Preying on those seeking to understand Israel’s military engagements over the last quarter- century, NPR’s Greg Myre and Scott Simon produced a segment on July 18, 2026, titled “Then and now: Re-evaluating Israel’s expanding military engagements 25 years later.”
The problem? The systemic omission of critical facts required to comprehend the position Israel finds itself in today.
The reporters introduced the segment by explaining that: “Decades ago, Israel was actively shrinking its presence in many of the areas it is now aggressively military engaging.” They then contrasted this with current Israeli military activity on four fronts: Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and the West Bank.
In doing so, NPR skipped over what happened both before, and in between the then-and-now, denying its audience an understanding of the cause and effect.
Lebanon
Myre recounted how, shortly after arriving in Jerusalem in 1999, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew Israeli troops who had been in Lebanon for 18 years. Yet, he offered no explanation as to why Israel had invaded Lebanon in 1982. The invasion followed years of Palestinian terrorists operating out of southern Lebanon, firing rockets into Israel and launching cross-border attacks that killed dozens of Israelis (including 13 children). The immediate catalyst was the Palestine Liberation Organization’s attempt to assassinate Israeli Ambassador to the UK Shlomo Argov, who was critically wounded in London.
Syria
A Druze village in the Golan Heights.
Regarding Syria, Myre reported that in 2000, Barak tried to negotiate a peace deal with Syria by offering land for peace, noting that “Israeli troops had captured Syria’s Golan Heights in 1967.” The overly simplistic framing again portrays Israel as an unprovoked aggressor. The hosts ignored the existential threats preceding the Six-Day War, including Nasser’s genocidal rhetoric and Syrian shelling attacks on Israeli farms and villages, forcing Israeli children to sleep in bomb shelters in 1965 and 1966. Faced with mobilized Syrian, Egyptian, Jordanian and Lebanese armies for three weeks and Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran, Israel decided on a preemptive attack rather than await destruction, capturing the strategic Golan Heights, from which Syrian forces had fired down into Israeli communities for years.
Myre added that Israel still holds the Golan Heights and “seized additional land just last year and remained there.” Stunningly, there was no mention of the collapse of the Assad regime in late 2024, the breakdown of the 50-year Separation of Forces Agreement (which left a void) or the attempts to negotiate a new agreement with the new Syrian leader – a former jihadi. There was also no discussion of the Turkish presence in Syria. The IDF moved into positions the Syrian army abandoned so no hostile force would embed itself next to Israel’s border, and Prime Minister Netanyahu said, in his Dec. 8, 2024, statement, “This is a temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found.” The hosts’ failure to explicitly report that this was a security-driven maneuver, in a country riddled with hostile terrorist organizations, and not a land grab, served a narrative, rather than facts.
West Bank
Covering the West Bank, Myre described watching the Israeli government tear down the Jewish settlement of Ma’on in the West Bank when he was first there. He described how the army tore down the shacks and “pulled the settlers from the rooftops and dragged them away.” He recently drove by Ma’on and saw what looked like a subdivision with lots of houses, giving that as an example of how settlement expansion makes it “more difficult, bordering on impossible, to work out a peace deal and create a state for the Palestinians.”
Attributing the lack of a Palestinian state predominantly to the presence of housing structures ignores that Palestinian leaders previously rejected at least six statehood offers. It also ignores historical evidence, like when Israel and Egypt forged a peace agreement over 40 years ago and the Israeli military razed or removed more than 600 homes in 14 settlements, or when Israel withdrew from Gaza more than 20 years ago and razed approximately 2,800 structures. (Later in the report, when talking about Gaza, Myre admitted Israel removed 8,000 “Jewish settlers” from Gaza in 2005).
Structures don’t reject peace; people reject peace.
More critically, Myre ignored public opinion of those who actually live there. In a September 2025 poll, 56% of Palestinians in the West Bank believe the State of Israel has no right to exist and 50% believe Israel can be destroyed. In an October 2025 poll, 78% of West Bank and 55% of Gaza respondents were opposed to disarming Hamas and 59% of West Bank respondents believed Hamas’ decision to launch the October 7 attack was correct. In fact, support for Hamas increased. More shockingly, 86% of respondents denied Hamas committed video-recorded atrocities (like killing women and children). In the shadow of the October 7 invasion and ensuing war, 57% of Israelis polled in October 2025 reject a Palestinian state, including 68% of Jewish Israelis.
The barrier to peace is not housing – it is terrorism and the rejection of most Palestinians to Israel’s right to exist.
Gaza
Rounding out the report, Myre acknowledged Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, and then said, “And as we know, Israel and Hamas have often fought since then, and Israeli troops reentered Gaza after the Hamas attack in 2023. Well, today, the Israeli military holds close to 70% of Gaza.”
The startingly casual and brief summary ignores Hamas’ governance, building of terror tunnels and attacks on Israel since 2005. According to a list tallied by the Jewish Virtual Library, more than 20,000 rockets were fired by Hamas and/or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) at Israel between 2005 and Oct. 7, 2023. In addition to rocket fire, in 2006, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel by tunnel, killed two Israeli soldiers, wounded more, and captured one. In 2014, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in the West Bank. Rockets, murder and kidnapping necessitated defensive Israeli military operations in response in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2023.
Most egregiously, reducing the horrific atrocities of October 7 to the “Hamas attack in 2023” sanitizes the deadliest single day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The generic word “attack” does not describe the systemic murder, rape, beheading and kidnapping that Hamas executed on that day.
Journalistic integrity requires providing the requisite context to understand complex conflicts. By omitting the terrorism and rocket fire that preceded Israel’s operations, leaving out the highly relevant detail of Assad’s fall and minimizing to an extreme degree the horrors of October 7, NPR excused itself from such requirements. Instead, it served a narrative that blames Israel for its security footprint while ignoring the violence that precipitated Israel’s need to fight on these fronts to begin with – and now.