Hamas Propaganda

A Palestinian pays for goods at a street market in Gaza City, Wednesday, July 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

 

"It was all staged."

"There was food in the next room -- the hostages who escaped from tunnels told us this."

"The captors are not starving. Our people are."

"We do not deny the humanitarian need in Gaza. But we ask the world not to fall for Hamas's lies."

"Condemn Hamas and tell them: You want to move forward? Release the hostages."

"In the last week alone, we've brought in 30,000 tons of aid -- 30 tons by air yesterday alone. The UN has almost 800 trucks they could distribute -- and failed to do so."

"So a lot could have been done."

Israeli President Isaac Herzog 

 

"Why are German and international news agencies continuing to use his [photographer working for Turkey's state-operated Anadolu Agency] images when many are clearly biased or staged?"

German newspaper Bild

 

"[Be forewarned of] manipulation attempts through professionally produced press photography."

"All parties involved in this war -- including media and intelligence services -- are using the power of imagery like never before to shape public perception." 

German Journalists' Association

 

 

According to a special report produced by The Press Service of Israel, citing United Nations' own numbers, 85 percent of the aid entering the Gaza Strip by truck since May 19, has been stolen. Black market profiteers and inflation have resulted in much of the international aid taken by force ending up in Gaza markets, at mark-ups making them unaffordable for most Palestinians. The food and medical supplies meant to be distributed freely among Palestinian civilians have instead been forcefully diverted to become pricey goods unavailable to the very people the aid was meant to help. 

"Where is the photographer? Who is standing around him? What do the people depicted in the picture see? Do they see what we suspect, for example a food distribution? Or are they facing photographers?"

"The images also have an additional function. They are intended to overwrite the brutal images of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Many people don't even remember these pictures."

"Hamas is a master at staging images."

"I assume that many of these pictures with starving and sick children are simply staged or come from other contexts." 

Emeritus history professor and photography expert Gerhard Paul, University of Flensburg, Germany 

The Suddeutsche Zeitung recently published an expose on the use of staged imagery by Hamas to convince international opinion that Israel has embarked on a genocidal program to prevent food and medical aid from reaching Palestinians in Gaza, suffering under the Israeli Defense Forces' invasion to destroy the terrorist group's capacity to carry on its intentional destruction of Israel. Hamas, infamous for its strategy of installing themselves among the general population, for placing its weapons in schools and hospitals, placing its rocket staging areas in dense population areas, uses civilians for cover.

 

The Hamas propaganda machine rests its case to the international community on the numbers of Palestinian citizens it claims become victims of Israeli bombs; those very citizens of Gaza whom Hamas deliberately places in harm's way, counting on them as sacrificial lambs to the Hamas agenda portrayed as victims of Israel's ruthless bombing campaigns which could readily be halted should Hamas surrender to the forces that engage in stopping it from conducting further carnage in Israel among Israeli citizens.

 

President Herzog, in his press appearance held up the two photographs of Israeli hostages Eviatar David and Rom Breslavsky, emaciated on the verge of death through deliberate withholding of food. While Israel is expected by the international community to provide humanitarian aid to the very population in which the greater majority expressed support for Hamas, for its barbaric savagery during the October 7 invasion that saw 1,200 Israelis slaughtered, Hamas gleefully publishes videos of its sadistic torture of Israeli hostages.

 

 

 

The international press treats these revelations of Palestinian terrorism and the results of their death-cult pledges to destroy Israel and kill all Jews as humdrum non-news, but the very country that is engaged in protecting its population from mass lethal psychopathy is damned and condemned for the condition in which Palestinian Gazans find themselves, while the terrorist group that governed Gaza and which uses its population as a living shield is described as 'resisting their oppressors'. 

 

The photographer whose work is being labelled as deceptive by Bild and Suddeutsche Zeitung regularly posts anti-Israel content on social media, while his photographs staged and otherwise, are published by the BBC and CNN along with other legacy mainstream media. Germany's press circles have revealed the manipulation of war photographs, condemned by The German Journalists' Association. 

 

As for the food appearing in the markets selling at prices inflated up to 300 percent, Palestinian sources within Gaza informed The Press Service of Israel that much of that food originated from international aid, including U.S. shipments for months on end. That food is stamped as humanitarian aid, visible to anyone within Gaza with the wherewithal to make that purchase. 

 

Al-Sahaba market in the Gaza Strip, July 28, 2025.  (photo credit: TPS-IL)

 

 

 

Slandering Israel Comes Easy

"Hundreds of aid trucks have entered Gaza with Israel's approval, but the supplies are standing idle, undelivered."

"The reason? The UN refuses to distribute the aid. Hamas and the UN prevents the aid to reach the civilians in Gaza."

"The world deserves to know the truth."

"But BBC, CNN, Daily Express and The New York Times spread a misleading story using a picture of a sick, disabled child to promote a narrative of mass starvation in Gaza -- playing into the hands of Hamas's propaganda war."

"Without proper disclosure. Without medical context. Without journalistic ethics." 

Israeli Foreign Ministry  

Humanitarian aid packages waiting to be picked up on the Palestinian side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing on July 24, 2025. “The UN refuses to distribute the aid,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry says. Photo by  by Amir Levy/Getty Images

 British investigative journalist David Collier wrote an explanation that one of the children used as a shaming condemnation against Israel purportedly failing to ensure that sufficient humanitarian aid reaches the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, a child with the surname al-Matouq "suffers from cerebral palsy, has hypoxemia, and was born with a serious genetic disorder", data extracted from a 2025 medical file.

 

A BBC documentary titled "Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone" was discovered by Mr. Collier to have been narrated by the son of a senior Hamas official. That revelation led to embarrassment on the part of the British public broadcaster and a retraction of the documentary. The photograph of the emaciated child saw sensational use by international media testifying to the devastation brought by Israel's war in Gaza and the resulting aid crisis there.

 

Last Thursday, the New York Times digital story was entitled "Gazans are dying of starvation", over the image of the skeletal child. "A horrifying image encapsulating the maelstrom of human misery gripping Gaza" was how the Daily Express captioned the heart-rending photograph of Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub Al-Matouq.  

 

Unlike his brother standing by his side, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq suffers from cerebral palsy.

 

And then there is the image of five-year-old Osama al-Rakab, yet another child whose photograph saw use as an illustration of the threat of child malnourishment resulting from Israel's 'blockade' of humanitarian aid entering the Strip. Al Jazeera  featured the little boy's skeletal torso throughout a number of Italian media outlets to extract maximum disgust from news readers, holding Israel responsible for the pitiable condition of the child.

 

Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), divulged that al-Rakab "suffers from a serious genetic illness unrelated to the war", and with his mother and brother had been transported out of Gaza to an airport in Israel destined for treatment abroad. "This is what a modern blood libel looks like: A sick child. A hijacked photo. A lie that spreads faster than truth", wrote the Israeli Foreign Ministry on its X account.

 

A third infant, 11-month-old Sila Barbakh was featured on Israel's official X account, who "isn't starving", but rather "suffers from a pre-existing chronic gastrointestinal illness, unrelated to the war". In none of these pathetic photos of children suffering from dread diseases were they captioned 'for illustrative purposes only', unrelated to Hamas's wildly successful public relations' campaign aimed at the gullible West.  

 

His name is Osama al-Raqab. He has cystic fibrosis, a serious genetic illness. He’s been in Italy receiving treatment since June 12. Israel enabled his medical transfer from Gaza.

 

The Times of London found it useful when featuring tiny Barbakh's suffering from starvation to expand y explaining that the baby weighted a mere "seven-and-a-half pounds". According to data published by the Hamas-operated Gaza Health Ministry, 56 Palestinians had died in July of starvation. About half the total number reputed to have died of starvation since the war began on October 7, 2023 when Palestinian terrorists led by Hamas stormed into southern Israel to launch its campaign of rape, pillage, torture and mass slaughter. 

 

Humanitarian supplies handover was shifted away from the United Nations in May, with an U.S.-backed, Israeli-supported group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), taking the initiative. Civilians in Gaza had then to travel into areas controlled by Israeli military to receive the supplies. That solved the issues involved in Hamas armed operatives taking control of aid-delivery trucks to have the goods they carried stuffed into Hamas warehouses, and withheld from the civilian population. Some of that aid ended up at open-air marketplaces selling for exorbitant prices. Most of it was sidelined for the exclusive use of Hamas operatives.

 

Today, the IDF invited dozens of international journalists to the Kerem Shalom crossing inside Gaza, to see for themselves. Israeli Foreign Ministry

 

Reportedly, GHF distributed close to 90 million meals to civilians while facing significant opposition from Hamas, which had attacked and murdered a dozen Palestinian employees of GHF who had been working with the group to help distribute the aid. According to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Hamas offered bounties to any of their followers who kill American contractors or any Palestinians assisting their endeavours in providing aid.

 

The United Nations has accused Israel of reportedly killing hundreds of Gazans seeking aid in what is  essentially an active war zone. Many more have died resulting from stampedes in the chaos of crowds of Palestinians vying among one another to receive aid. A week ago Israel announced its intention to once again commit to airdrops of humanitarian aid, alongside Arab nations, including Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Airdrops had been suspended in view of properties being destroyed and civilians being hit by the airdrops.

 

People carrying aid parcels from the privately run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) walk along the Salah al-Din road near the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip (Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images)

 

The New York Times claimed that the "Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war". In response, the Israel Defense Forces released a video showing Hamas militants with rifles "looting an aid truck", while civilians gathered about.  These same images were shared by Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian-American academic, senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. Showing Hamas operatives stealing aid during an earlier ceasefire.

 

"Right here before your eyes! But according to NGOs & media, there's still 'no evidence' of theft", charged Alkhatib who has been a vocal critic of Hamas and the Netanyahu government, both. Alkhatib shared a video in another post, showing Hamas police officers who stripped, arrested and beat Palestinians who had gone out to the GHF aid distribution site, and paid the consequences, with the aid they had gathered taken from them, for their pains. 

 

 A truck loaded with food on the Israeli side of the border crossing heads back into Gaza. However, the food is sitting for days or weeks before it can be distributed. The U.N. and aid groups say they face a host of problems that include a shortage of trucks and fuel due to the war, as well as criminal gangs that are looting the supplies.    Maya Levin for NPR

Drama on the High Seas

"It's appropriate that Greta the anti-Semite and her Hamas-supporting friends see exactly who the terror group Hamas is, what atrocious acts they carried out against women, the elderly and children, and who Israel is fighting to defend against."

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz

 

"While Greta and others attempted to stage a media provocation whose sole purpose was to gain publicity -- and which included less than a single truckload of aid -- more than 1,200 aid trucks have entered Gaza from Israel within the past two weeks."

"In addition, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has distributed close to 11 million meals directly to civilians in Gaza."

"There are ways to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip -- they do not involve Instagram selfies. The tiny amount of aid that was on the yacht and not consumed by the 'celebrities' will be transferred to Gaza through real humanitarian channels."

Israeli Foreign Ministry 

The yacht, carrying 12 people, set off from Catania, Italy on 3 June  Reuters

 

Drama, expressions of foreboding and fear, sinister allegations that Israeli authorities would exercise an agenda of vengeance against a small ship's crew of avowed anti-Israel activists who accuse the Jewish state of 'genocidal' intentions against Palestinians in Gaza as payback for the Palestinian terrorist attack against Israeli civilians and foreign farm workers on October 7, 2023, exploited the occasion for its sympathetic and gullible audience led to believe that those aboard the pro-Palestinian Freedom Flotilla Coalition vessel Madleen faced death in their bold attempt to feed 'starving' Palestinians.

 

This theatre of the high seas set out to demonstrate how noble were the yacht's passengers and crew in risking life and limb to show the world how inhumane Israel is in its ongoing battle against Palestinian civilians -- not the Hamas terrorists who have controlled life in Gaza, and continually placed the population in direct and deliberate danger by attacking Israel, and in so doing drawing Israeli return fire -- has been, sacrificing civilians to ferret out the dedicated 'fighters' among them.

 

That the 'fighters' are unadulterated terrorists whose death cult agenda time and again strikes at Israel and its population, is construed instead by its Western supporters as 'freedom fighters' opposing 'occupation'. That Palestinian leaders have time and again in the past 80 years turned down the opportunity to achieve a state of their own through negotiations, which end predictably in their refusal to recognize the State of Israel, and have chosen instead ongoing violent attacks is of no moment to supporters of Hamas. Nothing deters them from their belief of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups as 'liberators'.

 

The Madleen departs for Gaza.   Fabrizio Villa / Getty Images

 

The use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, the openly stated Hamas argument that in their zeal to destroy Israel and retain the entire geographic area 'from the river to the sea' representing Palestinian patrimony, not the historic ancestral Judean land that it is, seems purely incidental to the empathetic activists who swear to break through the internationally legal blockade of Gaza. Hamas itself knows the power of suggestion, that repeating allegations time and again gives them currency, celebrates the death in numbers of Palestinians as 'proof' that Israel has set out to demolish Gaza as a Palestinian entity.

 

The British-flagged yacht Madleen, with its dozen dedicated protesters whose agenda is to embarrass Israel at the presumed potential cost of their lives, exploited their opportunity to advantage drawing the attention of the world to their courageous posturing while openly and dramatically expressing their terror at the presumed end that awaited them as they neared Gaza in the open seas they traversed. Finally, "The show is over", signalled the Israeli Foreign Ministry, as the vessel was detained then hauled by tug to the Israeli port of Ashdod.

 

Israel's Foreign Ministry released this image of Greta Thunberg being offered a pastrami sandwich and a bottle of water after those onboard the Madleen were detained by Israel's military.

Israel Foreign Ministry

 

Greeted by an Israeli naval vessel, and given food and drink, the ministry posted the message that Thunberg was "on her way to Israel, safe and in good spirits". Not so, responded kaffiyeh clad Greta; she and her colleagues were "kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces or forces that support Israel". Of the dozen aboard, half were French, there was one Spanish national, and one each from Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands and Turkey.

 

According to the always-reliable Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the interception represented "a blatant act of international piracy and state terrorism", just as the Iranian Republic condemned the intervention as "a form of piracy". Defence Minister Israel Katz ordered the military to have the activist group view a 43-minute video of atrocities Hamas terrorists committed during the October 7 massacre, which the war in Gaza resulted from. 

 

As it happened none of the conscience-driven activists would watch the video, declaring it Israeli 'propaganda'. 

 

Crew members of the "Madleen" are seen with their hands in the air as Israeli forces come aboard, in this image from the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.

Freedom Flotilla Coalition/Freedom Flotilla Coalition/Telegraph

 

"Unauthorized attempts to breach the blockade are dangerous, unlawful, and undermine ongoing humanitarian efforts."

"We call on all actors to act responsibly and to channel humanitarian aid through legitimate, co-ordinated mechanisms, not through provocation."

Israeli Foreign Ministry 

Surrender or Die

"We will continue the war until the end. It will continue until Hamas is destroyed, until victory."

"Whoever thinks we will stop is detached from reality."

"[Every member of Hamas is] marked for death."

"Surrender or die."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Trucks with humanitarian aid wait to enter the Palestinian side of Rafah on the Egyptian border with the Gaza Strip on December 11, 2023. (Giuseppe Cacace/AFP)

Skilled at perpetually extracting compassion from the world community, portraying itself as the champion of Palestinian human rights, Hamas has never hesitated to sacrifice the lives of Palestinians for the greater cause of destroying Israel and accomplishing the mass murder of Jews, for their charter sets out just that very goal it is determined to bring to fruition. And while Hamas trains Palestinian children in Gaza to become the next generation of dedicated shaheeds fully incorporated into holy jihad as their purpose in life for the glory inherent in killing Jews, it portrays itself abroad as both liberator and victim.

 

Palestinians generally have taken great pains to persuade the outside world that they are victims of Israeli aggression, that Jews have committed the greatest of sins in 'occupying' land consecrated to Islam by reinstating their ancient ancestral lands into 20th Century Israel for all future generations of Jews to find haven from a hostile world. Jews have rediscovered anew just how hostile the world is to their presence after an all-too-brief post-Holocaust interregnum from discrimination and persecution. 

 

Palestinian public relations campaigns have convinced the gullible West that Palestinians are invested in the concept of a state of their own alongside that of Israel, that perpetual slogan of a 'two-state' solution to the current state of simmering conflict. But it's really a one-state 'solution' that they hold dear, the prospect of which they shield from the West, but pursue by indoctrinating their young to consider Israel an interloper, illegally and immorally sitting on Palestinian geography, and it is the duty of all Palestinians to 'resist the occupation'.

 

Smoke trails are seen as a salvo of rockets are launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel, as seen from southern Israel, December 21, 2023. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne

Funding terrorist attacks is a great inducement in support of appealing to Palestinians' sense of nationalism and victimhood. Fatah's campaign is more subtle but it is one of total reclamation of the land and destruction of Israel; Hamas is more upfront about its ambitions, hiding from no outside source its lethal intentions against Israel and Jews living in their ancestral homeland. The savagery of the October 7 incursion into Israel with its planned sadistic rapes, mutilations and mass murder was Hamas showing the world what it is dedicated to: pure terrorism.

 

And show the world it did, in evidence they produced themselves through videos proudly demonstrating their capacity to inflict pain and suffering on the innocent, from babies to the elderly and infirm, from girls and women being repeatedly raped, tortured, mutilated and finally murdered; even dead bodies of old men, of African farm workers, of women are desecrated, driven through the streets of Gaza City, eliciting great whoops of joy at the bodies of dead Israelis, whipping up enthusiasm for striking at the corpses. Incredibly, even the airing of these monstrous atrocities failed to convince the world that Israel's loss is worth mourning.

 

Yet now that Israel is responding, even while Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad continue bombarding Israel with rockets, the world condemns Israel for the deaths of Palestinians. While Israel warns civilians to remove themselves from harm's way, Hamas orders its civilian population to remain in place, and will even shoot to kill those who waver and intend to move to safety. Western media hang on every statistic that the Hamas Health Ministry publishes of Palestinian death numbers attributed to Israeli bombing in Gaza. Wildly inflated numbers to elicit greater sympathy cannot be validated.

 

Israeli soldiers operate in the Gaza Strip amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in this handout picture released on December 21, 2023. Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS

 

That bombing is strategic and meant to  target Hamas infrastructure, including the vast network of tunnels it has built under the Gaza Strip's cities, towns and 'refugee camps'. The tunnels and their shafts are built into and under mosques, hospitals, UNRWA-operated schools, apartment complexes and ordinary houses. In those tunnels, weapons caches are stored, and Hamas operatives find safe haven when they shoot off rockets from depots placed in crowded civilian areas, inviting a response from the IDF. The greater the number of civilian casualties, the lustier the outcry from the press and Western governments, playing right into Hamas's schemes.

The tunnels have been useful in providing hiding places for some of the hundreds of Israeli children, elderly, women and men that the terrorist groups and ordinary Palestinian civilians have taken  hostage. Each time rockets are aimed at Israel, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank cheer and applaud when they reach their goals. Support among the Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, is robust, the majority support Hamas and feel the atrocities of October 7 were justified in the name of 'freedom' for Palestinians. 

Qatar, Egypt and the United States have been playing host and interveners between Israel and Hamas in negotiations for temporary ceasefires when prisoners in Israeli jails can be exchanged for hostages. It is in very fact, Hamas terrorist elites that are giving the orders and calling the shots. All of the commanders of the terrorist groups, in the wake of October 7 made themselves very scarce, going into hiding to preserve their lives, leaving their lower-order operatives to battle with the IDF under their instructions.

Their lives are expendable, those of the civilian population are ultra-disposable, while the commanders shield themselves from repercussions of their wholesale slaughter of Israelis and foreign farm workers on October 7. With pressure on Israel to be 'proportionate', and empathy for the plight of the Palestinians brought upon them by their psychopathic leadership Hamas leaders feel emboldened to dictate acceptable strategic variances from combat for access to humanitarian shipments of aid to the embattled Strip.

 

Armed, masked men reportedly affiliated with Hamas can be seen atop trucks carrying humanitarian aid that arrived in the Gaza Strip via Egypt's Rafah crossing, December 17, 2023. (Screenshot, used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

 

When agreement is secured to open border crossings, another opportunity is presented to terrorist leaders to slip out of the Gaza Strip in an escape from the punishment meted out by Israel's military. At the same time, while tractor-trailers stuffed with needed food, water, medical supplies, oil and gas are brought in to relieve the crisis for civilians to endure the conflict, the trucks and their humanitarian goods are commandeered by Hamas operatives for their own use, once more depriving the civilian population of access to life-saving food and medicine.

Drone footage