Westerners Help Hamas Win the Propaganda War

 By Tom Gross  25 October 2025

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-westerners-helping-hamas-win-the-propaganda-war/

After two years of war, and despite Israel’s many successes on the battlefield, Hamas can also claim a kind of victory – at least for now. The terror group has survived and is once again exerting control in the areas of Gaza under its authority. Public executions, whippings, stonings and kneecappings have returned. In the first five days of the ceasefire, Hamas executed at least 100 Gazans.

Hamas’s survival was achieved not only through its remaining fighters and its holding of hostages, but also thanks to a chorus of western apologists. A coalition of so-called progressives and professional activists has excused, rationalised and defended the group’s actions across universities and in newspaper editorials. The BBC, Sky, the Guardian, the FT and the New York Times have all parroted Hamas talking points.

Tales of impending famine in Gaza, for instance, were broadcast as fact, sourced from UN bureaucrats and ‘aid agencies’ with long records of anti-Israel bias and, in some cases, open sympathy for Hamas. This isn’t journalism: it’s agenda-driven activism disguised as news. What the BBC and others failed to grasp is that, for Hamas, the western media is the battlefields.

From the outset, even before Israeli troops had entered Gaza, Hamas’s operatives and sympathisers in the West were shouting about ‘genocide’ and ‘famine’. It was a propaganda trap – and the western media walked right into it.

Consider, for example, these headlines from the early weeks of the conflict in 2023:

11,15,30 October, 6 November: “Fuel in Gaza will run out in 48 hours”

The pattern speaks for itself. It’s been the same story with Gaza being ‘on the brink of famine’ for the past two years. This is how it works:

Step one: The Hamas ‘health ministry’ makes up a casualty number which could be debunked by the most cursory statistical analysis.

Step two: Aid organisations repeat the number without independent confirmation.

Step three: UN agencies in Gaza (some staffed by Hamas members) cite the aid organisations.

Step four: Media outlets quote the UN agencies.

Step five: Hamas’s supporters in the West claim the numbers are ‘UN verified’.

UN officials have also contributed to the fiction directly. In May, Tom Fletcher, a humanitarian coordinator for the organisation, told BBC Radio 4: ‘There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.’ Almost no babies died as a result of the war in the following days. But that didn’t stop the BBC running the claim in bulletins and news outlets around the world repeating it, citing the BBC as a reliable source.

The Hamas narrative has been amplified, too, by disinformation campaigns driven by Iranian, Russian and Chinese state-linked bots on social media, which have exploited Gaza as a means of destabilising western societies. These regimes understood how easily such narratives could tap into a pre-existing willingness among many in the West to believe anti-Semitic libels.

Today, falsehoods are disseminated by journalists, academics and UN officials – cloaked in the language of human rights but echoing ancient prejudices.

Why were Hamas’s inflated casualty figures reported as facts? Why were incorrect claims of Israel bombing hospitals repeated without scrutiny – while confirmed cases of Hamas rockets hitting Israeli hospitals in Ashkelon and Beersheba were ignored? In part, this was down to journalistic complacency. The facts were accessible.

Independent researchers discovered that some of the most widely shared images of ‘starvation in Gaza’ were from Yemen. One prominent photo showing a skeletal child was highlighted by the media as evidence of famine. In reality, the child wasn’t malnourished due to famine. He had cerebral palsy, hypoxemia and other genetic conditions. That didn’t prevent the Guardian, Times and New York Times running it on their front pages, inflaming the emotions of millions of readers. Despite its resources, the much-touted BBC Verify unit missed these falsehoods.

The good news? Large swaths of the British public aren’t buying it. Scroll through the reader comments under articles about Israel, and you’ll find thousands of ordinary people who haven’t lost their critical faculties. They know casualty figures from terrorist regimes aren’t a sacred truth. They can spot propaganda when they see it.

Unlike some intellectuals, they don’t lose all logic the moment the word ‘Israel’ is uttered. As George Orwell once quipped: ‘You must be an intellectual. Only an intellectual could believe something quite so stupid.’ Today, he might have aimed that line at Guardian readers or BBC news staff.

In this war, it is not Israel or even Hamas that has lost its purpose, but the media.

 

Europe Has Apparently Learned Nothing

        by Majid Rafizadeh, Europe Has Apparently Learned Nothing :: Gatestone Institute

• Once again, Europe seems to have slipped into a dangerous fantasy: that engaging in polite diplomatic parleys with promises of sugar plums will tame Iran's rapacious ambitions.
• France, Germany, and the United Kingdom (E3), acting as the European Troika, declared their intention to revive the long-stalled nuclear negotiations with Iran.
• At the core of the E3's plan lies the deeply flawed assumption that Iran can be wooed into restraint through incremental "incentives." These generally consist of easing financial pressure, lifting trade restrictions, or delaying multilateral sanctions in exchange for ephemeral commitments.
• Sadly, Europe appears to be pursuing the worst lessons of appeasement: the dangerous illusion is that you can temper a ravenous aggressor by conciliation, weakness and generosity. The aggressor immediately sees that the best route for him is to demand more. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing.
• By treating the Iranian regime as a legitimate negotiating partner — and by discounting the moral and strategic gulf that separates it from liberal democracies — Europe is bankrolling the terrorism industry.
• President Donald J. Trump's current posture — doubling down on sanctions, refusing immediate diplomacy until leverage is secured — should jolt Europe out of its passivity.
• The European Troika's charade must stop. Anything less just prolongs the threat.

 

Can Trump’s Gaza Peace Deal Last?

By Jonathan Sacerdoti   https://jonsac.substack.com/p/can-trumps-gaza-peace-deal-last?triedRedirect=true

Together, Trump and Netanyahu have achieved what few thought possible: an agreement for the release of all hostages held in Gaza and a broad cessation of hostilities, at least for now. The is a big moment, but also an unclear and perilously risky one.

The deal, announced publicly but still potentially in flux, contains both substance and shadow. According to Israeli sources, 20 live hostages are to be released in the initial phase, with expectations that this will occur by Sunday night. Hamas, for its part, has confirmed a framework involving the end of fighting, Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (possibly 70 per cent of the strip), the entry of humanitarian aid, and a prisoner exchange. The guarantor states – Qatar, Egypt, Turkey, and the United States – have reportedly secured assurances against the resumption of war so long as both parties honour the terms.

Yet many details remain ambiguous, and deliberately so. Maps of Israeli withdrawal have been amended, and five crossings are set to open for aid. It’s reported that for every living hostage, as many as 100 convicted terrorists will be freed, among them senior figures sentenced to life for murder. This is a brutal price for Israel. But for many families awaiting a son, a daughter, a child, it is one they have long been willing to pay.

President Isaac Herzog said what millions feel: ‘All the people of Israel stand with the hostages. All the people of Israel stand with the families.’

But not all images comfort. From Gaza, videos immediately emerged of men who appear well-fed and strong, celebrating in the streets. Terror-affiliated media chant genocidal slogans – ‘Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud’ – whose message is one of eternal battle and endless death of Jews. Senior Hamas operatives, including Zaher Jabarin, photographed smiling in the Sharm El-Sheikh negotiation rooms, do not smile for peace. Their smile indicates that for them at least survival, and perhaps advantage, has been secured.

This agreement will bring a kind of calm. But calm is not peace. It is not justice. It is not safety. Even yesterday, Hamas-aligned media were promoting videos of their military wing training to abduct IDF soldiers, declaring such operations ‘inevitable.’ Meanwhile, those in Gaza who worked with Israel to protect non-Hamas aligned Gaza residents, such as Yasser Abu Shabab, have become targets of death threats and face possible annihilation in the vacuum of Israeli withdrawal. And what of the ‘innocent civilians’? If Hamas clings on to power it will reinforce it brutally and ruthlessly as it always does. If not, it can be easily replaced by other equally brutal Islamic terrorist factions keen to fill its place.

The Palestinian movement has not earned peace. It must show that it wants more than survival, more than revenge, more than martyrdom. That it wants a future. Until then, no agreement, no photo-op, no negotiated phrase can promise stability, even if the hostages come home for now.

In the days ahead, we will see weeping and celebration, heartbreak and healing. The hostages will come home, and with them, untold stories of horror and survival. We will also see funerals. Some will return dead. Some, not at all, for the Palestinian terrorists are likely to stall and lie at every possible opportunity and ensure the pain is dragged out. It is unlikely they will truly give up every last hostage.

No single agreement can reverse decades of indoctrination and incitement. No single gesture can dismantle the machinery of hatred that has ruled Palestinian political life and ideology for generations. In the days ahead, Israel will witness scenes that test the limits of the human heart. There will be reunions so overwhelming they will shake the nation to its core, and losses so final that no agreement on earth can soften them.

But even as we embrace the living, we must not ignore what else this deal unleashes. Celebrations erupt in Gaza not just for the return of prisoners, but for the return of convicted murderers, some of them architects of massacres, now welcomed home as heroes. It is a decision made under unbearable moral pressure, and one that may come to stain the future with fresh blood.

The Media are not allowed into Gaza.

  The media are merely conglomerates that sell column inches and air time. Others are state-funded bureaucracies with fixed ideological agendas.

 Journalists exhibit almost conceit when they insist that they have some natural right to stroll onto any battlefield. In truth, there are many places and proceedings to which journalists are denied access: cabinet meetings, intelligence briefings, jury deliberations, corporate boardrooms, trade negotiations, Papal conclaves, nuclear command bunkers, sports team strategy sessions, and Hollywood movie sets. The list is endless.

 No serious person imagines democracy has collapsed because reporters cannot barge into NATO’s war rooms. However, when it comes to Israel, the rules are magically rewritten. The expectation is that the Jewish state must fling wide its gates and allow hostile scribblers to tramp about a war zone as though it were an open-air museum.

 Consider, too, the international press’ record. Since day one of the war, they have parroted Hamas falsehoods, recycled invented casualty figures, and published photographs that even a  child could see are staged or fake. They have splashed headlines across the globe that would disgrace a provincial gossip paper.

 Coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has been the most contemptible display of reporting ever.

 When the press has consistently demonstrated hostility to Israel and indifference to truth, why would Jerusalem confer privileges upon it? The news media has shown itself to be neither neutral nor trustworthy. It has not yet grasped the contempt with which they are now held.

 Why should a country at war with a genocidal enemy invite in hostile agitators who will lie about its every move?

Starmer in UK has declared war on Western values

 

What is happening to our country? When did we give up on truth, democracy and Western values? When did we choose to reward terrorists, butchers, kidnappers and barbarians? Why is Britain turning its back not just on Israel, a democracy on the front line against Islamism, but also, increasingly, against its Jewish citizens?

The explosion in anti-Semitic sentiment and crimes in the UK is a national emergency, an existential threat to the liberal society painstakingly constructed since the 1850s, yet, unlike other kinds of racism, it is dismissed or ignored. Why? Is it elite prejudice of the sort Emile Zola exposed in France all those years ago? Is it electoral politics? Can’t Labour see that it is making everything worse with its unfair, mendacious attacks on Israel?

The double-standards are sickening. There was anger that Isaac Herzog, Israel’s Left-wing president, is in Britain meeting Sir Keir Starmer; yet the PM’s tête-à-tête with the Palestinian Authority dictator Mahmoud Abbas, holder of an anti-Semitic PhD from a Soviet university and proponent of pay-per slay support for the families of Palestinian terrorists, was uncontroversial. How can this be right?

And why doesn’t Starmer put maximum pressure on Hamas to release its hostages and quit Gaza, and make the case for a multinational, Arab-backed temporary government to rebuild it, rather than promising to unconditionally recognise a virtual Palestinian state that would still be committed to Israel’s obliteration? Does Labour only pretend to care about Gazan civilians?

Britain, courtesy of a ruling class that has lost its moral bearings, home of Left-wing broadcasters that no longer pretend to be objective, is now among the global centres of Israelophobia. The Jewish state is always on trial, guilty until proven innocent.

The savage Hamas blackmailers who were targeted in Qatar rebranded themselves as “the negotiation team”, even though they were the terror group’s most hardline leaders. Each one of their blood libels, of their incendiary calumnies, goes around the world, lapped up by a gullible audience that never learns. A little more mud sticks every time. Israel isn’t committing a genocide, as the Foreign Office has quietly admitted, and yet 45 per cent of voters believe, absurdly, that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews.

Israel needs to fight anew for its legitimacy every day. It is never given the benefit of the doubt. Britain, America, France: all made terrible errors in wartime, all are plagued by their fair share of rogues, and yet few believe that these nations have forfeited the right to exist as a result.

There is no empathy, no contextualisation, no historical knowledge, no interest in all the times Israel sought to agree a land-for-peace swap but was rejected. Israel must be perfect, more moral than anybody else, or else it will be demonised, vilified and sanctioned. Our Western-centric, secular intelligentsia refuses to accept that Palestinian elites are rejectionists. They don’t want a two-state solution: they want control, from the river to the sea, with the Jews ethnically cleansed.

Hamas pioneered a new form of warfare, squandering billions in aid to build a network of tunnels under homes, hospitals and mosques. This will be studied by military historians for centuries; Israel has so far only destroyed 35-40 per cent of all these tunnels. Gaza’s population is used as human shields, in the hope that as many as possible are killed to score propaganda points, while the terrorists hide in tunnels. It’s an obscenity, and the West falls for it.

Anti-Semitism is a virulent, ever-evolving pathogen. As a form of social contagion, it is ideal for social media, with its fake or misleading viral images, incendiary accusations and propaganda campaigns. A world where critical reasoning has been superseded by short-form videos is an ideal ecosystem for the resurgence of a medieval hatred based on rumour, gossip and hearsay.

In today’s post-Protestant woke world, which worships a certain form of weakness and glamourises the oppressed, Israeli Jews are too strong. Their country represents everything the woke detest: a patriotic, demographically healthy nation-state that believes in strong borders and military virtues, all with a biblical backdrop.

The Left, which used to see Israel as a case study in decolonisation and anti-imperialism, a beautiful story of the return of a dispossessed people to its indigenous homeland, has switched sides. It now falsely categorises Israel as a “settler-state”, like the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, countries that it deems to be axiomatically racist and guilty of “white supremacy” and “genocide”.

To the woke, the Balfour declaration, a great moment, was Britain’s original sin. The Labour Government should be fighting this tidal wave of madness; instead, it is trying to ride it. The scale of its betrayal is off the charts.

            Allister Heath. Full article at

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/10/labour-betrayal-british-jews-historic-disgrace/

 

 

The Media’s Starving Gazan Images: Narrative & Reality

Over the past few months, the news has been awash with reports on the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The media has picked up every story put out by Hamas without any checking.

Even as Israel increased the level of humanitarian aid entering the embattled coastal enclave, gradually reducing the intensity of the crisis, the media has not slowed down its onslaught of coverage.

Traditional news sites and online personalities have attempted to illustrate the severity of the situation and to frame a narrative of famine by focusing on individual cases of malnutrition.

Analyses conducted by The Free Press, investigative reporter David Collier, and others have, however, discovered that many of those profiled have suffered from pre-existing conditions that have been exacerbated by the humanitarian crisis. In many cases, the media did not initially provide its audience with this necessary information. With the rate of interfamily marriage within the Gazan community, genetic illnesses are very common.

While there is no doubt that the treatment of these pre-existing conditions has been hampered by the ongoing war, as well as the stealing of aid by Hamas and local gangs, and inflated food prices, it was pure media manipulation to place a focus on already-sick people and attempt to portray their suffering as solely the product of Israel’s war against Hamas.

The following are some of those with pre-existing health conditions who have been profiled by the mainstream media and by influential accounts on social media:

Mohammed Al-Mutawaq His emaciated body was splashed across the front pages of a variety of newspapers, including The New York Times and The Daily Express. No mention of him suffering from cerebral palsy.

Osama Al-Raqab The images of five-year-old Osama Al-Raqab first appeared in the media in April and May. Suffering from cystic fibrosis, Al-Raqab was transferred on June 12 to Italy for advanced treatment. However, this did not stop some media outlets from using his image more recently, devoid of any medical information or context.

Karam Khaled Al-Jamal. In late July, Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye reported that 27-year-old Karam Khaled Al-Jamal had passed away from starvation and “lack of proper nutrition.” No mention that he suffered from muscular dystrophy and partial paralysis since birth. 

Abdullah Abu Zarqa In late July, the images of a gaunt 4-year-old spread online, including a video of him saying that he was hungry. An investigation by the IDF found that Abu Zarqa suffers from “a genetic disease causing deficiencies, osteoporosis and bone thinning.” Four months prior to the Hamas invasion of southern Israel that precipitated the current war in Gaza, Abu Zarqa travelled to eastern Jerusalem with his mother for medical treatment. 

Mosab al-Debs. 14-year-old Mosab al-Debs’ image was used by a number of mainstream media outlets, including the BBC, Reuters, and CNN, portraying him as suffering from malnourishment amid the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. What these reports failed to report is that al-Debs was a special case, requiring a special feeding tube due to a brain injury he received a year prior.

 Hamza Mishmish. In a late July piece on the ongoing situation in Gaza, NPR attached a photo of an emaciated 25-year-old Hamza Mishmish being carried in the arms of another man, apparently due to “severe malnutrition and bone loss.” However, Hamza’s caretaker explained that he has an “extremely weak” immune system, suffers from cerebral palsy, and has been afflicted with other illnesses since birth. None of which was mentioned in the NPR report.

There is undoubtedly a serious humanitarian situation occurring in the Gaza Strip. However, the causes and the solutions are more complex and nuanced than the simplistic anti-Israel narrative promoted by the media and influential social media accounts.

When the media and online personalities try to deceive their audience by passing off photos of ill Gazans suffering from long-term ailments as evidence for wide-scale starvation and malnutrition in Gaza, they are not only misrepresenting reality but are falling short of their journalistic duty to report the truth.

For the full report from Honest Reporting, go to https://honestreporting.com/the-medias-starving-gazan-images-narrative-reality/

 

 

 

Hostage Families Demands is Music to Hamas

In a press conference on Sunday morning, the October Council—consisting of hostages’ families, bereaved relatives of Oct. 7 victims and mothers of reservists read statements aloud conveyed a uniform message to the powers-that-be in Jerusalem: End the war and bring home all the hostages. Their plea for a deal to return the captives held by Hamas for the past 22 months isn’t new.

On the contrary, accusing the government of pursuing its goals in Gaza at the expense of the hostages has become a protest-movement mantra that every Israeli knows by heart and it’s a narrative backed by the mainstream Israeli media and embraced by Hamas.

Former political/military officials whose hatred for Bibi outweighs any vestige of patriotism they once possessed go even further. They’re perpetuating the lie, spread by the Jewish state’s most virulent enemies, that Israel is guilty of war crimes also embraced by Hamas

Again, nothing novel about the noxious noise that’s music to Hamas’s ears. Ditto for the call to paralyze the economy via the revival of the general-strike idea.

But the current attempt to pressure the premier into meeting unreasonable demands came on the heels of the announcement that Israel would be taking over Gaza City. The Cabinet approved the plan after a 10-hour session, during which ministers debated among themselves and with IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir about how to proceed in the face of a failed “negotiation” process with Hamas.  

The upshot was a diluted version of the original proposal to take military control of the entire Strip. Nevertheless, the protest movement went into high gear, hysterically citing a leaked statement attributed to Zamir—that the operation would result in the death of the hostages and hundreds of soldiers.

There’s no concrete evidence that Zamir actually expressed such a sentiment. In fact he publicly stated that the Israel Defense Forces under his command would implement with vigor the course of action agreed upon by the political echelon.

This isn’t the reason that the Histadrut labor federation, which represents some 800,000 Israeli trade unionists, isn't endorsing the strike, however. No, it supports the protest movement in principle. This also is music to Hamas’s ears.

But the general strike it staged last September to pressure the government to reach a ceasefire deal with Hamas did little more than disrupt the lives of Israelis in a way that wasn’t helpful to the cause.

Aside from that, it turns out that the bulk of the workforce under the Histadrut umbrella is on vacation until the end of August. As for the hi-tech sector, which has said it will join the strike: One employee in that sector quipped that Sundays are very light on the keyboard in any case, so techies staying home on Aug. 17 will hardly be affected.

In an interesting twist, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum hasn’t lent its support to the event—or at least not yet. Perhaps its leadership was waiting to hear what Netanyahu had to say to the foreign press on Sunday afternoon, and later that evening to the Hebrew-language media, before settling on a strategy.

Speaking to journalists, Netanhahu said was that he was done with the “drips and drabs”—that he was aiming for the release of all 20 of the hostages. This was a reference to the captives who are still alive.

Still, the fear that the intention to defeat rather than deal with Hamas could easily be sidetracked wasn’t baseless. It stemmed, among other reasons, from reports of a meeting on Saturday in Ibiza, Spain between U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman al-Thani. Not a good sign.

To make matters more suspicious—or precarious—the Qatari news outlet Al Araby Al Jadeed, said that a delegation of Hamas leaders landed in Egypt on Monday to resume “ceasefire talks” where they left off. You know, with Hamas basking in the global campaign blaming Israel for a fake famine on Gaza, while refusing to release the hostages whose actual starvation it’s been filming for added torture. Just as it video-documented the atrocities it committed on Oct, 7, 2023—for the whole world to see. And conveniently forget.

When did cutting off one’s own nose ever succeed in spiting his foe’s face? The answer is that the protest movement considers Netanyahu a greater enemy than Hamas. Its prominent members have gone so far as to admit it, loudly and proudly and this is music to Hamas’s ears.

 (Based on article by Ruthie Blum at https://tinyurl.com/ynm3m637  )