"By Way of Deception Thou Shalt Make News"
All modern wars are Information Wars, and the best liars often win
It's an old, old observation that the first casualty of war is the truth.
And it's often the case of highly emotional tear-jerker tales to stir up hatred for the designated enemy and justify unrestrained response to avenge the supposed victims of the supposed atrocity.
We saw it when the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the USA was coached by a leading public relations firms to fabricate the false story about babies being tossed out of incubators to "die on the cold floor"; nothing of her true identity or the PR firm's involvement were stated at the time. Of course, the goal was already served as many accepted the need to get involved in Iraq.
(The baby tales are always the best, whether about Jews murdering Christian babies to make Passover matzohs, or Germans bayonetting Belgian babies during WWI, and so the 40 beheaded babies story follows the old playbook precisely.)
The non-incident at the Gulf of Tonkin was used to justify major escalation of the US interference in Vietnam (and Southeast Asia in general).
Non-existent weapons of mass destruction were used to justify shock and awe in Iraq. And why Iraq? Oh, right, lies about Saddam's involvement in 9/11 and connection to Al-Qaida.
Dozens of lies came out of Kiev at the start of Russia's special military operation, yet the media ignored years of Ukrainian and NATO provocation and deaths of 14,000 Russian-speaking residents of the Donbass by Notsee troops.
There has always been a highly-skewed media bias towards Israel, in which most war crimes and atrocities are either ignored or rationalized, while the slightest resistance by Palestinians, including peaceful marches, are always labeled "terrorism." When Palestinians are shot or bombed by IDF, they "died," but when Israelis die, they were "killed," a subconscious ploy to remove intent from one group while gluing it to another.
The playbook is so knee-jerk that any time something is labeled a war, like the War on Drugs, or the War on Covid, an army of lies is guaranteed to be on the battlefield from the inception.
The motto of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency (apparently not as intelligent as reputed; they collect so much data that they have turned analysis over to computer AI, and so ignored the warnings of an imminent attack that humans might have noticed) is taken from a biblical passage in Proverbs 24:6 and usually is translated as: "By way of deception thou shalt make war." Some use "stealth" instead of "deception," and it can also be translated as "For by wise counsel thou shalt wage war."
Those who like to pick on Mossad (and, by extension, Jews per se) as uniquely duplicitous prefer the "deception" version, even though Sun Tsu wrote "ALL war is based on deception" and EVERY military treats deception as a valuable weapon (look how the USA used inflated rubber tanks and trucks to fool the Germans into thinking Patton's fake air-filled army was poised to invade Calais).
The motto was changed recently as part of the Mossad's public 'coming out' to another Proverbs passage:
"Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety." ~ Proverbs 11:14
Wise persons are advised to get their information from "a multitude of counsellors" before swallowing the inevitable deceptions designed to sway your emotions and win your support for a particular agenda. NO single side has all the truth or all the lies, though history teaches us that some have better or worse track records of honest and transparent reporting of the truth. But even so, the best approach is to take ALL reports and claims as MERE claims until they can be verified by credible sources, and even then the whole truth may still be getting its pants on, as Mark Twain said, while the lie is still running far ahead.
https://fb.watch/nH7gnzC15m/Fake news rife in Israel-Palestine war