The Top Eight Hoaxes of the Gaza War

The Top Eight Hoaxes of the Gaza War

When Gazans raided southern Israel in October 2023, it became immediately clear that Israel would have to go into the terrorist territory to rescue hostages and uproot Hamas. Despite the initial outpouring of sympathy, historical precedent suggested that the most significant roadblock preventing the Jewish state from realizing these goals would be the public opinion-driven international pressure. Just like the 2000s war on terror was launched with the Muhammad Al-Durrah hoax, Gazans would summon every antisemitic trope with a slew of fake videos and wild unsubstantiated allegations.

Although defamatory content was expected, the media was never as relentless in its perfidy and the public — so gullible. Here are the eight most viscious lies of the war.

1.     Al Ahi Hospital bombing

In mid-October 2023, when Israel was still counting its murdered, some bright blasts over Gaza went viral on social media, prompting Hamas to announce that Israel attacked Al Ahi hospital, killing 500. They quickly revised the figure to 900. The bit was immediately picked up by news agencies worldwide and influencers fumed at the Jewish blood lust.

My first thought was that armed factions were hiding in medical facilities — it’s been their modus operandi for decades. And, in fact, for almost two years now, Gazans continued to pick hospitals, mosques, schools, and other civilian infrastructure as their battlegrounds and held hostages there. But with Al Ahi, the truth was much more simple.

The following morning, Russia’s TASS correspondent visited the site and filmed the intact hospital with superficial damage to nearby structures and burnt cars in the parking lot. Others returned with the same visuals. The damage was caused by a homemade rocket misfired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group.

In a just world, the media would have been so embarrassed about the badly mangled story, they’d cease uncritically rehashing Hamas’s press releases. Or at least their readers would become more skeptical of anti-Zionist content. Yet more libels followed and, judging by a Pew poll showing that most Americans now view Israel unfavorably, the public is increasingly willing to accept the most fantastic notions about the Jewish state.

Among them:

2.     The 14,000 babies

“The starving Gazans” has been one of the most promoted anti-Zionist tropes. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for one, talked about mass starvation as early as January 2024.

On May 14, the United Nation’s Tom Fletcher established very specific goalposts, claiming that 14,000 babies would die within 48 hours. This synchronized dying out proposition made no sense, but it predictably made major media headlines and:

According to Jewish Onliner, engagement with the words 14,000 and babies “reach[ed] 4.5 billion potential views in just 24 hours.”

A few days later, a man shouting “free Palestine” murdered two Israeli embassy staffers at the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.

3.     Children with genetic disorders

The 14,000 babies didn’t die, but in the most current hoax, the media picked up images of emaciated children, usually surrounded by plump relatives, as visual proof of mass starvation in Gaza. These types of visuals have been circulating since the beginning of the conflict, but now they’ve reached the mainstream.

An honest editor would be deterred by the presence of healthy relatives in the pictures in question, but, in what appears to be a coordinated effort, they were aired on CNN, ABC, and multiple other major media outlets, including the front page of the New York Times. These children are all suffering from debilitating genetic disorders, in the case of the Times’ cover story — cerebral palsy.

As the scandal unfolded, The New York Times Communications, the account with just 89,000 followers, as opposed to their main 55 million page, tweeted:

We have appended an Editors’ Note to a story about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza who was diagnosed with severe malnutrition. After publication, The Times learned that he also had pre-existing health problems.

In their typical fashion, the newspaper of record published a front page blood libel and throttled the correction.

From the cover of the Gray Lady, the smear advanced to other media outlets. The host of a YouTube channel for toddlers, Rachel Griffin-Accurso promoted the anti-Zionist libels to her 16 million subscribers. The children’s entertainer — or propagandist, let’s be real! — removed her Instagram image of “starved by Israel child” once the Times retracted, but issued no apology.

The libel had legs even after the Times had tweeted their tenuous correction. The day after the retraction, the socialist Senator Bernie Sanders spoke before the Congress with the large backdrop from the sick baby photo shoot.

4.     Hostages are treated well

About fifty hostages remain in Gaza, half of them presumed alive. To prove that they are doing well, their captors coerced testimonies of humane treatment — and influencers believed them.

Yet terrorists murdered the Bibas babies with their bare hands — and the world moved on. The hostages are being tormented physically and emotionally; those who returned, return famished, with chronic illnesses and visible signs of torture. The Red Cross is not interested in visiting, but Israel has information about their deteriorating medical condition.

As Gazans and their advocates like to say, every accusation is a confession. Whatever they fantasize about Israel is true about the way they treat Jews — and that includes deliberate starvation.

5.     Hundreds executed at distribution points

Today, Hamas is on its last legs. Although they’ve lost every battle, they are able to recruit fighters because they loot and redistribute international aid.

To bypass Hamas, the United States launched the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, to gift food packages in southern Gaza. To lose control of provisions would be lethal for Hamas — it’s their Battle of Berlin. Real men that they are, they are fighting it through public relations.

In late May, Hamas began alleging that the Israeli Defense Forces were firing on Gazans congregating near GHF distribution points, killing hundreds. Despite the fact that every Gazan has a cell phone, no such event has been documented. Pallywood didn’t bother to fake videos of the diseased or stage funeral processions. Israel’s own footage confirmed that no bullets were fired at the crowd at the time of alleged massacres.

Yet plenty of recordings of Hamas stealing aid and abusing Gazans are flooding social media. Hundreds of trucks worth of aid are left undistributed. Although the IDF found no signs of it, some observers believe that the terror group is trying to engineer a famine in the areas it controls in order to create diplomatic pressure on their neighbor.

6.     The Church targeting

On July 13, shrapnel from a shell appeared to have clipped off the superstructure on top of Gaza’s sole Catholic Church. It caused cosmetic damage — the photographs appear to show the intact roof. A picture of the priest with the bandaged calf and a skinned knee made the rounds along with the statement of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem announcing the killing of three civilians in “this targeting of innocent civilians and of a sacred place.” The Pope’s condemnation came in immediately, expressing “profound sorrow for the Israeli army’s attack on the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City.”

Israel is investigating the incident and the pontiff’s own information came from Gaza. If the IDF targeted the church, it would not be standing today — but it would be out of character for them to do such a thing.

The overwhelming majority of Gazan Christians fled after Hamas took hold. As somebody who hails from a totalitarian state, I can tell you that all official and most unofficial statements coming out of such entities should be regarded with skepticism. To take them at face value is to discount real suffering.

7.     Inflated death toll

Because Israel took the utmost care to evacuate Gazans out of the areas of military action, the civilian to combatant ratio is unbelievably low for urban warfare. Unfortunately, as war correspondent Andrew Fox recently noted, “the media has picked a side” — 98% of global outlets use the death toll figures provided by Hamas.

Even then, Hamas’s numbers — under 60,000 fatalities, three quarters of them are men between 13 and 55 — do not satisfy the anti-Zionist true believers. In a manner reminiscent of the unstoppable global warming hype, a group of activists took it upon themselves to extrapolate from projections. Last summer, the British magazine Lancet published a statement speculating that the total number of fatalities could be as high as 186,000. The author Martin McKee soon admitted that the figure is “purely illustrative.”

His piece was not an article, but a non-peer reviewed letter. Nonetheless, it made headlines and gave Anti-Zionists an opening to say that, according to the most prestigious medical journal in the world, the number of casualties in Gaza is much higher than reported.

McKee recently updated the “purely illustrative” figure to “434,000 people, or 20.7% of Gaza’s entire pre-conflict population” — and why not? Is it really any less shameful than exploiting photos of sick babies?

8.     Israel is committing genocide

That Israel is committing genocide is a standard anti-Zionist trope. It apparently has been doing so since 1948, as the enemy population grew tenfold. The trope is so commonplace that the New York Times writer Brett Stephens had to write an op-ed debunking it.

Israel might be highly successful in tech, pharma, and agriculture, but, despite being the world leader in the defense sector, they are just not good at that genocide thing. They, for some reason, conducted clean decapitating strikes on Hezbollah and the military leadership of the Islamic republic. Inexplicably, the IDF lost hundreds of their men doing land operations in Gaza when they could have attacked Hamas from the air.

That Israel has no interest in mass killing is plainly obvious to anyone with a cursory knowledge of the Israeli society. Their faith in a two-state solution plummeted after the Simchat Torah Massacre — and that’s a simple fact. However, the harshest proposal under discussion is voluntary resettlement.

That Gazans desperately want to emigrate is also plainly obvious. Had they wanted to stay, there would be no need for Egypt to fortify the border with them. Unfortunately, the world has no interest in giving refuge to the poor starving Palestinians. The “international community” prefers to wield them as a tool against Israel. And that is the source of the conflict.

Western media today is increasingly allied with Qatar’s Al Jazeera on the question of Jews. Media malpractice is nothing new, but when people are being lied to like that, it’s usually because they are being prepped for a genocide.

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