Illustrative: Palestinians run during clashes with Israeli forces amid an Israeli military operation in Jenin, in the West Bank July 3, 2023. REUTERS/Raneen Sawafta

There is no denying that the CCTV footage is dramatic: a small squad of men and women sporting dubious doctor disguises, sweep through the corridor of a hospital with automatic weapons drawn.

The striking clip of the Israeli special forces inside a hospital in the West Bank city of Jenin has now been seen by millions worldwide, after being picked up by the international media, which invariably distorted the incident to suggest Israel’s actions were unlawful.

Here are the facts as we know them:

On Tuesday, January 30, a specialist Arabic-speaking Israeli counterterrorism unit entered the Ibn Sina Hospital in the city that has become synonymous with Palestinian terrorism.

In a “surgical” operation that lasted just 10 minutes from getting into the building and leaving, the team quickly identified their targets: three terrorists named Mohammed Jalamneh, Mohammed Ghazawi, and Basel Ghazawi.

They were all neutralized.

Israeli forces were acting on intelligence that the men were planning an October 7-style massacre on Israeli soil.

Shortly after their deaths, Islamic Jihad claimed two of the terrorists as members, who were brothers, while Hamas confirmed the third was one of its “fighters.”

The three men had deliberately been using the hospital as a base to both plan their attack and hide from Israeli forces.

Media coverage of the IDF targeting 3 terrorists hiding in a West Bank hospital is a bad joke.

Here’s a thread of what we found: 🧵 https://t.co/duT7ppzOHN pic.twitter.com/SagrrRwngI

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) January 31, 2024

When the media came to report the incident, however, some of these facts were soon twisted beyond recognition or omitted entirely to, in some cases, suggest Israel had acted unlawfully by killing the three men.

The most outrageous examples of skewing the story came in the form of headlines from The Washington Post, CNN, and the BBC, which all obscured the fact that the Palestinian men were terrorists who were preparing to carry out an imminent attack against Israeli civilians.

The Washington Post’s was the most outrageous, with the publication ignoring that all three had been immediately claimed by terrorist organizations, and instead reporting that Israeli agents “kill[ed] 3 in West Bank hospital,” which implicitly suggested the dead people were innocent patients.

CNN omitted entirely the fact that the men were confirmed as terrorists in a headline that stated Israeli special forces had “infiltrated” the facility to “kill Palestinian men.”

Meanwhile, the BBC referred to the terrorists as “fighters” in a headline, a choice that seemed to glamorize the deceased. In the same article, the hospital’s director, Dr. Naji Nazzal, made the contentious claim that the men were “executed … in cold blood…”

The most outrageous reporting, however, came from the media outlets that baselessly suggested Israel may have violated international law or perpetrated a “war crime” in its killing of three terrorists.

The Economist, for example, asked whether Israel had broken the “laws of war” on the basis that soldiers disguising themselves as doctors may be an act of “perfidy” — a protection invoked under the terms of the Geneva Conventions. Perfidy describes a form of deception in which one side promises to act in good faith with the intention of breaking that promise after their enemy has left themselves vulnerable on the reliance of their enemy’s assurance.

Of course, the real breach of international law should concern three terrorists misusing a hospital as a hiding place, while they planned a large-scale terror attack against Israeli civilians.

ABC News took a similar approach, having interviewed experts who said the raid may have “violated international law”: 

It’s a violation of international law to feign protected status, in this case, by dressing up as a doctor or patient, ‘in order to invite the confidence of the adversary and then proceed to kill or injure them,’ Aurel Sari, associate professor of public international law at the University of Exeter, told ABC News. This violates the prohibition to kill or injure the adversary by resorting to perfidy, Sari said.

Two points should be noted in response.

First, Israel’s arrest raids in Jenin do not now — nor have they ever — violated international law. Under the terms of the Oslo agreements, which gave the Palestinian Authority (PA) control in the area of the West Bank in which Jenin is located, the PA was bound to maintain security and combat terrorism.

The PA’s abject failure to combat terrorism emanating from areas under its control gave Israel the right to legally operate in those locations to prevent the commission of attacks.

Second, Israeli forces did not “invite the confidence” of an adversary by dressing as doctors; there is no evidence that the three men acted in the belief that the Israeli forces were actual medical professionals.

The raid on Jenin’s Ibn Sina Hospital may have looked fairly jaw-dropping to observers.

But dramatics are not evidence of war crimes, and certainly don’t mean terrorists are suddenly innocent victims.