Is the new hasbara just to make everyone feel insane?

What do you see?

I see a very skinny war journalist taking a photograph of desperate, starving people.

If that’s what you also see, “You are being manipulated,” according to Eylon Levy, a former Israeli government spokesperson who was booted early on in the conflict and just trolls Twitter all day now.

Levy and all the big hasbara accounts, including official government channels, are circulating a story from a German tabloid alleging that a Time cover story photograph was “faked.”

Their proof is the first image. “Today the news broke that this TIME photo from Gaza was staged and a total FAKE. Demand that TIME apologize and print a full page retraction in print and digitally. @TIME

“The cover of TIME magazine was staged,” shrieked Eve Barlow. “Why did they have to stage a photo of children starving? You’ve been played.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry:

One photo was staged. The other debunked it. While @BILD revealed how Hamas photographers engineer scenes for propaganda, Time Magazine plays into the propaganda. This is how Pallywood works: Manufactured emotion. Media complicity. Truth discarded. @TIME Where is your retraction?

You look at the two photos again. Nothing in front of you makes that claim even remotely convincing or rooted in any kind of reality. You consider the shocking, pure evil in the death sentence they’ve handed to the photographer and likely his whole family by identifying him and claiming he’s in Hamas. In another photo of the shoot,

And you feel insane!

In traditional gaslighting, the abuser makes the victim doubt their sanity by undercutting their version of reality. This is worse! I absolutely trust my version of reality, which is what I see in those two pictures, which is a photographer setting up a shot of starving people in a war zone, and the hasbarists insist I’ve been brainwashed by Hamas.