Hamas is having a difficult time. The genocidal, Gaza-based terrorist group has been decimated by the Israeli Defense Forces since it carried out the Oct. 7, 2023 invasion of Israel, the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Hamas’s capabilities have been severely degraded, its leaders and top operatives killed or captured. The group has lost ground—but not, it must be said, with much of the press.
As CAMERA has documented, Hamas has been running an information op, claiming that Israel is responsible for “genocide” and a “famine” in Gaza. And many news outlets have lapped it up, uncritically repeating the terror group’s propaganda.
It would be unthinkable for media to parrot casualty claims made by al-Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), or other U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. But revealingly, groups like Hamas, whose preeminent target is Israel, get a pass.
The Washington Post has been at the forefront of Hamas’s propaganda campaign.
On July 30 the newspaper published a piece entitled, “60,000 Gazans have been killed. 18, 500 were children: These are their names.” The dispatch is alternatively headlined “Israel’s war in Gaza claims thousands of young lives.”
Beginning with its title, the entire article is completely reliant on anti-Israel sources—including Hamas. Reporters Sammy Westfall, Amaya Verde, Julia Ledur, and Hazem Balousha list Gazans killed in the recent Israel-Hamas war. But their source is the “Gaza Health Ministry”—a Hamas-controlled entity.
The newspaper grudgingly acknowledges that the “Ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants” only to proceed to give it undue credibility, asserting that it “released the names and ages of those confirmed killed during the war.” Later, the paper blithely admits that the “the ministry’s list of names is the only official record of the dead,” only then to assert that “children fill page after page.” Hundreds of names are listed, many—predominantly children—with pictures listed next to their names, alongside descriptions. “Some were killed in their beds,” the Post writes. “Others while playing. Many were buried before they learned to walk.”
The entire article is clearly meant to stir emotion at the tragedy of war for many Gazans. War is horrific. The suffering and death of innocents, including children, are tragic. This must be clearly stated. But responsibility for that war, both its onset and its continuation, must also be placed where it belongs—with Hamas. And a look at what Hamas is hoping to achieve—its strategy, tactics, and objectives—is indispensable to honest analysis.
The entire Post article is predicated on claims by a U.S.-designated terrorist group that calls for Israel’s destruction and the genocide of Jews and which explicitly uses its own people as human shields. The Post, however, says no such thing. In journalism it is essential to have independent and secondary confirmation of key facts, particularly for sensitive and inflammatory issues. This is a basic tenet of the field. And it is one that the Post completely abandoned, dispensing with longstanding ethics and standards of the profession.
CAMERA even searched Post archives for a comparable example: another instance of the newspaper publishing casualty claims by a U.S.-designated terrorist group, complete with photos and obituaries, and without any independent verification. CAMERA was unable to find any other example. Hamas, it seems, gets special treatment from the Post. That speaks volumes, none of it good.
Indeed, the newspaper never published, in a similar fashion, a list of names of every single victim of the October 7, 2023 massacre perpetrated by Hamas and other Iranian-backed terror groups—and those victims have been independently verified. Instead of commemorating victims of terrorism, the Washington Post would rather incentivize terrorists.
More than 1200 Israelis and others were brutally murdered on October 7—the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust and a terrorist attack which, adjusting for population, was 13 times more deadly than the Sept. 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks that prompted the global war on terror and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Hamas perpetrated those attacks knowing that not only would Israel respond militarily, but the IDF was, by every metric, qualitatively superior. Accordingly, the terrorist group’s strategy was to weaponize the suffering of its own people. And for this tactic to succeed Hamas counts on Western press outlets like the Washington Post.
As Doug Feith, a former U.S. Under Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, noted in an Oct. 16 2023 Free Press Op-Ed, Hamas’s strategy is one of “human sacrifice.” The terrorist group intentionally places weapons, operatives, storage depots, and headquarters in densely populated civilian dwellings, purposefully locating them in or near schools, hospitals, apartment complexes—even near “reporters” like the Associated Press. This is to deter follow-up attacks from Israel, but it is also to incur the death of civilians. It is, Feith noted, “innovative in the worst way.” He adds:
“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.”
The Washington Post is here to help Hamas. And this, as CAMERA noted in Nov. 23, 2023 Washington Times Op-Ed entitled “Dear media, Hamas couldn’t do it without you,” is nothing new. The Post is complicit, voluntarily serving the terror group’s aims.
As CAMERA documented, proof of Hamas’s strategy has been in the public domain for a very long time. There’s an extensive body of evidence, including photographic, video, and testimony from Hamas operatives, proving that Hamas seeks to maximize the death of civilians. In 2014, the Washington Post itself noted Gaza’s Shifa Hospital has “become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” A July 31, 2014 Post report was even entitled “Why Hamas stores its weapons inside hospitals, mosques, and schools.” But that was then, and this is now.
Regrettably, now the Washington Post is “all in” for Hamas. The terror group’s strategy of human sacrifice and its documented history of lying and inflating casualty stats is entirely missing in the newspaper’s July 30 article. Instead, the Post portrays Israel, not Hamas, as chiefly responsible for both the war and its subsequent misery. This isn’t journalism. But it is par for the course for a newspaper that employs dozens of staffers formerly linked to Al-Jazeera and other Qatari-based entities—Qatar also being one of Hamas’s chief supporters.
Indeed, as CAMERA has documented, the Post continues to publish reporters like Hajar Harb, who celebrated the October 7 attacks on her social media. Harb’s posts were brought to the attention of Post staff, but they didn’t care. The Post has also been aware of the fact that the “Health Ministry” is controlled by Hamas. But the Post has its objective, and it can hardly be called “journalism.”
The July 30 report also relies on quotes and sources from organizations like the United Nations and its offshoots, which have a long track record of anti-Israel bias. UN employees even took part in the October 7 massacre and UN facilities were used by terrorist operatives. For real journalists this would be discrediting, but it has become abundantly clear that, when it comes to Israel, journalism isn’t the Post’s mission. Rather, terrorist agit-prop is.