Lord Haw-Haw was the nickname given to William Joyce and others who broadcast Nazi propaganda in the UK during the Second World War. The Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas haven’t reached quite that level. They haven’t set up underground radio stations devoted to reading out loud every Hamas press release. But, consciously or otherwise, they do Hamas’s bidding. Spread its propaganda, hawk its lies. The activist class and much of the supposedly liberal media treat Hamas claims as good coin while being showily sceptical of everything Israel says. To such an extent that even the obvious fiction of organised rape on hospital wards was swiftly believed.

It happens over and over again. When al-Ahli Hospital was bombed last year, much of the media parroted the Hamas line that Israel did it. It later transpired that it might have been a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad. When Hamas says more than ‘30,000 Palestinians’ have been killed, the media repeats it like a mantra. It doesn’t stop to ask not only whether the numbers are reliable, but also how many of the dead are Hamas terrorists. The idea that Israel has ‘murdered 30,000 Palestinians’ is a fiction, another war lie, essentially. The truth is that Israel is at war with Hamas, and thus it has slain many Hamas members, and in the process, as in every war in history, civilians have sadly died, too. It is rare indeed to hear such truths from the West’s Smart Set whose flapping hate for Israel has driven them into the arms of Hamas.