Images of injured and dead people, supposedly Gazan victims of Israeli aggression, have been exposed as fakes, as Hamas continues to manipulate a susceptible media.

FoxNews.com on Tuesday reported on solid evidence that Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas, together with Islamic Jihad, have not only been using civilians as human shields, deliberately putting them in danger, but have choreographed several seemingly gory scenes, as well as passed off images from other conflicts as Gazan civilians supposedly killed by Israel.

“In an attempt to persuade the world that Israel is committing war crimes and to distract attention away from the illegal and immoral use of their own population as human shields, Hamas has resorted to staging a number of fake deaths and scenes of severely injured people right in front of international tv crews,” FoxNews.com reports.

The bbc, for example, recently broadcast a video clip in which a man was carried off by four others, supposedly badly injured from an Israeli missile strike. A little later in the video, however, the same man reappeared, walking around completely uninjured. In another incident, a bbc correspondent re-tweeted a picture of a dead girl in Gaza—who, in fact, was killed in Syria three weeks earlier.

Paul Hirschson, spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, believes Hamas’s motive is to incite public opinion in the Arab world, so those populations in turn will put pressure on their governments to support Hamas.

Though Western media for the most part refuse to expose them, these tactics are not new for Hamas.

Hamas leaders are well aware of how to use the media to manipulate global opinion against Israel. Hamas has already been proven to stage events and concoct stories to gain pr advantage. Back in 2006, for example, it fabricated a story accusing Israel of killing innocent Palestinian civilians. Headlines around the world picked up on Hamas’s version of the story, yet further investigation ruled out Israeli involvement in the attack and instead pointed to evidence of Hamas responsibility.

During Israel’s last war with Hamas, the terrorist group aimed to cause as many civilian casualties as it could by firing rockets and taking cover behind human shields, often in densely populated places like schools and hospitals. Instead of outrage in the international arena being directed against Hamas, it was directed at Israel.

As we wrote back then,

It’s a simple strategy: Surround yourself with old men, young children and pregnant women; set up a launcher; fire a rocket into Israel; then hope and pray Israel retaliates by bombing the site from where the rocket was launched. After that, the bbc and its mainstream media counterparts will complete the strategy, spreading images of the dead Palestinians around the world, inciting the Muslim street and duping the Western world into lambasting Israel for its “war crimes” against “innocent” Gazan civilians.

Though the truth later came out, it didn’t receive the media attention it warranted.

The Palestinians’ tactic of using choreography and fake images to evoke sympathy around the world has been tried and tested also, and has been part of an extensive and ongoing effort to block the truth in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and warp world opinion against Israel.

Sadly, such tactics only succeed because of the eagerness of much of the West’s anti-Israel mainstream press to publicize any injustice done to Palestinians, even if it is manufactured, and because of the credulity of a misinformed public. For more information on how terrorist groups are exploiting the media, read “Manipulating the Media.”