A German politician has been filmed taking large sums of cash from a Kremlin-supporting broadcaster, Czech intelligence has claimed.
Petr Bystron, who is standing for Alternative for Germany (AfD) at European parliamentary elections in June, allegedly received €20,000 (£17,000) in cash from the manager of a Russian propaganda network while sitting in a parked car, recordings indicate.
Mr Bystron, who also sits on the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee, has previously denied allegations of taking Russian money as a “defamation campaign”.
The Security Information Service (BIS), the Czech Republic’s domestic intelligence agency, now says Mr Bystron met with Artem Marchevsky, who allegedly managed a Kremlin-backed propaganda front called Voice of Europe, at least three times in the past six months.
They are relying entirely on numbers provided by Hamas. There is no independent third party counting casualties in the strip.
Okay, so where should casualty figures come from?
It’s fine to admit that we simply don’t know until the war is over. Only then can a true count be possible, without terrorists interfering.
And who will make the count then?
Ideally an independent party, like an NGO with no affiliations to Hamas and Israel.
And how would they make such a count? Dig all the bodies out of the rubble and find where all the unmarked mass graves are?
Head count of the survivors vs. pre-war records.
The pre-war records kept by Hamas? Who you said can’t be trusted?
Think about this for a second. Hamas has an interest in accurate internal head counts for e.g. tax purposes - they were the de-facto government of the strip, after all. Their public statements cannot be trusted.
Conflating the Gaza Ministry of Health with Hamas is a very common propaganda tactic. The truth is that they operate under the de-facto government of Gaza, which is Hamas, but they don’t work for them as in pushing their agenda. Your statement of the numbers being “provided by Hamas” is entirely false tho.
The numbers they provided in the past passed verification by third party investigations (Examples: 2014 war comparison with B’Tselem and analysis of the current war’s numbers by The Lancet) and are considered to be reliable. During an active war, independent verification is pretty much impossible tho.