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Is Gaza Starving? Searching for the Truth in an Information War

(Free Press) Matti Friedman - After Oct. 7, Israelis started reading that Israel's response to the attacks - a war that Palestinians started, and which had barely begun at the time - was actually a "genocide." In the following months, hundreds of Israeli soldiers were killed fighting house-to-house in areas where Palestinian civilians - and combatants - were warned that troops were coming so they could leave. Reports of impending hunger engineered by Israel in Gaza have been commonplace for at least a decade and a half. Over the years, Israelis have been accused of fake massacres and rapes. The country's actions are lied about almost daily by people describing themselves as journalists, analysts, and representatives of the UN, often using statistics that are themselves untrue. For people in Israel, the constant barrage of libel is simply a fact of life. After years of this, average Israelis tune it out. In an attempt to understand the truth of the reports of acute hunger in Gaza, I called several trusted colleagues, veteran Israeli journalists intimately involved in covering events here. The consensus was that there were nearly no trustworthy sources regarding reality in Gaza - certainly not the "Gaza Health Ministry," which answers to Hamas; or Palestinian reporters intimidated by Hamas; or international organizations embroiled in various forms of collaboration with Hamas. All are engaged in a successful information campaign that uses Palestinian suffering, real and imagined, to catalyze international anger and tie Israel's hands. The international press isn't the answer. During my years as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, I saw coverage altered by Hamas threats to our staff, while this fact was concealed from readers. I know firsthand that nearly no information coming from Gaza can be taken at face value. One journalist who commands public trust and who speaks regularly to Palestinians they know is Ohad Hemo, the Palestinian affairs reporter for Channel 12. He reported on July 23 that food warehouses serving Hamas fighters are still full. "I don't know if people are dying directly from hunger, as is being claimed in Gaza, but there is hunger in Gaza." Even when aid makes it in, he explained, it's only fit young men who have any shot at fighting for the sacks and crates beside the trucks and food centers. The aid isn't reaching many who need it. You might have thought that hunger in Gaza would work against Hamas, forcing the group to have mercy on its own civilians and accept the ceasefire desired by Israel and the U.S. and currently under discussion in Qatar. But Hamas knows that the opposite is true. The disaster they've engineered in Gaza fuels the global campaign against Israel. One of the terrible facts of this war is that the Palestinians who started the war, and who constructed the twisted battlefield on which it has been fought, won't act to save their own people. Starvation and death serve the Hamas plan. That means that Israel must decide how far it wants to push - and when to stop.
2025-07-29 00:00:00
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