Study: Mainstream Media Peddled Hamas Propaganda to Smear Israel and U.S.-Backed Gaza Aid Group
“A core failure of media coverage is the routine elevation of the Gaza Health Ministry, a Hamas-run agency, as a trusted source on culpability for violence.”
A new study has found that the U.S. and European mainstream media have been complicit in spreading biased and false narratives to malign Israel and discredit the U.S.-backed humanitarian operation currently unway in Gaza.
The U.S.-led Gaza Humanitarian Foundation “was targeted and discredited via an ecosystem of unverified claims, narrative laundering, and institutional amplification,” a detailed study released by the New Jersey-based Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) said.
The GHF, backed by President Donald Trump’s administration, seeks to distribute humanitarian relief directly to the residents of Gaza, bypassing Hamas, which has been hoarding the aid or selling it at exorbitant rates on the black-market.
“We believe Hamas made over one billion dollars last year just from manipulating the system of aid managed by the United Nations and others,” GHF’s executive chairman, Rev. Johnnie Moore, told Fox News on Thursday. “They take free food, then sell it. They hoard it for their fighters. They use it to recruit.”
In recent months, Hamas has carried out a series of terror attacks, murdering GHF workers and disrupting the aid distribution work. Despite repeated threats and deadly attacks by Hamas, the organization has delivered more than 79 million meals since launching its operations in late May.
Since May 2025, we’ve delivered 78M+ meals, directly to Palestinians in Gaza.
But from the start, our work was vilified in viral headlines that blamed us for mass Palestinian casualties, based largely on unverified, Hamas-linked sources like the Gaza Ministry of Health.
See… pic.twitter.com/jcpVtmOjIE
— Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (@GHFUpdates) July 17, 2025
The NCRI, a research organization that monitors online and cyber threats, used Artificial Intelligence-based language models and other analytical tools to sift through months of Gaza-related news coverage. The 35-page document shows how leading media outlets in the U.S. and the West “spread hostile, and often unverified, narratives delegitimizing” the GHF.
The mainstream media “headlines overwhelmingly frame Israel or GHF as responsible, burying in the body text that these claims originate from Hamas if this fact is revealed at all,” the report said. “The result is a narrative that masks its source and misleads the public about who is to blame.”
The coverage in the mainstream media was overwhelmingly titled against Israel and the GHF, the study observed:
A significant number of headlines from mainstream media outlets thus elevated one side of the story – the side promoted by a designated foreign terrorist organization – without waiting for forensic clarity and countervailing evidence. Although in some cases the body texts of news articles did make an effort to present a more holistic exploration of sources, the verdict or tone in the headlines – that the IDF and/or GHF was responsible for the killings at aid sites – was already given. (Page 1)
The anti-Israel bias in the media coverage was so out in the open that:
Headlines [analyzed in the study] blamed the IDF or GHF for reported atrocities; Not one held Hamas responsible. Hamas-linked officials and anonymous witnesses became default sources, while U.S., Israeli, and GHF voices were largely sidelined. (Page 25)
The study criticises the media’s reliance on the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, which has “a proven and systematic history of lies, deceptions, duplicated data, and exaggerations which strain credulity of any nonpartisan observer.”
The study noted that a “core failure of media coverage is the routine elevation of the Gaza Health Ministry, a Hamas-run agency, as a trusted source on culpability for violence.”
The report highlighted one such instance when leading media outlets used highly dubious sources to push a false story:
The Particularly, on June 1, 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry claimed that 31 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire at a GHF distribution site. The Washington Post, among others, repeated this claim without verification. After the story reached millions, its headline was retracted nearly 48 hours later. The BBC, Reuters, ABC, and others continued to amplify similar narratives based on anonymous witnesses, Hamas-linked officials, and unaffiliated local reporters – most of whose claims were never independently verified. The result is an information pipeline that elevates unverifiable inputs and continues to place trust in questionable sources with political motives. The effects of this environment are measurable. (Page 20)
The mainstream media were eager to blame the Israeli and U.S. players while downplaying the culpability of Hamas, a murderous terrorist group.
The analysis showed that “exposure to news content citing these sources leads to increased blame attribution to Israeli and American actors and reduced criticism of Hamas,” the study said. “This is not simply a bias of omission, but rather the operationalization of narrative asymmetry.”
The study found that the United Nations, international aid organizations, and activists run a consolidated campaign against the U.S.-backed humanitarian organization.
The tone of their campaign became even more vicious and angry after seeing the success GHF was having on the ground in Gaza:
The data suggest a pattern: narrative attacks on GHF intensify in response to successful aid delivery. For certain actors, including those affiliated with the United Nations, humanitarian NGOs, and media influencers, operational success by GHF does not reduce hostility, but rather triggers it. These entities have framed humanitarian access by GHF as a threat to the political and ideological narratives upon which they depend, instead of as a neutral good. (Page 25)
The current media campaign against Israel is not driven by some legitimate criticism of certain policies adopted or measures taken by the Israeli government or its armed forces, but is rooted in a deep-seated urge to malign the Jewish state, the study observes:
These findings are not simply evidence of heightened criticism or anti-Israel sentiment, they reflect a deeper moral distortion. The belief that Israel is intentionally starving children or deliberately targeting hospitals under the pretense of counterterrorism is not grounded in verifiable fact. These are not legitimate policy critiques; they are fabricated atrocity narratives that reframe Israel’s actions as genocidal, regardless of evidence to the contrary. (Page 24)
The groups and activists running the present campaign care more about smearing Israel than the well-being of the people of Gaza. Their “behavior reflects a deeper structural alignment in which humanitarian outcomes are subordinated to narrative control,” the study notes.
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Comments
Someone please tell me again how Jews control the media?
Such despicable and brazenly dishonest slanders from the vile and evil leftist/Dhimmi-crat media organs, who are committed to whitewashing, rationalizing and enabling goose-stepping, genocidal Islamofascism and Muslim terrorism.
Hamas and UNRWA have made huge bank stealing and reselling donated foods and goods. Why would they want that grift to end? The MSM, ICC, et al, are willing to lie for their agenda
Can someone explain that bizarre logo to me? It looks like a knife superimposed on a stylized Molotov.
Is it a knife and food (mean and maybe bread)?
A lit candle, sagging in the intense heat of the desert, and a box cutter.
Apparently, I’m not the only one.
Early in the war news casters breathlessly announced a rocket launched from Israeli forces hit a hospital killing 500.
Over the next few days it came out it wasn’t the hospital but a parking lot near a hospital, didn’t kill 500 but maybe 50. And it wasn’t a Jewish rocket but a Hamas rocket that fell short of Israeli territory due to faulty manufacturing.
Everything about the narrative was opposite of the true events announced by main stream media. This didn’t change my view on the media as my trust in the media has been absent for decades.
Mainstream media was the worst but so to was Tik Tok, and while most of the right resisted taking their opinions a lot of the right (i.e. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, the Twins) was indistinguishable from the left and in some cases openly pro-Nazi.
“…the U.S. and European mainstream media have been complicit in spreading biased and false narratives to malign Israel and discredit the U.S.-backed humanitarian operation currently underway in Gaza.“
“…leading media outlets in the U.S. and the West ‘spread hostile, and often unverified, narratives delegitimizing’ the GHF.
The mainstream media ‘headlines overwhelmingly frame Israel or GHF as responsible, burying in the body text that these claims originate from Hamas if this fact is revealed at all,’ the report said. ‘The result is a narrative that masks its source and misleads the public about who is to blame.’”
Ya don’t say.