IMAGES FROM GAZA/ "Those starving children are a challenge to our reason."
What's happening in Gaza can be justified in many ways, but that doesn't take away the truth of the facts. And there are testimonies that are worth more than fact-checking.
As the latest news reports suggest the peace talks have broken down, terrifying images are arriving from Gaza . They are photos of skeletal children consumed by hunger and thirst.
Yesterday, many newspapers, including Avvenire and L'Osservatore Romano , featured them on their front pages, in some cases full-page spreads. The photos are striking and are, in fact, beginning to stir consciences.
Alongside, and perhaps precisely as a result of, the Pope's strong and clear words , intellectuals, politicians, and institutions are finally taking a stand to stop the war, but also to condemn the actions of the Israeli army. Many in Europe, and even a few in Italy.
People are dying in the Strip, even from hunger, and there's no hope of recovery. The images of this catastrophe are dramatically true, beyond any reasonable doubt, but there are also those who dispute them. Yesterday, Il Riformista wrote: "The images of grieving mothers with emaciated, suffering children in their arms, with big eyes, legs and arms dangling. These are images that are deeply painful, but are they true? "
Fact-checking is certainly necessary. Palestinian websites ( Tahaqaq ), Israeli websites ( Fake-reporter ), international newspapers ( NewsGuard , Reuters Fact-checking ), and even Italian ones ( Open Fact-checking ) do it. The European channel Artè broadcasts a magazine specializing in the meticulous analysis of online videos.
For example, they recently addressed the famous video showing hundreds of Gazans apparently relaxing on a beach, which Hamas interpreted to demonstrate the failure of Israeli operations and Tel Aviv to deny accusations of violations of international law.
War, and this is nothing new, is becoming more and more a war of bullets and news every day. Faced with accusations from numerous international organizations, yesterday, X's Israeli accounts read: "While Israel facilitates the entry of humanitarian aid and delivers it directly to civilians in Gaza, the UN is obstructing the efficient flow of aid. We call on the United Nations to stop blocking essential aid."
And war has always been a war of images, too. This is demonstrated by the controversy surrounding the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land , which chronicles settler aggression in the West Bank. It's a documentary worth seeing, nonetheless.
Today, everything is complicated by Artificial Intelligence, capable of creating images on command. Sometimes they are clearly fake, like the disturbing virtual projection of a future Gaza, modeled after Miami, with skyscrapers and luxury resorts, but without Palestinians. But sometimes they are passed off as real, by both sides. And, paradoxically, a worrying effect of AI's new creative possibilities is that it casts suspicion on real images. Muddying the waters is the devil's tactic.
But there is a solution, and it's called testimony. If the witness is authoritative, reliable, honest, and present, it's as valid a guarantee as fact-checking , if not more so.
Let's take, for example, the case of Cardinal Pizzaballa, who lives in those places, goes there, and loves those people. It's worth following what he has said and says.
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