Famously, the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” graces the front page of every New York Times edition. The slogan was coined at the end of the 19th century by the paper’s publisher, Adolph Ochs. Of course, in today’s hyper-globalized world, the slogan is wishful thinking. No paper could realistically cover all the important news stories of the day.
Still, it would be hard to argue that outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and others adequately cover even those stories they do print. They often devote precious space to emotive or opinionated claims, while omitting highly material and relevant information that sheds important new light.
Provided below are three important, but underreported, stories from the week bearing on Israel and the Middle East that media consumers should know.
1) Abu Obeida’s Propaganda Apparatus
This week, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) eliminated Hamas’s “spokesperson,” Hudayfa Samir Abdallah al-Khalout, more commonly known as Abu Obeida. While Abu Obeida had long been a face of the terror organization, such as through videos promising to broadcast the execution of Israeli civilian hostages, it turns out he held a far more critical role than the public appreciated.
A post by a Georgetown University student, Mapheze Saleh – daughter of senior Hamas terrorist Ahmed Yousef – celebrating a video from Hamas’s Abu Obeida promising to murder hostages and to broadcast their executions.
According to a report by Galei Tzahal reporter Doron Kadosh, Abu Obeida oversaw a propaganda apparatus comprised of 1,500 terror operatives. For context, Kadosh noted, the IDF, a much larger institution, has about half that number in its media and public-facing departments.
The figures reinforce what experts have long noted: Hamas’s strategy is reliant on information battlespace (i.e., propaganda). This is perhaps best explained in a report produced by a number of retired American military commanders regarding the war between Israel and Hamas in 2021:
Perhaps the most telling feature of the Gaza conflict was the strategy mismatch between Israel’s purely military and operational objectives to degrade Hamas’ military capabilities assisted by impressive advances in identifying and precisely striking targets—and Hamas’ information-based strategic objectives of delegitimizing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in global opinion and degrading the IDF’s operational advantage. The ability of an unscrupulous adversary to constrain military operations or even achieve strategic advantage against a much more capable opponent through the use of human shields and disinformation about both facts and law is a particularly concerning harbinger of what the United States might soon face. Our consensus judgment is that IDF military operations complied with [the law of armed conflict] and consistently implemented precautions to mitigate civilian risk, some exceeding those implemented in recent U.S. combat operations that we participated in, despite confronting an adversary that often sought to exacerbate that risk deliberately. Yet, we found a significant gap between this reality of IDF [law of armed conflict] compliance, and of Hamas’ violation of it, and the public’s perception. Israel’s messaging efforts were unable to close this gap.
As further explained by two authors, Professor Geoffrey S. Corn and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Robert P. Ashley, “legitimacy turns on both the actual and perceived respect for law and morality,” and that “legitimacy ‘can be a decisive factor’ in the achievement of strategic goals.”
Kadosh’s reporting suggests Hamas’s leadership clearly understood this. In 2021, Hamas’s propaganda apparatus was comprised of “only” 400 terror operatives, a figure that nearly quadrupled in just a few years. Notably, Hamas’s propaganda network goes far beyond the Gaza Strip. The terror organization is deeply rooted in Western countries, including the United States, where it has worked to spread propaganda and build support for its terrorism.
Though Western media long repeated Abu Obeida and Hamas’s propaganda, none reported on the recent revelations regarding the enormous extent of the terrorist organization’s propaganda apparatus.
2) The Genocide Scholars Who Weren’t
“The world’s leading genocide scholars association say Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza,” proclaimed CNN anchor Eleni Giokos on September 1. The claim, based on a resolution adopted by an “academic” association, was also echoed by CNN’s Jeremy Diamond, Boris Sanchez, the latter’s guest Omar Baddar (from the Arab American Institute), and dozens of other news outlets around the world.
The problem? The association, known as the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), is not actually an association of genocide scholars.
It turns out that the only qualification for being a member of IAGS is a valid credit card to pay a membership fee. The membership directory, now hidden from the association’s website, revealed numerous non-scholarly members, members with no particular specialty in “genocide studies,” and other questionable details (e.g., 80 of the 500 members were based in Iraq). Proving the point, several researchers were able to join IAGS as members using fake identities, including “Mo Cookie” (with a profile image of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster), “Sheev Palpatine” (with a profile image of Star Wars’s Emperor Palpatine), and “Palestinian Adolf Hitler.”
Had these accounts been created just a week earlier, Mo Cookie and Palestinian Adolf Hitler would’ve been among the “leading genocide scholars” cited by CNN.
Palestinian Adolf Hitler was a member of @GenocideStudies.
Did he vote on the “Genocide in Gaza” resolution too? https://t.co/NVHOFUTtTL pic.twitter.com/Y66H6u4VE8
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) September 3, 2025
This is to say nothing of the conduct of the IAGS vote itself, marked by irregularities and extremely low turnout.
Though the IAGS resolution was covered far and wide, only the Free Press and the Free Beacon covered the revelations shredding IAGS’s credibility. That the resolution contained plainly false statements should’ve been a red flag for the likes of Diamond and all other journalists who rushed to spread the “leading association’s” claims.
3) Hezbollah Terrorizing Lebanon
When one thinks of the Lebanon-based, Iran-funded Hezbollah, one may think of the acts of terrorism it has committed against Americans, Israelis, Syrians, and Jews around the world. But left underreported by the media is Hezbollah’s use of terrorism against the Lebanese people.
In 2006, the United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 1701, which required “the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon.” But by 2023 Hezbollah had grown more militarily powerful than ever. Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Hezbollah joined the assault and began launching rockets and missiles into Israeli communities – the exact scenario resolution 1701 was supposed to prevent. In just one strike, 12 Israeli Druze children were killed by a Hezbollah rocket in the town of Majdal Shams.
Israel responded powerfully in the fall of 2024 and, in just a few short weeks, utterly decimated the world’s most powerful terrorist organization. By the end of the operation, Hezbollah had lost its entire leadership and nearly half of its fighters.
This left the Lebanese state and military with a unique opportunity to effectively act on its obligations under resolution 1701 and disarm a substantially weakened Hezbollah. On August 5, the Lebanese government instructed the army to prepare a plan to disarm all Lebanese militias, including Hezbollah.
Instead of respecting the wishes of the Lebanese authorities and people, Hezbollah and its new secretary-general, Naim Qassem, responded by threatening that there will be “no life in Lebanon” if the Lebanese Armed Forces attempt to disarm Hezbollah. In other words: Hezbollah is holding an entire nation hostage, threatening to wage war on the very people it purports to “protect.”
Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time Hezbollah resorted to terrorism against its own people to preserve itself. In 2005, it assassinated the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
Though Israeli and Arab news outlets have widely covered the story, as well as Reuters, major news outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN (except in Arabic), Fox News (except in Spanish), the Los Angeles Times, the BBC, CBS News, and ABC News have largely failed to cover the terrorist organization’s threats to draw Lebanon into another civil war.
Historical Context for Current Events
Today, 48 Israelis and foreign nationals are held captive by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza for the 700th day, all while European states move to reward their captors by recognizing Palestinian “statehood.” The practice of taking civilian hostages by Palestinian terrorists is not new, however, nor is Europe’s pattern of enabling antisemitic terrorism.
On this day 53 years ago, the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September carried out the Munich Massacre – murdering 11 Israeli Olympic athletes they had taken hostage during the Munich Olympic Games. To this day, there is deep resentment in the Jewish community over the German authorities’ incompetent and insensitive handling of the incident. In April 2023, the German government finally acknowledged “that agonizing questions were left unresolved” over their handling of the incident.
This was far from the only time Jews and Israelis would be let down by European handling of Palestinian terrorism on European soil. In 1980, following the bombing of a synagogue in Paris by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, French Prime Minister Raymond Barre would declare: “This odious bombing wanted to strike Jews who were going to the synagogue and it hit innocent French people who crossed the Copernic street.” That is, it was the harm to “innocent French people” that mattered, a category which apparently excluded the targeted Jewish community. In 1982, Palestinian terrorists bombed a different synagogue, this time in Rome. It was later revealed that the Italian government had made a deal with Palestinian terrorist organizations: they were free to hit Italian Jews so long as they refrained from attacking other Italians.
These incidents symbolize Europe’s continued failure to truly learn from and atone for its treatment of Jews throughout history. In the end, it was Israel, not Germany, that exacted justice for the victims of the massacre carried out on German soil.