Husam Zomlot, the Head of the Palestinian Authority Mission to the United Kingdom, appeared once again on Christiane Amanpour’s program on CNN last week on January 22. As he’s done in the past, he used the platform to make many claims that were simply detached from reality, but this time he also made very big admission. Amanpour seemed to believe her role in the interview was merely to assist him with his propaganda.
No less than three times, Zomlot made the false claim that there is a genocide in Gaza – a baseless blood libel that has been debunked repeatedly, including most recently by a report from the Henry Jackson Society, a British think tank. The HJS report found that Hamas casualty figures included about 5,000 natural deaths, included people killed by misfired Hamas rockets, included people who died before the war even began, and in some cases classified fighting-age men as children. There is no genocide in Gaza. Only a war that was started by Hamas, a point that both Zomlot and Amanpour ignore.
“What happened to Gaza will have to be recorded in human conscience as the first ever live streamed genocide,” Zomlot falsely claims. In fact, it was the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that was the first ever live-streamed attempted genocide.
And a day earlier, on January 21, in an interview conducted for the Amanpour program by Paula Newton, Palestinian teacher Asma Mustafa was permitted to falsely call herself a “survivor of the genocide,” saying the war has been “the most violent war ever, I have ever witnessed in [the] Gaza Strip.” Mustafa also spoke of being displaced repeatedly, including from humanitarian zones. But, incredibly, she mentioned the date “the seventh of October” only in the context of an increase in hardship and trauma for Palestinians. In her entire segment, there was not a single mention by interviewer or subject, of the cause of the war – the barbaric and savage attack on Israel that day.
Returning to Zomlot’s interview on the 22nd, he was eager to put the blame for everything that has happened on both sides onto Israel. The reason for all of this, he claimed, is “Israel has no vision, has no plan, has no horizon for the future,” Israel’s government is “fanatical,” Israel’s “war on Gaza has nothing to do with security, it was an ideological war to protect their own occupation.” Israel, he claimed, “is set on one thing, to undermine the Palestinian government and to undermine with it any possibility of a two-state solution,” and Hamas, he claimed, is the “product,” not the cause, of the conflict. But it was Zomlot’s Palestinian Authority that rejected a two-state solution in 2000, 2008, and 2014. And in 2005, Israel granted independence to the people of Gaza, who used that opportunity to vote Hamas into power. Neither Zomlot nor Amanpour bring up either of these points.
Amanpour notes that during the hostage exchange, Hamas put on a “complete show of force.” Bizarrely, Zomlot jumped on this point to imply that Israel should never have responded to the October 7th attack at all, saying “that’s a cause [for] reflection in the part of Israel, exactly, because after 15 months of genocide, of mass murder and destruction this is what they get.” At this point in the war, Zomlot asks rhetorically, “they have improved their security? They have really, they have really undermined Hamas or any other parties’ ability to recruit? To the contrary, all they did is that they have sent us many steps away from a resolution.” The implication of this frequently heard talking-point is that Israel should have just ignored the attack in which civilians, including children and the elderly, were tortured, raped, burned alive, murdered, and taken back to Gaza as hostages.
Although Zomlot claims that he opposes Hamas, his claim that Israel’s fight is futile and that Israel is incapable of winning is pro-Hamas war propaganda, designed to demoralize Israel and dissuade its supporters.
Zomlot also mischaracterizes a recent quote from former President Biden: “when I heard President Biden only couple of days ago, just before he left office, speaking about that conversation between him and Netanyahu when he warned Netanyahu not to carpet bomb Gaza, and Netanyahu told him that you did that with Germany and with Japan, and Biden responded, that’s why we had the UN.” But in the clip, Biden makes clear that Netanyahu did not use the term “carpet bomb.” Zomlot omits that Biden also says that Netanyahu made what Biden called “a legitimate argument” in support of his actions, that “these are the guys that killed my people.” Zomlot then says that, “Israel is going to repeat this, the only option Israel has right now is violence.” In fact it is Hamas that pledges to repeat the violence of the October 7 attack, and who, just a week prior to Zomlot’s appearance on CNN, vowed to continue “jihad and our resistance.” Obviously such actions would force Israel to respond.
After Amanpour called the Palestinian Authority leadership a “catastrophe,” Zomlot tried to blame this, too, on Israel, saying, “it’s the Palestinian people that have to decide and will decide on their own leaderships,” and “we need to remove Israel’s veto over our democratic process.” But there is no such veto – it was the Palestinian Authority that refused to hold elections for fifteen years and then, in 2021, it was the PA that cancelled planned elections using Israel as a flimsy but convenient excuse. And it was the Palestinian people in Gaza who elected Hamas in 2006.
Zomlot reminded the audience that he was a guest on Amanpour’s show on October 7, 2023 as the Hamas massacre was still ongoing. He said that he used that appearance “to warn the world that Israel will wage a war against the Palestinian people.” In fact, as CAMERA documented, he used that appearance, as he used last week’s, to promote false claims, and had to be asked three time to condemn that day’s attack before saying “the loss of civilian life is tragic on all sides.”
But perhaps the most telling moment of the interview came when, at the end of a long rant, Zomlot said, “when we fail to uproot the root cause, we go to the Palestinian situation and we start thinking, should we reform this, should we, our issue is not technical, it’s political, Israel has got to go, if not now then I don’t think –” At this point a respectable journalist might have noticed that he was calling for the end of the world’s only Jewish state. But Amanpour, instead, reminded him, “you mean the occupation.” “Yes,” Zomlot agreed, “the Israeli occupation….” But his slip of the tongue here tracks with his comment earlier in the interview that, “Israel has been creating the conflict for 76 years.”
Husam Zomlot may work for the Palestinian Authority. But his rhetoric as well as his goals line up perfectly with Hamas. So why does Amanpour keep bringing him back to her show?