All the News in Gaza Is Coming From Hamas

Jacki Alexander

Palestinian fighters from the armed wing of Hamas take part in a military parade to mark the anniversary of the 2014 war with Israel, near the border in the central Gaza Strip, July 19, 2023. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

There is no freedom of the press in Gaza. If journalists don’t follow Hamas’ guidelines for press coverage, they are arrested, beaten, and/or tortured.

These are not controversial statements; they are based on reports from Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International.

When journalist Hajar Harb revealed doctors in Hamas’ Gaza Health Ministry were arranging illegal medical transfers out of Gaza for Palestinians who did not require medical treatment — and profiting off of them — she was harassed and threatened by both the police and by the doctors.

Fouad Jarada was arrested for writing a Facebook post critical of Hamas’ patron, Qatar. He was beaten and whipped during his detention.

Ismael el-Bozom was arrested and beaten for “drawings and writings critical of Hamas” that were uploaded to his Facebook account.

Amer Balousha was arrested for “Misuse of Technology” — a crime that does not exist in Palestinian law — for daring to post about corruption among Hamas leaders. He was beaten in custody and told, “It’s forbidden to write against Hamas, we will shoot you.”

In 2014, the Foreign Press Association called out Hamas for having “harassed, threatened or questioned [foreign reporters] over stories or information they have reported through their news media or by means of social media.” This claim was later confirmed by a Hamas official, who explained, “the security agencies would go and have a chat with these people. They would give them some time to change their message, one way or another.”

The journalists’ crime? Reporting on terrorists firing rockets from civilian areas, which meant to Hamas that these reporters were “collaborating with the occupation [i.e. Israel].”

That’s also why Al Jazeera immediately stopped an interview last year with an elderly Palestinian woman in Gaza who explained that the lack of food and water in Gaza wasn’t a result of aid not coming in. “All the aid reaches the Gaza Strip … Hamas takes everything to their homes,” she said.

Hamas not only stifles the messaging coming out of Gaza, but actively works to shape the narrative in its favor.

Just this week, Uvda — Israel’s premier investigative journalism show — divulged new information gleaned from Hamas’ plan for the October 7 attack. The New York Times previously reported on the plan, code-named “Jericho Wall,” but Uvda went further and revealed that Hamas always intended for journalists to “join the brigades and broadcast the operation in real time.”

Of course they did. In addition to providing important propaganda for domestic consumption, this allowed them to reframe their massacre of Israeli civilians as a heroic act of decolonization. Or, as they stated in their 18-page manifesto: “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7 was a necessary step and a normal response…”

Hamas is well aware of the power of narrative, and is actively trying to impact public opinion in their favor. And, it’s working.

With the international media largely unable to access Gaza during the war, more outlets and individuals are relying on “independent” voices broadcasting on social media.

But true independent voices are precisely the ones that Hamas has spent the last two decades silencing. Those that are left, have simply changed their message.

So, when international media outlets utilize Gazan journalists, photojournalists, and freelancers — without the disclaimer that they are a mouthpiece for Hamas — they are complicit in spreading misinformation that has real world consequences for news consumers and for Jews far beyond Israel’s borders.

Global attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions are at an all-time high. The fuel fanning these flames is the inaccurate reporting about Israel, oftentimes based on Hamas’ narrative:

Famine. Genocide. Ethnic cleansing. Al-Ahli hospital. Stealing Palestinian organs.

These false accusations have led to attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions from Tunisia to Dagestan. In America, antisemitic attacks are reaching “historic levels” according to FBI Director Christopher Wray — and that was four months ago.

Mainstream media organizations know that the news they are getting from Gaza is compromised. It’s tainted by Hamas’ oversight. Yet, they continue to amplify and legitimize these messages by giving them a platform, without even the bare minimum of a disclaimer.

So, the next time you read or watch news coming out of Gaza, here is your disclaimer: Hamas approves this message.

The author is the CEO and President of HonestReporting.

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Jews Provoked the Holocaust, Palestinian Leaders Say (Again)

Rafael Medoff / JNS.org

President Mahmoud Abbas

Palestinian Arab leaders can’t seem to make up their minds about the Holocaust. Sometimes they say it never happened. Sometimes they say it did happen, but Israel’s behavior is even worse. And sometimes—such as last week—they say the Jews themselves provoked the Holocaust.

Yasser Abu Sido, a senior official of the Palestinian Authority’s ruling party, Fatah, said on an Egyptian television program on Feb. 23 that “Hitler had obvious reasons” for perpetrating the Holocaust.

The Jews’ own provocative behavior was the reason, according to Abu Sido. “They planned to take control of Germany. They started to bring down Germany in terms of the economy and moral values.” That was why “Hitler reacted by making the Jews go on the streets and lick the sidewalks. They know this very well.”

Abu Sido’s blame-the-Jews approach to the Holocaust echoes words spoken repeatedly by P.A. chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

In an April 30, 2018 speech to the Palestinian National Council, Abbas explained the “reasons” why Jews were massacred throughout history, from the pogroms of the Middle Ages to the Holocaust. He began by dismissing the idea that antisemitism had anything to do with it. “Why did this happen? They say ‘it is because we are Jews,’ but that must be false,” he said, because “there were Jews in Arab countries. Why wasn’t there ever one incident against Jews [there] because they’re Jews? Not even once.” (An obvious falsehood.)

The real reason for the Holocaust, Abbas said, was the Jews’ own “social behavior, [charging] interest and financial matters.” Those Jewish actions are what provoked the Nazis, he claimed.

Just last year, the P.A. chairman repeated that perspective in a speech to Fatah’s Revolutionary Council (on Aug. 24, 2023). “They say that Hitler killed the Jews because they were Jews and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. Not true,” Abbas asserted. “[The Nazis] fought [the Jews] because of their social role, and not their religion… The [Nazis] fought against these people because of their role in society, which had to do with usury, money and so on and so forth.”

Somehow, that train of thought coexists peacefully in Abbas’s mind alongside the view he articulated in his infamous PhD dissertation-turned-book, “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism,” published in 1984. There he argued that fewer than one million Jews were killed by the Nazis, and they were the victims of a secret partnership between David Ben-Gurion and Adolf Hitler. Asked about the book by a Lebanese television interviewer in 2013, Abbas insisted that he stands by what he wrote, and even has written “seventy more books that I still haven’t published” on the topic.

It’s bad enough that mainstream P.A. leaders such as Abbas and Abu Sido believe such crazy things. But what is at stake is more than just a grotesque distortion of history; their rhetoric can help set the stage for further atrocities—because the logic behind the Holocaust comments by Abbas and Abu Sido is remarkably similar to the position that they and their P.A. colleagues have taken regarding the Oct. 7 pogrom.

Abbas and other P.A. leaders have characterized Oct. 7 as a “response to the occupation.” They have said the attack “did not happen in a vacuum.” They have portrayed Gaza as a “prison” from which Hamas was trying to “break free.” Every such justification is another way of saying that Israel’s own behavior was to blame for provoking the attack.

In a sense, Abbas is being consistent: The Jews provoked the pogroms of the Middle Ages. The Jews provoked the Holocaust. And the Jews provoked the murders, gang-rapes and beheadings of Oct. 7. That’s the common thread in all of his thinking on these subjects.

Blaming the Jews for their persecutors’ actions is not just adding insult to the injuries that the pogromists inflicted. It incites further violence by justifying whatever Arab terrorists do to Jews in the future. Such an extreme and irrational perspective—which is promulgated by P.A. leaders, disseminated by the P.A.-controlled media and taught in the P.A.’s schools—may be the single greatest threat to hopes for Arab-Israeli peace.

Originally published by The Jewish Journal.