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On Friday, Israel removed from two government-run Twitter accounts a chilling image of US journalist James Foley just before he was beheaded, after the tweets sparked widespread controversy on the internet.
The picture was taken from a video of the beheading of Foley by a masked militant belonging to the Islamic State, and was posted on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official Twitter account on Thursday. Foley’s picture was combined with a photo of Hamas members dragging a dead body with a motorbike, after executing the person for providing Israel information.
The combined image, posted a day after Twitter started to remove the five-minute video of Foley’s execution entitled “A Message to America”, was taken down quickly after it spread through the site. The video itself was uploaded to several social media sites, and several images were taken from it. Extremists in the clip warned that they would kill a second journalist in their custody unless the US stops its air assaults in Iraq.
Netanyahu has been accused of using the tragedy to advance Israeli propaganda by linking the Hamas and IS.
After the controversy, Kenneth Roth, Director of the Human Rights Watch, tweeted, “Netanyahu’s Twitter account is now using image of James Foley’s horrible execution to try to score political points against Hamas”.
A tweet from the Israeliforeign ministry’s official Twitter account also had the same images, with the words “Islamist terrorist organizations such as #ISIS and #Hamas are enemies of peace and of all civilized nations”. Both tweets were deleted on Friday.
According to sources, the Israeli government had decided to take down the photos after deciding that the images were in bad taste.
Senior Hamas leader Ezzat al-Rishq took to Facebook and said that “Netanyahu’s attempt to link Hamas” with the IS was “a deception and disinformation campaign” that showed “no respect for the sanctity of the dead”.