Coleman Hughes: The Simple Truth About the War in GazaHamas’s strategy is to maximize suffering on its own side—and then have the world blame Israel. Our moral confusion is its chief asset.
https://www.thefp.com/p/coleman-hughes-the-simple-truth-about?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Over the past few weeks, images of emaciated Gazan children have circulated the media. Global outrage has exploded over emerging evidence of widespread hunger that the pictures purportedly capture. The anger has led major U.S. allies, including France, Britain, and Canada, to say they will recognize a Palestinian state.
Amid these developments, it may seem cartoonish, even obscene, to say that in the war between Israel and Hamas, Israel is the good guy. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth that’s incredibly easy to forget amid the day-to-day coverage of this terrible war.
If you need a reminder, consider what Hamas did on Saturday when the terrorist group released a video of Israeli hostage Evyatar David. Evyatar, who is 24 years old, has been held captive by Hamas for 667 days. He is shirtless, gaunt, and clearly starving. Or as his family put it: “a living skeleton, buried alive.” He tells the camera he hasn’t eaten in days.
In one section of the video, he is forced to dig a hole in the tunnel where he is being held. He says it will be his grave.
Hamas released this video because it wants to increase its leverage in negotiations. If the Israeli population becomes so heartbroken that they demand a hostage deal on any terms, then Hamas can go back to ruling Gaza, building up its forces using stolen aid, and preparing for the next October 7.
Another way to put it is that the terrorist group is running a highly effective campaign of information warfare, and Western media outlets are falling for it.
Take a recent article, by now much discussed, published by The New York Times. Relying on testimony from several doctors working in Gaza as well as the Gaza Health Ministry, the article states that deaths in Gaza from starvation are on the rise. One photo stands out: a mother holding an emaciated, skeletal toddler named Muhammad.
This photo was plastered on the front page of the Times. It made the rounds on social media. You almost certainly saw it. And importantly, it was the only photo in the article that clearly suggested starvation. The rest depicted hungry refugees trying to get food aid under chaotic conditions.
Then we discovered that the Times hadn’t used a photo showing the boy’s older brother, who clearly isn’t starving. And Muhammad wasn’t emaciated due to a lack of available food; he was born with cerebral palsy. Six days after the article came out, the Times issued an editors’ note, stating that the boy was born with unrelated health issues that account for his skeletal appearance, and removed his mother’s testimony that he was “born a healthy child.”
What other information might have been left out?
Amid these developments, it may seem cartoonish, even obscene, to say that in the war between Israel and Hamas, Israel is the good guy.
Think about what had to happen for the Times to publish that photo on its front page, without context. Semafor reported Friday that the Times originally chose a different photo of a malnourished child with cerebral palsy. Concerned that the child’s preexisting condition would undermine claims made in the piece, they swapped the photo for the one of Muhammad. Then it came out that Muhammad also had a prior disability.
How did this happen? In selecting the photo, journalists would have had to talk to the child’s mother and doctor, who presumably withheld this crucial detail. The claims then had to survive fact-checking without anyone pointing out how strange it was to see one child emaciated and his brother right next to him, looking fine.
Then, after the true story was revealed, the Times would have had to call this doctor again and ask if he had left out the baby’s disease. And since the entire article is based on the testimony of similarly placed doctors, you have to wonder: How many of the doctors in Gaza who talk to Western journalists are making similar omissions? And if they are, how would we know? And isn’t it a strange coincidence that several of the photographs that have gone viral of suffering Gazan children are children who have serious genetic diseases?
This isn’t the first time misinformation has spread in Western media. Recall that after an explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on October 17, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry—which is part of Hamas’s political infrastructure—reported almost immediately that exactly 471 people had been killed by an Israeli bomb. The Times circulated this report without scrutiny.
Then it came out that the true death count was possibly less than half that number. The hospital wasn’t hit—it was the parking lot next to the hospital. And it wasn’t an Israeli bomb that caused the explosion, but a misfired rocket launched from Gaza by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
There’s no doubt that there is a humanitarian disaster in Gaza. But the information pipeline between Gaza and the West is fundamentally broken, biased, untrustworthy, and weaponized against Israel. And the less skeptical that Western journalists are, the more sources like Hamas and the Gaza Health Ministry can disseminate misinformation without penalty, perpetuating the false narrative that Israel is the genocidal aggressor in a war waged against them by a group whose mission is, in fact, genocide.
 |
None of this means that everything the IDF does is justifiable. It’s possible to agree with the goals of an army but condemn its methods. During the Civil War, the Union Army burned down 40 percent of Atlanta, including civilian homes. Some of that was unnecessary, even immoral. But the North was still the good guy. Not because it was the underdog, or because it suffered more war crimes than the South, but because its goal—to end slavery—was fundamentally just.
That’s the case with Israel. Israel’s goal is to live in peace with its neighbors. Throughout its 77-year history, it has agreed to half a dozen peace deals with the Palestinians. It voluntarily left Gaza in 2005. If it had any interest in wiping Gaza off the map, it could have done so any time in the last several decades.
Of course, as with any army, it’s not hard to find examples of IDF soldiers conducting themselves terribly. Israel’s March decision to cut off all humanitarian aid to Gaza for more than two months—in an effort to pressure Hamas to release the hostages—was a strategic mistake. And the aid distribution experiment that finally began in May has been chaotic and, because of that, largely ineffective. There are credible reports of soldiers shooting civilians who were trying to get food and accidentally went into a prohibited zone. Some of these are tragic accidents. Others may be war crimes.
But there is a moral asymmetry here. When an IDF soldier goes berserk, he is subject to criminal punishment. Hamas’s entire reason for being—its entire mission—is a war crime. Hamas fighters don’t wear uniforms. They have stolen enough aid from civilians to survive in their tunnels for a prolonged period of time. They are completely unaffected by the suffering of their own people.
The greatest tragedy of this war is that the excesses of both the IDF and Hamas almost always fall on Palestinian civilians.
The information pipeline between Gaza and the West is fundamentally broken, biased, untrustworthy, and weaponized against Israel.
That’s by Hamas’s design. Is it Israel’s fault that its own civilians are incredibly well protected by defensive infrastructure, including the Iron Dome and bomb shelters? Is it Israel’s fault that Hamas has built one of the most extensive networks of underground bomb shelters in the history of warfare, but doesn’t allow its own civilians to enter them? Is it Israel’s fault that Hamas uses children as lookouts, thereby turning them into combatants under the international laws of war?
When we hold Israel alone responsible for the civilian death toll in Gaza—a death toll that is the direct result of Hamas’s barbaric style of warfare—we implicitly blame Israel for war crimes that were committed by Hamas.
Hamas’s strategy is to maximize suffering on its own side. It knows it cannot beat Israel on the battlefield, but it hopes that by putting its own civilians in harm’s way, it can galvanize world opinion against Israel and destroy the Jewish State in the long run. This strategy only works if the world blames Israel for the consequences of Hamas’s choices. Our moral confusion is Hamas’s chief asset.
 |
The most serious charge made against Israel is one of genocide. It’s also the most absurd.
Genocide is the intentional physical destruction of a people in whole or in part. Israel’s aim in Gaza is not to destroy the Palestinian people as a whole, nor is it to destroy Gaza and Palestinians in particular. The Gaza Health Ministry reports that about 60,000 people have been killed in Gaza in 22 months of war. Israel says that about 20,000 Hamas fighters have been killed.
Both may be exaggerating their numbers, but let’s take them at their word. Assuming 60,000 people have been killed, that’s about 3 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population. The Nazis killed over 60 percent of European Jews. The Ottoman Empire killed over 50 percent of the Armenians in its territory. Hutu extremists may have killed close to 80 percent of the Tutsis in Rwanda over 100 days in 1994. Those were genocides.
In legitimately identified cases of genocide in which a smaller percentage of people were killed, it was because the perpetrator didn’t have the power to kill more. That’s not the case with Israel. If the IDF wanted, it could kill almost everyone in Gaza in a matter of weeks. Why hasn’t it?
Comments are closed.
