Propagandist Muhammad Shehada Continues to Promote False Claims

By: Karen Bekker February 19, 2021

For over a year, CAMERA has been documenting the false statements of Muhammad Shehada, a Gaza-based columnist who is connected to Richard Falk’s NGO, Euro-Med Monitor for Human Rights.

Writing in the Forward, Shehada has:

  • Called the Palestinian Authority’s payments to convicted terrorists a “canard” that was debunked by the Washington Post, when the Post article he referenced actually confirmed that the payments were being made;
  • Claimed that he could not buy fruit for his dying father due to Israeli restrictions, then subsequently backtracked on the claim after being called out by CAMERA; 
  • Claimed that sewage ran through the streets of Gaza due to Israel’s bombing of Gaza’s power plant, when in fact the cause of the sewage problem was a tax dispute between Hamas and the PA;
  • And falsely claimed, at the start of the pandemic, that Israel banned chemicals necessary to make disinfectants from reaching Gaza.

Other than the claims about disinfectant, the Forward failed to correct Shehada’s false claims.

Shehada has now found a new venue from which to spread his falsehoods. On February 11, Shehada wrote in Newsweek:

In June 2016, Issa [Amro] was indicted on eighteen counts by the Israeli military, on charges—some of them over six years old—that ranged from insulting a soldier to incitement to resisting arrest to participating in an assembly without a permit. In other words, he was indicted for nonviolent resistance. And this week, he was convicted of six of the charges, receiving a suspended sentence.

In fact, Issa Amro, co-founder of the group Youth Against Settlements, was convicted on January 6, among other things, of assault. According to the Jerusalem Post, the conviction was for “shoving Israeli security forces.”

When contacted by CAMERA, editors at Newsweek amended the text to note that the February proceeding was a sentencing hearing, but declined to correct the omission of the fact that Amro was in fact convicted on one violent charge.

Notably, Shehada has a pattern of creating misleading narratives about Israel by omitting important facts and even employing complete fabrications in service of his defamations. Now he has found a more mainstream platform from which to broadcast them.

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