible outlets did not run this story until the Pope mentioned the report, at which time they noted the facts could not be verified.

The stories all quote the church's press release that there was no warning and that's at least somewhat misleading and charged, as all of Gaza City has been under an evacuation order for months.

Also, it sounds like there were soldiers and a tank nearby. Perhaps people inside the church versus outside the church versus out on the street versus out on the nearby rooftops saw and heard things differently. It's also true that Hamas targets and kills its own people if they think they can blame the IDF. Snipers are usually pretty good shots, not really prone to shooting innocent people.

The stories uniformly cite as the source for the story a press release by the church, some of the more credible outlets, which included IDF's comments, say the circumstances or facts of the shooting could not be independently verified.

The press release seems to have been deleted from the church's website, as direct links shared by some outlets that ran the store are now broken, page not found. That doesn't make it untrue either, I suppose.

I don't know if this is a true story or not, but it's very obviously, at least to me, that it's more complicated than telling yourself "wow, the Israeli's have snipers just out there gunning down little girls and old ladies going to church," which is no way to treat yourself with news consumption. The story, including as written by Al Jazeera, has obvious red flags.

If Israel does investigate and does bring charges, credible outlets will report it. Qatar will not, Iran will not, Hamas will not, South Africa will make no mention of it to the ICJ, nobody in Gaza or any other far-right extreme Islamist state will ever know about it, Amnesty International will ignore it, and Russian trolls will make no posts about it, and that's how we got here.