Israel bears the brunt of false wartime claims

A demonstrator lights a pink flare as others deploy a banner and raise pictures of hostages during an anti-government protest in Israel. Picture: AFP

Much of the world’s media is judging Israel by standards no other country could meet.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial last Tuesday about the murder of six young Israeli hostages held in Gaza since the October 7 massacre said it all: “Hamas Murders Hostages, Israel Is Blamed”.

In Australia, the painfully politically correct Nine newspapers’ cartoonist Cathy Wilcox nailed – unintentionally – the hypocrisy of the anti-Israel left. Around Wilcox’s Israeli cabinet table drawing, which was published by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age last week, one minister says: “The people are protesting in the streets! They want us to bring an end to the conflict before more hostages are killed.” Another minister responds: “What can we do?”

Benjamin Netanyahu asks: “Punish the Palestinians a little harder?”

The protesters, of course, are not demanding the end of the war at all, but are wanting Netanyahu to prioritise freeing the hostages by accepting Hamas’s demands.

In this world view, Israel is always in the wrong, even when six young hostages held in a tunnel under Rafah are shot in the back of the head because Israel’s troops are approaching. But before the bullets they are made to film statements for their loved ones to be released later by their captors.

Never mind Israel left Gaza in 2005, or that its sovereign territory was invaded on October 7, and 1200 of its innocent civilians were murdered – many sexually defiled, some burned alive, others having their heads cut off.

And let’s not forget that 240 more, many who were enjoying a music festival for peace, were taken as hostages into the tunnels of a terror organisation.

In the eyes of the left, Israel is wrong to retaliate. It is a colonial power even though Jews have always lived in Israel, and Palestine and Judaism predates the Islam of Hamas by 2000 years.

Israel’s critics never argue the moral point. Palestinian deaths in Gaza would end if Hamas – a terror organisation with similar origins to ISIS – surrendered.

Even US President Joe Biden last week reserved his public criticism for Netanyahu over his perceived reluctance to accept a ceasefire but said nothing about Hamas’s cold-blooded murders.

The day before the WSJ hostage editorial, the Israel Defence Forces killed eight terrorists hiding near the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City.

The Times of Israel reported one of the Hamas fighters was Ahmed Fawzi Nasser Muhammad Wadiyya, a Hamas company commander who led the invasion of the small community of Netiv Ha’asara on October 7.

This was the terrorist seen on film drinking Coke from the fridge of the Taasa family, “moments after killing Gil Taasa, 46, in front of his sons, Koren, 12, and Shay, 8”.

Gil died when he jumped on a Hamas grenade to save his boys by giving them time to flee to their safe room.

While protesters in Tel Aviv desperately want the return of their hostages, Netanyahu, the IDF and the secret services have larger duties: to protect Israel from further attacks.

This column last October 14 spoke about meeting Yitzhak Rabin and PLO deputy leader Faisal Husseini in 1992 as the PLO and the Labour PM worked on a two-state solution the Palestinians have been offered several times since but have never accepted.

That column predicted Israel would struggle most in the months to come with “not bowing to the blackmail of hostage-taking”. Israel, a home to holocaust survivors, has tried to rescue every captured Jew since the Entebbe mission led by Netanyahu’s brother, Yonatan, in 1976.

Bret Stephens in The New York Times on September 3 described Israel’s hostage dilemma perfectly. Gilad Shalit, a soldier captured by Hamas and held in Gaza in 2006, was released five years later – in total exchange for 1000 Palestinian security prisoners held by Israel.

Netanyahu approved that deal. Among those released was Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of October 7 and now head of Hamas after Israel’s assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the previous Hamas leader, in Tehran on July 31.

Some in Israel’s government, the protesters in Tel Aviv and a few foreign policy analysts argue Israel should do whatever is necessary to achieve a truce to free its hostages, even withdrawing from the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt. This could allow the resupply of Gaza with weapons smuggled from the south.

Those pushing the ceasefire agenda argue Israel’s biggest success to date came with the release of 70 hostages during the previous ceasefire in November. While the IDF has freed some Hamas captives in targeted actions, the military has been less successful than diplomacy.

Yet not all is going as badly for Israel as some in the media suggest – too often taking their lines from Hamas’s backers at Al-Jazeera. In fact, Sinwar, who had hoped to precipitate a regional war, is almost certainly disappointed at the limited strike by Hezbollah on Israel a fortnight ago and Iran’s reticence to hit Israel directly after Haniyeh’s assassination.

The Jerusalem Post’s David Ben-Basat on August 27 wrote: “Sinwar … who is well aware his time is running out will not agree to any deal that does not involve significant withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor and Rafah Crossing along with assurances from the US and Israel that he will not be assassinated.”

Netanyahu will be cautious about giving Sinwar anything, given the IDF has killed 17,000 Hamas fighters but paid with the loss of 704 IDF personnel.

Ben-Basat continued: “The Palestinians, who have turned their self-victimisation into nationalism, use the Al-Jazeera news network to showcase the ruins of Gaza … to the world.”

The reliance of Western media on Al-Jazeera has allowed terrorists to pose as journalists, pumping out false claims about civilian starvation and total death numbers and creating the idea the only democracy in the Middle East is populated by evil racists while a medieval death cult committed to the subjugation of women, the murder of homosexuals and the destruction of Israel is a force of freedom fighters.

Camera, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, has extracted some corrections and apologies from large US media groups in the past month.

The New York Times on August 12 corrected an opinion piece that claimed Israel had imposed “a blanket blockade on food entering Gaza”. Camera pointed out that on August 7, the day before the publication of the false blockade story, 158 aid trucks entered Gaza. On August 8, 271 trucks of humanitarian aid crossed into the city.

In July, 4629 trucks with 23,240 tonnes of food entered Gaza. In fact, as this column reported on April 7, food supplies have been higher than before the war, even using UN figures.

Camera said an average of 150 trucks a day of aid and food had entered Gaza since October 7, compared with 75.3 trucks a day in the nine months before October 7.

On casualties, Camera reported on August 21 that 80 separate US news outlets had published a correction in which Associated Press admitted claims of 40,000 Palestinian civilian deaths should have mentioned that this number, which the IDF does not accept, actually includes 17,000 dead Hamas fighters. The total figure is supplied by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health ministry.

Don’t expect our ABC to correct that, or false claims about starving Gazans.