Hamas agenda on Israel’s war in Gaza is influencing Western media
Hamas has not only successfully infiltrated Gaza but also the Western media, with journalists across the world failing in their duty of fairly reporting Israel’s ongoing war.
The media and political professionals of Western liberal democracies are educated and opinionated types who believe they know how best to run the world. It is beyond comical then, and highly disturbing, to see how they are played like fiddles by Islamofascists as adept at feeding lies and propaganda to Western journalists as they are at beheading innocents.
Murderous medieval zealots one minute, Hamas operatives manipulate self-righteous modern journalists the next. In the information age, the barbarians are exerting control over the digital gatekeepers.
And so it was, with Hamas’s control over humanitarian aid under threat (aid that is supposed to feed Gazans at no cost but until now has often been commandeered by Hamas and used for profiteering and control), the terrorists have created trauma and spun lines to a compliant Western media.
The story coming out of Gaza for days is that the Israeli Defence Forces have slaughtered Gazan civilians turning up at the new US-Israeli aid distribution centres designed to hand aid directly to Gazans, bypassing the Hamas henchmen.
Apparently none of the journalists or activists running these stories has stopped to wonder why a country supplying aid would want to murder the people it is feeding. Nor do they seem to have questioned the claims made by Hamas, which has a clear interest in disrupting the new aid arrangements – in fact, it has been a successful tactic, with so many Gazans too frightened to risk turning up at aid centres that deliveries have been delayed.
The only way to explain journalists overlooking this reality is to conclude they are intent on spreading hideous lies or they really believe the Israelis are murderous monsters who slaughter Palestinian civilians without even attempting to hide it. The concept is as illogical as it is monstrous; the only reason anyone is alive in Gaza after 20 months of war is because Israel has avoided targeting civilians, provided Gazans with warnings and safe passage, and facilitated aid deliveries.
If Israel wanted to be rid of Gazans it could have carpet-bombed the Strip in a matter of weeks. Perhaps these journalists and activists believe their own warped publicity.
It is not as though the lies from Hamas and blind, fact-free amplification by the media are new phenomena, catching the media by surprise. There have been numerous clear-cut examples that should have fostered ongoing scepticism.
In the first days of the war, just 10 days after the October 7 atrocities in 2023, false reports about Israel bombing a hospital and killing 500 people started in The New York Times and spread around the world. “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say” was the initial New York Times headline with a subheading: “At Least 500 Dead in Gaza Attack, as Biden Prepares to Visit to Israel”.
Days of global outrage directed at Israel followed – a propaganda triumph for Hamas – before the claims were proven beyond doubt to be false. A rocket directed at Israel by Hamas affiliate Palestinian Islamic Jihad had misfired, hit the hospital carpark and killed dozens of people.
The damage done to Israel was so comprehensive that it is tempting to wonder whether PIJ’s rocket was misdirected at all. Just as we wonder now whether Hamas deliberately kills Gazans daring to make their way towards non-Hamas aid distribution centres.
“At least 27 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire near aid centre, Gaza authorities say”, a BBC headline screamed this week. “Gaza authorities”, of course, means the information was provided by the Islamist terrorist group Hamas, currently at war with Israel. “More than 20 killed near aid distribution site in Gaza, health officials say” was one New York Times headline. “Health officials”, of course, means officials of Hamas, the terrorist organisation with the most to lose if the new aid program manages to feed Gazans while bypassing Hamas’s malevolent control.
We are left to wonder why so many in the media use these more flattering and less accurate descriptions of their sources. Why do they use terms such as “health ministry” or “Gaza authorities” rather than Hamas authorities or Hamas leaders?
This is dishonest, and deliberately so. It is about building an anti-Israeli narrative that minimises the focus on Hamas’s culpability for everything that is happening to the Gazans, the people Hamas claims to represent but who it uses as cannon fodder, human shields and sacrifices in the name of Islamist propaganda.
Hamas conducts its warfare – physical and psyops – from tunnels and bunkers while Gazans pay the price above ground. Extraordinarily, Western media happily plays the role of accessory in the Hamas information wars.
On Wednesday night the ABC reported “at least 27 Palestinians have been killed”, claiming it was a case of “the hungry seeking food and encountering gunfire” as it ran unverified first-hand accounts of shootings, presumably filmed by media under the control of Hamas. It also ran comments by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman Jeremy Laurence that “attacks directed at civilians constitute a grave breach of international law and a war crime”.
Despite the fog of war and most of the information coming from a listed terrorist group, Israel was again being fitted up for a war crime. The only scepticism evident in the reporting was over an IDF video showing Hamas terrorists firing at civilians – the ABC reported it was filmed at a different location to the aid centre, which hardly seemed the relevant point.
The ABC’s reporter in Jerusalem, Matthew Doran, reliant on the same Hamas-controlled information drip-feed from Gaza, said: “Israeli officials continue to accuse Hamas of trying to undermine the new private aid system in Gaza.” This is the credulity dynamic that plays out in the reporting – the vision, comments and information supplied by murderous jihadists are reported doe-eyed while everything Israel says is reported with a cocked eyebrow.
The previous day ABC newsreader Jeremy Fernandez told us: “Health officials in Gaza say 27 Palestinians have been killed near an aid distribution centre, accusing Israeli forces of opening fire.” “Health officials” is a term that sounds a whole lot more believable than Hamas terrorist sources.
Reporter Doran then referred to what he had “heard from Palestinian authorities”. Again, why not tell us he had heard it from Hamas authorities?
Why the endless efforts to legitimise a listed terrorist organisation that deliberately triggered this war by slaughtering, torturing, raping and kidnapping men, women, the elderly, children and babies? Why the daily efforts to give legitimacy to a terrorist outfit that extends the war every day by keeping live Israeli hostages (and the bodies of their compatriots) as bargaining chips?
For all the desperate nonsense about the possibility of prosecuting Israeli politicians for war crimes, the irrefutable ongoing war crimes of Hamas holding hostages is overlooked. The selective and misplaced outrage is grotesque.
A day earlier the ABC said 31 people were dead and again ran first-person accounts from videotape that must have come out of Gaza courtesy of Hamas, yet it was presented as fact, as if the ABC interviewed these people itself. Then came Dr Marwan Al-Hams from a Gazan field hospital: “It seems the IDF is sending a clear message to the hungry, we will kill you from the sky with planes and missiles or on the ground through starvation and attacks near aid centres.”
An independent medico or a Hamas-approved message? There never seem to be any doubts in the coverage from the ABC, BBC, CNN or many other media organisations.
The ABC then ran footage of a mother saying she would now rather starve than go to the aid centre again. This is exactly the message and outcome Hamas would want to spread if it aims to block the independent centres and get its AK-47s back in control of the aid flow.
We are left to wonder whether these journalists, producers and editors ever stop to wonder why Israel would establish a new aid system with the US just to use it as a slaughterhouse. It is a little easier to fathom why Hamas might want to ensure the independent aid delivery system fails.
Just two weeks ago, plainly fanciful claims about 14,000 babies being on the brink of death in Gaza ran unquestioned around the world. It sounded ridiculous, most journalists didn’t even stop to consider the implausibility, and it was soon demonstrated to have no basis in fact – but too late, the anti-Israel damage had gone global.
In none of these cases do the media corrections, if they come, overturn the public perceptions generated by the initial allegations. Less than a week after the false hospital bombing claim back in October 2023, The New York Times ran something of an apology as an “Editor’s note” that said in part: “Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation and been more explicit about what information could be verified.”
That admission came after many days of the world reporting that Israel had deliberately bombed a hospital and killed 500 innocents. This was a huge Hamas propaganda win that set the tone – Hamas has had far more victories in Western media than it has had on the ground in Gaza.
None of this is to say that in a protracted conflict of urban and asymmetric warfare, Israel can do no wrong. Undoubtedly there will be accidents and overreach, and tragically there will be unintended civilian casualties. Israel does not let journalists into Gaza; apart from the normal risks of war, they could be killed or even taken hostage by Hamas. Perhaps they should rethink.
There is only one group that started this war and deliberately prolongs it – Hamas. Whereas the IDF operates under robust political, judicial and media oversight and accountability.
To watch most of the world’s media is to turn all this on its head. They give succour to Hamas, demonise Israel and, in doing so, prolong the trauma – the useful idiots of the jihadists.
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