3 Persistent Myths About Gaza

It’s been nearly three years since Hamas’ deadly October 7, 2023 attack and the start of all-out war between Israel and Hamas. In that time, antisemitism has soared worldwide as Israel’s reputation has utterly collapsed. In the USA, a 2026 poll found that 60% of adults view Israel negatively, up from 53% in 2025. In countries like Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden, three quarters or more of adults harbor negative views of the Jewish state.

Israel’s abysmal reputation rests largely on some persistent myths about its conduct in Gaza which have become embedded in the global popular imagination, fanned by a steady stream of propaganda.

Here are three of the most persistent myths about Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

1. Israel is engineering a famine in Gaza.

The false idea that Israel deliberately engineered mass starvation throughout the Gaza strip in order to harm and kill civilians has taken a firm hold in the global imagination.

In 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for both Israel’s Prime Minister and Defense Minister for using “starvation as a method of war.” In 2025, UN Chief Antonio Guterres said that Gazans were facing the highest levels of starvation it was possible to record, and called it a “made-made disaster” and "failure of humanity,” laying the blame squarely on Israel. The UN highlighted that it was “mothers and children” who were starving in Gaza. In 2026, Medicines Sans Frontiers, a French organization with a history of strong anti-Israel rhetoric, warned that Gaza continues to face a crisis of malnutrition “manufactured by Israel.”

Yet according to Israeli sources, the truth in Gaza is much more complex: hunger in Gaza seems to be weaponized by Hamas, rather than Israel, and used as a propaganda tool to paint the Jewish state as uniquely depraved and evil.

“Even when aid is delivered into Gaza, Hamas loots it for its own use, blatantly disregarding the needs of the population,” the Israeli military has observed. A major 2026 study by the Israeli Government, Laundering Propaganda: How UN actors manipulated information in the Gaza War (2023-2025), documents instances of the UN and other international charities parroting Hamas propaganda, including omitting mentions of Hamas’ widespread looting of aid, and radically undercounting the amount of humanitarian aid that Israel sent into Gaza throughout its conflict with Hamas.

As the narrative that Israel, rather than Hamas, was solely to blame for causing hunger in Gaza became accepted as fact around the world, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which measures hunger worldwide, changed the way it calculates famine when it came to analysis in Gaza. As far back as 2024, the IPC jettisoned its normal standards in Gaza, and created new, much less rigorous yardsticks for measuring famine there. (To take one example of the IPC’s new standards in Gaza, the IPC lowered its standards for declaring famine from 30% of children exhibiting malnutrition to 15% in Gaza and used upper arm measurements instead of its normal standard of using full body weight-for-height data for calculating malnutrition. When the IPC failed to find that 15% of Gazan children exhibited malnutrition even using this new measuring system, it changed the way it collected data, inflating monthly averages until it could reach the 15% level.)

One major 2025 study found that Israeli authorities were sending aid totaling an average of 3,163 calories per person per day into Gaza, an amount that exceeded the widely adopted standard of 2,100 calories per person per day in crisis situations, set out by the influential Sphere nongovernmental organization.

In August 2026, a major UNICEF study on malnutrition among children in Gaza failed to find malnutrition there.

In August 2026, a major UNICEF study on malnutrition among children in Gaza failed to find malnutrition there. In fact, it found that Gazan children suffer from malnutrition at levels lower than children in neighboring countries.

Using World Health Organization (WHO) methodology, researchers measured heights and weights of Gaza’s children. Acute malnutrition rates ranged under 1% (between 0.2% and 0.8%). The rate of acute malnutrition in Gaza was significantly lower than among children in Jordan, Egypt, and other nearby countries.

Unsurprisingly, UNICEF’s report was not widely reported in the West: doing so would fly in the face of the ongoing false narrative that Israel is deliberately starving babies, women, children, and other civilians to death in Gaza. “Once again, fact prevails over fiction,” Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon said after the report was published; “Israel is not starving children. Israel is fighting Hamas terrorism, while Hamas uses civilians in Gaza as human shields. Those who rushed to accuse Israel must now be held accountable for spreading lies.”

2. Israel is targeting children for genocide.

On June 23, 2026, the UN declared that “Israel continues to commit genocide…by deliberately targeting Palestinian children.” A report claimed that Israel “deliberately targets Palestinian children” in order to “destroy childhood.”

The UN commission that issued the report is formally known as the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (COI). It’s a unique body which reflects the UN’s obsession with and bias against Israel. Established in 2021, the Commission is mandated to produce a report about Israeli’s human rights abuses twice a year. No other country is subject to this type of UN reporting.

Unsurprisingly, the Commission has a history of harshly one-sided reporting. Its recent report accuses Israelis of orchestrating a frenzied orgy of killing as many children as, “from newborns to adolescents.” Yet the report is largely fact-free, relying on uncorroborated testimonies from people living under Hamas rule, and parrots Hamas talking points.

UN Watch, an organization dedicated to monitoring the UN’s activities related to Israel, notes that:

“In each incident recounted, the COI cannot conclusively determine whether Israeli forces fired the shot, whether militants were present, whether combat was occurring nearby, whether any threat existed, or what battlefield circumstances surrounded the incident. Yet despite these uncertainties, it repeatedly reaches definitive conclusions regarding Israeli responsibility and intent. In each case, the COI constructs an entire narrative of intentional killing through stacked assumptions rather than verified facts, transforming uncorroborated allegations into definitive findings of criminal conduct.”

The report also “systematically removes Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (“PIJ”) from the battlefield narrative, portraying the Gaza conflict as though the IDF, acting under orders from Israeli political and military leadership, was engaged solely in the deliberate killing of civilians, particularly children. The Report never acknowledges that the IDF was fighting a heavily armed force of tens of thousands of Hamas and PIJ operatives who constructed hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, embedded military infrastructure throughout civilian areas, and routinely operated from homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and displacement zones.

Despite these flaws, the COI’s highly inflammatory report has been reported as fact. Wikipedia, for instance, already uses it to wrongly assert that Israel engages in “the targeted killing of children.” The American Jewish Committee has documented a staggering increase in social media memes accusing Israeli Jews of being baby killers, in a modern-day echo of accusations that Jews kill children.

Accusing Israel of deliberately targeting children also erases Hamas’ role in using civilians - especially children - as human shields. Hamas weapons storage facilities are located in schools, mosques, hospitals, and residential buildings, ensuring that civilians - especially children in schools - are put in harm’s way.

3. Israel targets journalists.

Another persistent narrative is that Israel is deliberately trying to kill journalists in Gaza in order to prevent them from telling the world the truth about Israel’s supposed crimes there. As the UN puts it: “Gaza has become the deadliest conflict ever for journalists. More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, the Vietnam War, wars in Yugoslavia, and the war in Afghanistan….(and it) is the cover-up of genocide.” The UN also expresses the view that if Israel has its way, it will kill every last journalist.

According to the Amit Terrorism and Intelligence Research Institute in Israel, the reality is much more complex. “Media personnel are extremely important for Hamas during confrontations and wars with Israel,” it notes, regarding them as part of their propaganda machine in the battle for hearts and minds and anti-Israel incitement.” Hamas and affiliated terrorist groups coordinate with media outlets in Gaza and elsewhere, helping place Hamas talking points and misinformation in news reports that then are broadcast around the globe.

When Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, Hamas-appointed journalists accompanied them and filmed the attack. Still more journalists and stringers (freelance journalists affiliated with major news organizations) filmed the early hours of the attack, apparently tipped off and granted access by Hamas. One stringer, Ali Mahmud, snapped a picture of 22-year-old Shani Louk moments after she was murdered by Hamas terrorists. In the photo her body is flung in the back of a truck, being brought to Gaza by Hamas terrorists; one terrorist is half-sitting on her naked back. Mahmud’s picture was bought by Associated Press (AP), which later stood by him, calling him an official AP employee; his photo was later awarded first prize by the University of Missouri School of Journalism’s Reynolds Journalism Institute.

The fact that Mahmud clearly had some sort of connection with Hamas, which allowed him access to this moment, didn’t phase AP or Western news consumers for a moment. Anyone supplying information - no matter how distorted - and images from Gaza has been granted the title journalist by credulous westerners.

Hamas has claimed that over 250 “journalists” have been killed by Israel since October 7, 2023. Israeli researchers have identified approximately 60% of them as belonging to Hamas and other Hamas-affiliated terrorist groups. “Many had double roles, they were both military operatives and media personnel. This was particularly obvious in the cooperation between Hamas and Qatar’s Al Jazeera network.” Israel’s military has asserted that it targets only Hamas and other terrorist officials who’ve directly participated in violence, not simply anyone who cooperates with Hamas in order to parrot Hamas ideology in the press.

One memorable example of the dual role held by some Gaza journalists came in June 2024. That month, Israeli soldiers rescued three hostages - Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv - from a private family home where they were being held. The home belonged to Abdallah Aljamal, a Hamas official who doubled as a journalist for the Hamas-linked publication Palestine Chronicle.

Despite Aljamal’s clear role as a Hamas combatant - holding three terrified Israeli civilians against their will, locked up in his home - he was celebrated in the West as a blameless journalist who was murdered by Israel simply for daring to report the news. Britain’s Guardian newspaper commemorated him in an article, lamenting “The deadly toll on journalists in the Gaza war,” which states that “Over the past 22 months, the war in Gaza has become the most deadly conflict for journalists in history.”

None of this is to say that Gaza has not seen immense suffering — displacement, loss of life, and hardship there are real, and no accounting of this war should pretend otherwise. But real suffering does not require false narratives to be understood or mourned. The specific claims examined here — engineered famine, deliberate targeting of children, a campaign against journalists — collapse under scrutiny, and repeating them does not help Gazans; it obscures the actual causes of their hardship, chief among them a war that Hamas started and has prolonged by embedding itself among civilians, hoarding aid, and using media access as a weapon. Holding two things at once — that Gaza's suffering is real, and that Hamas bears direct responsibility for much of it — is harder than repeating a slogan, but it's the only honest place to start.