The media’s willing enablers of Hamas

The New York Times recently issued a correction to a new story about the conditions in Gaza. A viral photo showing an emaciated young child was held up as a symbol of the suffering of Palestinians and was a catalyst for many to condemn Israel. The Times story and ensuring narrative didn’t tell the whole story about that particular child, who suffers from a rare health condition that hinders proper nutrition. Airbrushed out of the original image was his brother who appears to be in better health. This comes on the heels of an erroneous Washington Post report that claimed Israel was deliberately shooting Gazans desperately seeking food. In June, journalists accused Israel of deliberately targeting a hospital, when in fact, the Israeli Defense Forces targeted a tunnel underneath a hospital in Gaza and eliminated a key Hamas leader.

War journalism is a dangerous enterprise, and we should be thankful for the many who risk their lives to bring us reports from conflicts around the world. The fog of war means that mistakes will often happen, but when it comes to the Israel/Gaza conflict, these mistakes only seem to go one way: against Israel and in defense of the barbaric terrorist enterprise of Hamas. These false narratives, built one upon another, become catalysts for increased and brazen anti-Semitism. In the last few months, two Israeli embassy staffers, a Jewish couple, were shot dead at an event held at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. In Boulder, Colo., a deranged pro-Palestinian protestor threw a Molotov cocktail at pro-Israel demonstrators, killing a woman and injuring several others. And these are only two of the thousands of anti-Semitic attacks happening in Western cities around the globe since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack against Israel.

These events are fueled by a persistently false narrative about Israel, that the country is deliberately and purposefully causing suffering in Gaza. Many commentators use the word “genocide.” But while Israel and the IDF have made mistakes—like every nation in the conduct of a war—these charges are patently untrue. Lt. Col. John Spencer, chair of the Urban Warfare Institute at West Point, has written persuasively, “Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent.” What’s more, he finds that Israel, in an urban war, has taken more precautions, at risk to their own soldiers’ lives, than any military in history, including the United States.

As for the charge that Israel is keeping aid from Gazans, this is also false. Rather, it is Hamas that both steals food and resells it. Hamas controls the distribution points. Hundreds of trucks filled with supplies sit idle because the United Nations refuses to change the broken delivery system controlled by Hamas. Israel, meanwhile, has both organized its own Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which bypasses Hamas to deliver aid, and has recently conducted air drops of aid. The UN, reflexively anti-Israel, even rejected Israel and GHF’s offer to deliver UN supplies, choosing rather to let them sit idle. Hamas even threatened Gazans who bypassed the flawed UN delivery system.

Christians should be discerning when reading news about the war in Gaza. We should pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Our hearts should break at the deplorable conditions under which many Palestinians suffer. But our anger should be directed at Hamas, who are the genuine bad actors responsible for the situation.

Israel is held to an impossible standard by her critics and by the media (but I repeat myself). Neighbors with a truly genocidal terrorist network that seeks the death of every Jew, Israel faces a weekly barrage of rocket fire and terrorist attacks and is expected to flawlessly feed the very people who seek her demise.

Christians should sympathize with the plight of Palestinians and yet that should not blur our moral reasoning. There is no equivalence between the state of Israel and the thugs of Hamas. What’s more, only the deliberately blind will not see the ugly anti-Semitism that lurks underneath the world’s condemnation of Israel, and only the deliberately deaf will not hear the murderous chorus that shouts “from the river to the sea.”

This includes the journalists whose job it is to report the news as it is, to be discerning, to not treat the Gaza Health Ministry as a bastion of truth while dismissing defenses of Israel. When the narrative trend line after the war favors not the victims of Oct. 7 but their enemies, when the errors in reporting only go one way in this war, perhaps our vaunted fourth estate is not including all the news that is fit to print.