Hamas has alleged (without evidence) that Gazans have been effectively “evaporated” by science-fiction-like extreme-heat munitions, leaving no recoverable bodies, a charge which the Israeli military has emphatically denied. WIRED, which prides itself on rigorous investigation and technological expertise, took the outlandish claim and put it in a cover story.
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WIRED prides itself on rigorous investigation and technological expertise.
But in its cover story on Gaza’s missing, which alleges that Palestinians were “effectively ‘evaporated’ by extreme-heat munitions, leaving no recoverable bodies,” it’s the magazine’s credibility that really disappeared.
The outlandish charge originated with Hamas and was amplified, without logic or evidence, by Al Jazeera, which posited that nearly 3,000 Gazans had “evaporated” from Israel’s alleged “systematic use of internationally prohibited thermal and thermobaric weapons,” “leaving behind no remains other than blood spray or small fragments of flesh.”
Neither Al Jazeera nor WIRED explained that the “civil defense teams” which supposedly “documented” the alleged “evaporation” of thousands of people were, in, fact, Hamas.
WIRED ignored the IDF’s emphatic denial of Hamas’ accusation about a “vaporizing” weapon, instead accepting Hamas’ evidence-free charge as fact.
Al Jazeera’s supposed evidence that such a weapon was used? What it called “grim forensic accounting” by Gaza’s Civil Defense: aka, Hamas.
“We enter a targeted home and cross-reference the known number of occupants with the bodies recovered,” said a spokesperson. “If a family tells us there were five people inside, and we only recover three intact bodies, we treat the remaining two as ‘evaporated’ only after an exhaustive search yields nothing but biological traces.”
But WIRED claims that there are no forensics tools in Gaza, calling the territory a “forensic desert.”
It cannot be true both that Hamas carried out a legitimate forensic accounting which confirmed the existence of a sci-fi-like vaporization weapon, and also true that, as WIRED reports, zero forensic tools are available in Gaza. So which is it?
The blogger Elder of Ziyon employed the kind of critical thinking WIRED avoided, writing: “What are the chances with any explosion that there will be three intact bodies and two completely incinerated? Practically zero. With conventional explosives it is almost impossible to have full incineration – there is a very high temperature but it lasts for a very short time which isn’t enough to make bodies disappear. And for thermobaric explosions, it is extremely unlikely that three bodies would be intact and two evaporated in an enclosed area.”
A serious attempt to report on the Hamas/Al Jazeera allegation might have read something like this: “Without providing any actual evidence, Hamas has alleged that Gazans have been effectively ‘evaporated’ by science-fiction-like extreme-heat munitions, leaving no recoverable bodies, an allegation which the Israeli military has emphatically denied.”
But that’s not what WIRED did. It took an outlandish claim by a brutal terrorist organization and put it in a cover story.