The “inversion of truth and reality has been one of the most favored propaganda methods of Israel’s adversaries,” the historian Joel Fishman once observed. A recent USA Today Op-Ed offers a case in point. Instead of providing readers with essential facts, the newspaper published a column replete with omissions and falsehoods.
Farida Al-Ghoul’s Sept. 6, 2025 Op-Ed charges Israel with deliberately starving Gazans, calling it the Jewish state’s “plan.” Al-Ghoul writes:
In Gaza today, hunger is not a by-product of war—it is a weapon. It is engineered, deliberate, and merciless.
Yet, food scarcity in Gaza isn’t Israel’s fault. Rather, it is wholly the fault of Hamas, the U.S.-designated terror group that rules the Gaza Strip and which calls for Israel’s destruction.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas and other Iranian-backed proxies invaded Israel, perpetrating the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust and commencing a war that lasts to this very day. Hamas butchered children, concertgoers, and the elderly, among others. Israelis were burned alive, women were raped, family members were tortured and murdered in front of one another. Hamas was proud of its atrocities, filming its handiwork and broadcasting it for the world to see.
The war’s initiation, as well as its continuation with all of its consequences, are the responsibility of Hamas.
The terror group launched the war knowing that it cannot win on the battlefield against Israel. And it perpetrated the massacre knowing that the Jewish state would be bound to respond militarily. Instead, Hamas’s strategy relied on other means: sacrificing its own people.
Hamas intentionally stores its munitions, operatives, and command centers in hospitals, schools, and other public dwellings. As Doug Feith, a former U.S. Under Secretary of Defense, pointed out:
While some of Hamas’s most brutal tactics, like systematic rape and beheading captives, are long-practiced atrocities for which the armies of Stalin, Hitler, and Genghis Khan are infamous, it is unprecedented for a party to adopt a war strategy to maximize civilian deaths on its own side. This is so strange and evil that it should appall any decent person. Contrary to conventional commentary, this is not a human shield strategy. It’s a human sacrifice strategy.
He added:
When Hamas fires rockets at Israel and kills, captures, and rapes civilians there, they know Israel will retaliate. Hamas leaders put their assets in civilian buildings not in hopes that Israel will hold fire, but in a cold calculation that the retaliation will do terrible harm to Palestinian civilians—despite the extraordinary efforts Israel’s army makes to avoid it. Hamas is working to maximize, not minimize, that harm. This is to generate international pressure on Israel to end its retaliation—and to strengthen Israel’s enemies in their depiction of the Jewish state as a villain.
Hamas weaponizes the suffering of its own people, using it as a cudgel against the Jewish state that it seeks to destroy.
A terrorist group that murders babies and sacrifices its own people isn’t above taking food from its own people. Indeed, although USA Today doesn’t mention it, Hamas has done precisely that.
As CAMERA has noted, Israel has sent tremendous amounts of good into Gaza. John Spencer, the executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute and a professor at West Point, has pointed out that “Israel’s aid to Gaza is historically unprecedented.” And in Aug. 19, 2025 article, CAMERA Senior Analyst David Litman observed:
One study found that during a four-month period in 2024, the amount of food aid entering Gaza equated to nearly 3,200 calories per person per day. That amount has grown: approximately 4,000 calories per person per day entered Gaza between May 19 and August 12. That’s nearly twice the daily recommendation. COGAT, which tracks and itemizes the entry of all humanitarian aid, says that during the same period, over 182,000 tons of aid entered Gaza, 95% of which was food.
The USA Today Op-Ed is wrong. Israel isn’t “weaponizing” food and starving Gaza. In fact, Israel is sending historically unprecedented levels of food into an active warzone. Israel is feeding Gaza. Or, more accurately, it is doing its utmost to do so. However, as even the United Nations—hardly a pro-Israel source—admitted in August 2025, 88 percent of the aid sent into Gaza is looted by armed men and mobs, with much of it then being sold on the black market at exorbitant prices.
Hamas has actively targeted aid deliveries. Organizations like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) have sprung up with mechanisms to prevent the systematic pillaging of aid. Yet, for trying to help the Palestinian people, the GHF has been targeted—both by Hamas, and by its sycophants in the press.
However, the USA Today Op-Ed omits all of this crucial context, preferring to frame the story as one in which the Jewish state is intentionally starving non-Jews. This is little more than an updated blood libel.
Al-Ghoul’s USA Today byline refers to her as a “writer and educator sheltering in northern Gaza.” But it must be noted: Hamas doesn’t allow journalists in Gaza to criticize the terror group. Indeed, they punish Gazans who dare to contradict Hamas-sanctioned narratives. On Sept. 2, 2025—four days before Al-Ghoul’s Op-Ed appeared—the Center for Peace Communications and the Free Press published a joint investigation showing that Al Jazeera helps Hamas identify, track, and target Gazans who are critical of Hamas. This is unsurprising; Al Jazeera is Qatari state media, and Qatar is itself one of Hamas’s chief sponsors.
Notably, Al-Ghoul has appeared on Al Jazeera, among other forums, offering her perspectives on events in Gaza for English-speaking audiences. In her USA Today Op-Ed Al-Ghoul laments a recent IDF strike at Nasser Hospital, calling it “a targeted attack on a tent in front of a hospital housing journalists from Al-Jazeera, killing correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal.” It was, she claims, an “assassination.”
Al-Ghoul omits that Nasser Hospital, like other hospitals, has served as a base for Hamas operatives. And Anas al-Sharif wasn’t merely a “correspondent” for Al Jazeera. Rather, as even the anti-Israel BBC has conceded, he “worked for a Hamas media team.”
Eylon Levy, the former spokesman for the State of Israel, noted on Aug. 11: Sharif was a “team commander in Hamas’s Northern Brigade” who was responsible for “rocket attacks” and propaganda. His “details,” Levy pointed out, “were even in the East Jabaliya Battalion’s phone directory.” There are even photos of a smiling Sharif taking selfies with Hamas leadership. On Oct. 7, Sharif posted on social media that “heroes are still roaming the country killing and capturing…God, God, how great you are.”
Notably, this isn’t the first time that Al-Ghoul conflated terrorism with journalism. In an Aug. 31, 2024 article, she lamented the death of her “mentor” Ismail Al-Ghoul, who she described as a “Palestinian journalist and Al Jazeera correspondent in Gaza” who was “assassinated” by Israel in a July 2024 strike. Ismail, she notes, was “a relative of mine” who had “an expertise in working with international media.” She fails to note that her relative and mentor was also a member of Hamas’s elite Nukhba force who “took part in the October 7 massacre” according to an Aug. 2, 2024 brief by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. That is: USA Today published an op-ed by a woman who is not only related to a known terrorist, but also hails him as a “mentor.”
If these men constitute Al-Ghoul’s idea of journalists one can readily discard her opinions on who is responsible for the food situation in Gaza—and much else.
Israel isn’t starving Gaza. Rather, it has undertaken significant efforts to feed Gazans. Hamas is holding food, and the future of Gaza, hostage. These are demonstrable facts. Claims to the contrary are propaganda that serves the aims of the terror group—not Gazans, and certainly not peace.