Are Israel’s actions fueling antisemitism, or is antisemitic propaganda fueling lies about Israel that are then used as an excuse and justification for more antisemitism?
We’ve just commemorated three years since the October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel, and we’ve witnessed a widespread factual and moral inversion by those who see Palestinians as the ultimate victim of Israel in the war Hamas started. It’s worth taking the time now for a comprehensive look back through the three-year long propaganda campaign that has given cover to this type of depravity.
This widespread media campaign against Israel was launched by its enemies within minutes of the October 7 attack. Disinformation was laundered through the U.N. and biased NGOs like World Central Kitchen, as well as mainstream media such as The New York Times and ABC, and ultimately repeated by people in positions of authority who ought to have known better.
Some, like former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel or the Forward’s Rob Eshman, have blamed increasing anti-Israel animus and corresponding antisemitism on the actions of Israel or its Prime Minister. This narrative framing is a choice to bend to a massive propaganda campaign rather than confront it, even while those who promote it disingenuously portray themselves as allies.
The IDF has recovered documents handwritten by Yahya Sinwar that indicate the mass propaganda campaign against Israel was planned from the beginning, along with the October 7 attack itself. The Amit Terrorism Institute writes that Sinwar “emphasized the ‘public discourse’ aspect by representing the invasion as a ‘civilian, humanitarian, national’ operation to achieve the Palestinians’ ‘rights.’”
Moreover, Gaza journalist Motaz Azaiza has now revealed that Hamas ran a chat group on WhatsApp, which it used to set the media agenda and suppress reports of opposition or dissent. He said, according to the Jerusalem Post, “photographers in Gaza have become accustomed to lowering their cameras the moment someone says something bad about Hamas, because anyone who dares to show reality is persecuted relentlessly.” Azaiza also said, according to Honest Reporting, that “every journalist in Gaza” was in the group.
It’s time to re-examine the long series of journalistic, governmental, and NGO missteps that brought us where we are today.
Al Ahli Hospital Lies
October 7 denial began as soon as the day of that savage attack in which Israeli civilians were tortured, raped, burned alive, murdered and kidnapped. The first serious strike in the media information war, however, came ten days later, on October 17, 2023.
That afternoon, reports began to circulate that an Israeli air strike had hit a Gaza hospital, killing hundreds of people. Even reputable news outlets rushed to print the incendiary slander without waiting for confirmation, based on the word of “Palestinian officials.” Who were those “Palestinian officials”? Hamas, of course. A Wall Street Journal headline that afternoon (subsequently amended) read, “Israeli Airstrike on Gaza Hospital Kills More Than 500, Palestinian Officials Say.”
Within 24 hours, it was revealed that an errant rocket fired by a Gaza terror organization had hit the parking lot of the hospital, and the number of people killed was nowhere even close to what was originally reported by Hamas. Subsequent analysis confirmed this conclusion.
It didn’t matter. The initial story was too good to check, and apoplectic reporters spread it around the world before, as they say, the truth got its pants on.
Nor did the fact that the story wasn’t true, or that Hamas had initiated the war only ten days prior, stop the terror group from laying the groundwork for its false claim to be the victim of the war it started, and even, already, of the biggest lie of all, the genocide libel. The Journal’s report included a quote from Palestinian Authority Civil Defense Spokesman Mahmoud Basal: “The massacre at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital is unprecedented in our history … we’ve witnessed tragedies in past wars and days, but what took place tonight is tantamount to a genocide.”
This was just the beginning. The juicy lie about the hospital was most likely told by terror operatives to cover for their mistake. What they learned from it, however, was how ready the media was, even less than two weeks after the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, to parrot claims that cast Israel as the villain in the war Hamas started.
Predictably, the following three years saw an avalanche of false claims about Israel.
The Genocidal Misquote
Next up was the New York Times’s Megan K. Stack, who on October 30, 2023 falsely quoted Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Stack claimed Gallant said, “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” Stack seems to have gotten the quote from Human Rights Watch’s Ken Roth, who seems to have gotten it from Al Arabiya. The inflammatory claim stood for almost three months until it was corrected: the real quote was, “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything.” (Emphasis added.) The misquote was picked up everywhere from NPR to college newspapers, and used as part of the basis for the false claim that Israel was acting with genocidal intent.
False Casualty Claims, Repeated Ad Infinitum
False claims about the number of civilian casualties were ubiquitous throughout the war and continue to this day. It was bad enough that many chose to credulously repeat Hamas’s casualty figures, which the Associated Press acknowledged almost from the start of the war did not distinguish between civilians and combatants, or between those killed by Israel and those killed by Palestinian misfires. Eventually those figures were also shown to include natural deaths.
Some, though, like actress Cynthia Nixon, MSNBC, and the medical journal Lancet, chose to even out-Hamas Hamas.
One of the earliest and highest profile examples of exaggerating the casualties came during Nixon’s December 6, 2023 appearance on the ABC television show The View. Nixon not only took Hamas’s casualty count at face value, she took the terror group’s propaganda a step further by claiming that all of the dead were civilians – a claim that was obviously false on its face.
On at least two occasions in late 2023 and early 2024, the same false claim, that all of the reported casualties were civilians, was made on MSNBC.
The politicized medical journal the Lancet also attempted to outdo Hamas’s own casualty figures. The British publication included an article claiming “the Palestinian MoH under-reported mortality by 41%.” The article was quickly debunked as suffering from “a methodological problem” and “bad data,” but not before its findings were reported by the Guardian and others.
Inflation aside, the constant repetition of casualty counts was itself a form of propaganda. There has never in modern history been a full-scale kinetic war that was fought without civilian casualties. According to military expert John Spencer, “Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that’s fought an urban war.” Israel was fighting a defensive war that it did not start and did not ask for, and civilian casualties were inevitable. Repeating the numbers over and over, however, created the impression that Israel (and, of course, only Israel) somehow should have magically fought a war with no civilian deaths.
By August of 2025, some media were running with the patently false claim that 83 percent of those killed were civilians – a claim that was debunked in the very article that first reported it. (Hint: identifying 17 percent of casualties by name as terrorists does not mean the remaining 83 percent were civilians.)
As Matt Taibbi has pointed out, wildly exaggerating numerical data is “is one of the defining features of a moral panic.”
The Abuse of Child Combatants
An even more emotional aspect of reporting on casualties involves the deaths of children. Any death of a child in war, including a combatant, is tragic, without a doubt. Those who emphasized the number of children claimed – by Hamas – to have been killed, however, nearly always omitted the fact that prior to October 7, it was well-known that Hamas recruited and employed child soldiers.
A Washington Institute analysis of casualties from October 7, 2023 to May 11, 2025 indicates that among those aged 10-19, males outnumber females, and among those aged 15-19, males as a share of casualties outpaces their age demographic’s representation in the population. This indicates that individuals in these age groups were employed as combatants. Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib has also highlighted the use of child soldiers by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which he calls “routine.” Even the Washington Post eventually reported that Hamas “recruit[s] teenage boys for missions like keeping lookout or placing explosives along Israeli military routes.”
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross’s database of International Humanitarian Law, only those below the age of 15 are barred from serving in a military capacity. While Hamas is not exactly known for following international law, the ICRC database illustrates that it is not uncommon worldwide for 15-17 year olds to fight. (Nor it is likely that Hamas has accepted the Abbas government’s accension to the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which raises military age to 18.)
Yet the United Nations defines a child soldier as “any person below 18 years of age who is or who has been recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity.” When the U.N. makes a finding that “Israel has killed 20,000 children and injured 44,000 more since 7 October 2023,” they have defined children as “every human being below the age of 18 years.”
The U.N., therefore, is knowingly categorizing some number of combatants as “children.” Moreover, rather than blaming Hamas, the party that both started the war and that employed these 15-18 year olds, and probably even younger, for military purposes, the U.N. blames Israel.
In doing so, the U.N. is both engaging in and encouraging others to engage in a distortion intended to tar Israelis as “child-killers,” playing on a trope about Jews that dates back to the 12th century blood libel.
Abuse of Hospitals and Humanitarian Facilities
While medical facilities are considered protected under Rule 28 of the ICRC’s customary international humanitarian law database, that Rule also states that such facilities “lose their protection if they are being used, outside their humanitarian function, to commit acts harmful to the enemy.” The commentary explains, “examples of acts harmful to the enemy include the use of medical units to shelter able-bodied combatants, to store arms or munitions, as a military observation post or as a shield for military action.” Article 21 of the Geneva Conventions is similar.
It’s been known since at least 2014 that Hamas uses medical facilities for military purposes. In doing so, Hamas forfeits the protections that such institutions would otherwise have.
For Hamas, placing weapons or military personnel in a hospital is a win-win proposition. Either Israel refrains from attacking those military assets – a Hamas win – or Israel attacks them, and Hamas gets a propaganda win. During the October 7 war, we often saw supposedly reputable news organizations playing right into Hamas’s ploy.
For example, a December 2024 Associated Press report published on PBS’s site was headlined, “Israeli troops burn northern Gaza hospital after forcibly removing staff and patients, officials say.” The article stated, “Israel’s military said it was conducting operations against Hamas infrastructure and militants in the area of the hospital, without details. It repeated claims that Hamas fighters operate inside Kamal Adwan but provided no evidence.” The fact that Hamas had a documented history, going back to at least 2014, of using hospitals for military purposes was ignored, as was the admission, a year prior, of Ahmad Kahalot, the Director of the that hospital: “I was recruited to Hamas in 2010 with the rank of Brigadier General. There are employees in the hospital who are military operatives of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades – doctors, nurses, paramedics, clerks, and staff members.”
The same narrative surfaced during the fighting in Lebanon as well, falsely claiming that Israel rather than Hezbollah was violating international law with respect to hospitals.
In April of 2024, José Andrés told Reuters that Israel had deliberately targeted his World Central Kitchen aid workers, even though a Hamas terrorist had boarded one of the trucks and fired into the air, causing a case of mistaken identity that made the convoy a target. The day after the IDF report explained the tragic but accidental case of mistaken identity, the celebrity chef told ABC’s Martha Raddatz that Israel was committing a “war against humanity itself.” The exterminationist claim echoes literal Nazi propaganda, for what can you do with a group that is at “war against humanity itself”?
Yet ABC chose to promote this quote in its online headline.
The Baseless and Absurd Claim that Israel Intentionally Shoots Palestinian Kids in the Head
Just after the one-year commemoration of the barbaric attack on Israel that started the war, the New York Times jumped in again with one of the most combustible slanders of the conflict.
The article was very, very carefully constructed. On a close read, it never actually said that Israeli soldiers were shooting Palestinian children in the head. It could not, because it had no evidence to support such a claim. It did everything possible, however, to create the framing so that a casual reader would think that was the case, indeed, even think he read it.
The October 9, 2024 Guest Essay by Feroze Sidhwa begins:
I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8. I’ve volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti, and I grew up in Flint, Mich. I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones. But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total.
At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby. But after returning home, I met an emergency medicine physician who had worked in a different hospital in Gaza two months before me. “I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,” I told him. To my surprise, he responded: “Yeah, me, too. Every single day.”
Sidhwa sets the scene by saying that he assumed the children he saw were shot by soldiers, Israeli soldiers, we can infer. But neither he nor any of the other nine quoted doctors who treated children with bullet wounds in their heads even claimed to have seen who shot the children. Why would they have – doctors generally see patients after such an event occurs and rarely witness it. Only one doctor, Dr. Khawaja Ikram, even claimed to have asked who shot his patient, and the answer was simply a “sniper.”
Israelis were not the only ones with guns in Gaza and not the only snipers. Hamas has a history of attacking its own people, and reportedly shot at Gaza civilians during this conflict as well. While these doctors saw children who had been tragically shot, the Times presents no evidence as to who shot them, only innuendo.
Like its sequel, the Nick Kristof rape dog libel, this was published in the opinion section rather than the news section, because there was insufficient evidence to back up its insinuations. Indeed, in a December 2024 phone call, Sidhwa admitted to the Times of Israel, “there’s no way of proving” his claim.
It should have been astonishing that the New York Times would print such blather. To anyone familiar with that paper’s coverage of Israel, though, it was no surprise at all.
A similar libel had appeared in the LA Times eight months prior by Dr. Irfan Galaria, who went on to become one of the doctors quoted by the NY Times. In the LA Times, Dr. Galaria also does not claim to have seen or even asked who the shooters were. He simply assumes: “snipers apparently stayed behind.”
Portraying Israel as the Aggressor Against Hezbollah
Attacks on Israel emanating from Lebanese territory began on October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas’s attack, and escalated. In July of 2024, twelve Israeli Druze children were killed by a Hezbollah rocket. Yet, when Israel targeted Hezbollah members with the now-famous pager attack, some news outlets chose to omit the reason and portray Israel as the aggressor against Hezbollah: “The attack raises fears of an escalation,” NPR wrote.
Assertion That Israel Can’t Invade Rafah
Another canard was that Israel could not invade Rafah without inflicting major civilian casualties. In March of 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris told ABC news, “Let me tell you something: I have studied the maps. There’s nowhere for those folks to go,” and implied there may be “consequences” if Israel proceeded. President Biden himself later made similar comments.
Of course, no country can fight a war by leaving a safe haven for its enemy to hide out, and the suggestion that it should was preposterous. Soon afterwards, Israel successfully evacuated nearly a million civilians from Rafah. Eventually, in October of 2024, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 attack, was killed in Rafah, and a map of the Rafah tunnels in which he had been hiding was found on his body.
Israel Falsely Accused of Blocking Aid
In March of 2024 NPR falsely reported that thirty thousand aid trucks were “backed up at the main border crossing with Egypt, waiting for Israeli approval to enter,” and New York Times columnist Nick Kristof repeated that misinformation to his 1.7 million followers on X. Both NPR and Kristof eventually retracted the sensationalist claim.
Other than two specific time frames (immediately after the 10/7 attack for a period of about two weeks, and another two and a half months in 2025), Israel allowed and facilitated aid into Gaza – even while Israeli children were still being held hostage. By July of 2025, close to two years into the war, “Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime,” according to John Spencer.
Meanwhile, the known fact that Hamas was causing hardship in Gaza by hijacking aid was largely overlooked by much of the media for much of the war. In July of 2025, nearly two years into it, the Washington Post reported, “earlier in the war, Hamas relied on taxes imposed on commercial shipments and the seizure of humanitarian goods, according to Gazans and current and former Israeli and foreign officials.” After the final ceasefire had been in effect for several months, it was revealed that Hamas had intentionally hidden baby formula to worsen conditions and damage Israel. The U.N. finally admitted that Hamas obstructed aid in July of 2026.
By the spring and summer of 2025, as Hamas weakened, the hysteria of the propaganda campaign grew, along with the media’s willingness to promote unsubstantiated claims. In May a U.N. official, Tom Fletcher, told the BBC, “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them. I want to save as many as these 14,000 babies as we can in the next 48 hours.” This turned out to be a tremendously wild exaggeration of a prediction that 14,000 children could potentially suffer from acute malnutrition within a year. The ludicrous claim was repeated by ABC news and others.
At the end of that month, U.S.-sponsored aid distribution sites opened in Gaza. Within two months of the American-led aid sites opening up, the Washington Post reported that Hamas was broke: “Hamas is facing its worst financial and administrative crisis in its four-decade history, facing stiff challenges in mustering the resources it would need to continue to fight Israel and rule Gaza.” The Post reported, based on a source within Gaza, that Hamas had been profiting from the international aid going in to Gaza. “Hamas profited ‘especially off the aid that had cost them nothing but whose prices they hike up,’ said a Gazan contractor who has worked at Gaza’s border crossings during the war.”
The media responded with a campaign of staged or out of context images designed to maximize outrage at Israel.
The New York Times ran a photo of a severely emaciated child wearing only a diaper, held by its mother in a framing reminiscent of paintings of Jesus and Mary, on its print edition front page. The headline said, “Young, old and sick starve to death in Gaza: ‘There is nothing.’” The subsequent correction, which explained that the child, Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, “had pre-existing health problems,” was seen by a fraction of the number of people who had seen the front-page photo.
The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC, and several British outlets had stories about starvation in Gaza the same week. Widely shared images of people holding empty pots, lined up for aid, were eventually revealed to have been manipulated. But by July 28, Israel had unilaterally announced a “humanitarian pause” in the fighting to send in more aid. Hamas was then able to hang on for another two months.
Exaggerating Public Anti-Israel Opinion
The depth of support for Hamas was a fiction as well.
Canadian writer Warren Kinsella has documented how Hamas created an electronic army to boost its messaging, as well as how school walk-outs that appeared spontaneous were in fact coordinated by the Arab Resource and Organizing Center. Anti-Israel protests in the U.S. were funded by Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based CCP sympathizer who is married to a co-founder of the anti-Israel group Code Pink.
The Gaza Flotillas were a publicity stunt eventually revealed to have been backed by Hamas.
Journalist Asra Nomani has revealed that recent protests across countries and continents were centrally coordinated by a steering committee whose members included Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. The goal of the protests wasn’t “simply to communicate a political position but to encourage audiences to emotionally identify with a movement and participate in its activities.”
And So Many More
The above does not purport to be a complete list. There was the Israel is killing journalists lie, the Israel is shooting civilians at a U.S. aid site lie, the Israel is “carpet-bombing” lie, most recently, the “NAZA” lie. There was blaming Israel for the October 7 Hamas attack, or otherwise justifying that attack.
And the biggest lie of all, the culmination of all of the other lies, the genocide lie.
Even after (now former) International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan said twice that the evidence against Israel cannot support a claim of genocide, even after the “International Association of Genocide Scholars” was revealed to be a sham organization, even after the claim that the International Court of Justice found it “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide was debunked by its own retiring president Joan Donoghue, the claim persists.
Over seventy-five retired senior U.S. military leaders and legal experts have now refuted the genocide lie as well. This, too, is unlikely to stop those who insist on promoting it.
It’s a reversal of victim and offender – in truth, the only genocide in Gaza was the one that Hamas attempted on October 7, 2023. According to Dr. Michel Thieren, the World Health Organization’s representative to Israel, however, “the guilt had already been assigned” to Israel from as early as October 8, 2023. “When we talk about genocide,” he continued, according to the Jerusalem Post, “very early, these people pronounced these two terms [genocide and famine], they were thrown out right from the start. So the crimes were already predetermined, and then the organizations tried to demonstrate them.”
Recall here that, as noted above, the initial Wall Street Journal reporting about the rocket misfire at Al Ahli hospital, on October 17, 2023, was already using the word “genocide.”
Each and every one of the above lies and more have been blasted across social media platforms creating a worldwide web of falsehoods and slanders against Israel. This massive disinformation campaign has provided an excuse, not only for those who hate Israel, but for those who hate all Jews, to let loose.
Some who claim to be Israel’s allies are responding to this in all of the wrong ways. Putting the blame on Israel, its Prime Minister, or its policies, calling it “tough love” and claiming they just want Israel to be better, is a transparent political maneuver that simply validates the propaganda to achieve personal gain. Friends don’t attack friends and claim it is done for the other’s own good – that’s a tactic of domestic abusers.
Israel’s true allies – and it has many – are fighting back against the lies and propaganda. Real friends of Israel should indeed be telling the truth, not to Israel, but about Israel. Three years since Hamas’s horrific invasion, the work to get the truth out is just beginning.
