INSTAGRAM AND FACEBOOK users attempting to share scenes of devastation from a crowded hospital in Gaza City claim their posts are being suppressed, despite previous company policies protecting the publication of violent, newsworthy scenes of civilian death.
Late Tuesday, amid a 10-day bombing campaign by Israel, the Gaza Strip’s al-Ahli Hospital was rocked by an explosion that left hundreds of civilians killed and wounded. Footage of the flaming exterior of the hospital, as well as dead and wounded civilians, including children, quickly emerged on social media in the aftermath of the attack.
While the Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip blamed the explosion on an Israeli airstrike, the Israeli military later said the blast was caused by an errant rocket misfired by militants from the Gaza-based group Islamic Jihad.
While widespread electrical outages and Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure have made getting documentation out of the besieged territory difficult, some purported imagery of the hospital attack making its way to the internet appears to be activating the censorship tripwires of Meta, the social media giant that owns Instagram and Facebook.
Hellbound and Down 