Hamas is on the ropes. Israel is winning its war against the U.S.-designated terrorist organization. But the Washington Post is here to lend a helping hand to the Gaza-based group.
As CAMERA has documented, the Post’s coverage of the war has been flawed from the start. The newspaper has uncritically regurgitated Hamas-supplied casualty claims, minimized Iran’s culpability, and outright lied about Hamas’s well-documented tactic of using human shields. Time and again, Post columnists and reporters have portrayed Israel as uniquely evil, placing the onus for the war and its consequences on the Jewish state, and not on the Iranian-backed terror groups that started the conflict. To do so, they’ve ignored both key facts and important context.
If unintentionally, the Post, among other Western news outlets, has been aiding Hamas in its war against Israel. Indeed, the newspaper’s coverage of aid to Gaza has been replete with errors and omissions.
Take, for example, a November 18, 2024 report (“Gangs looting Gaza aid operate in areas under Israeli control”). This dispatch, by Loveday Morris, Claire Parker, Miriam Berger, Hazem Balousha, and Hajar Harb, featured five bylines and ample distortion.
Indeed, Harb’s byline is particularly problematic.
As CAMERA’s Arabic department revealed in an April 1, 2024 expose (“Washington Post Contributor Celebrates October 7 Massacre”), Harb cheered the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023. On her social media posts, Harb called the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust “beautiful.” Harb mocked the kidnapping of Yafa Adar, an eighty-five-year-old Israeli grandmother. Harb responded to footage of Adar being kidnapped by writing “See this place ma’am? Allah willing, you’ll remain inside with us for a while.” On Harb’s Facebook profile she lampooned Shiri Bibas, an Israeli mother who was kidnapped and brought into Gaza along with her two children, Ariel and Kfir. It is hard to imagine how terrified Shiri Bibas must have felt to be kidnapped with her two young children by a genocidal terrorist group. Any decent person would feel sympathy and revulsion at her plight. Harb had only mockery, writing “[this is] your home and your spot, you and your children.”
CAMERA sent the newspaper evidence of Harb’s comments, including screenshots. Other newspapers covered the story, citing CAMERA’s work. But nearly a year later, the Washington Post has continued to file dispatches from Harb and, presumably, pay her. This disqualifies the Post from being taken seriously. It is contemptible and unforgivable.
Parker’s byline is also noteworthy. As CAMERA has documented, in an August 24, 2024 dispatch, the Cairo bureau chief called Palestinian terrorism “armed resistance.” This echoes language used by the U.S.-designated terror group. Nor is this the only occasion in which Parker regurgitated terrorist propaganda.
The reporter put the onus for October 7 on Israel, claiming that counterterrorist raids at Al-Aqsa mosque had helped spark the massacre. As CAMERA noted, there is a long history of blaming Jews for anti-Jewish violence. For Palestinian terrorist groups this dates back to at least the 1920s terrorist groups, when they claimed that Jews sought to change the status quo at the same mosque—a lie that led to pogroms and terror attacks. Both Hamas and Fatah have continued to employ what the scholar Nadav Shragai has called “al-Aqsa is in danger libel,” and thanks to Parker it has appeared in the pages of the Post.
It is perhaps unsurprising then that the Post’s November 18 dispatch was replete with anti-Israel bias and omissions.
The report puts the onus for aid being stolen in Gaza not on the organized gangs doing the looting, but rather on the Jewish state.
“Aid organizations say Israeli authorities have denied most of their requests for better measures to safeguard convoys, including appeals for safer routes, more open crossings, and permission to allow Gaza’s civilian police to protect the trucks,” the Post writes. “Israeli forces within view of the attacks have also failed on multiple occasions to intervene as looting was underway, aid workers, U.N. officials, transport workers, and truck drivers say.”
Israel, it seems, is damned if does and damned if it doesn’t. According to the Post’s own reporting, the Jewish state is both “occupying Gaza” and being too heavy-handed in its approach while simultaneously not doing enough. One can easily imagine a scenario where Israel intervenes more to prevent looting that’s already underway, leading to violence for which Israel is inevitably blamed. For Israel, in the pages of the Washington Post, there’s just no winning.
Unsurprisingly, the Post relies almost exclusively on sources with a long track record of anti-Israel bias. Much of it comes from the United Nations—an entity with a long history of bias against the Jewish state. The newspaper also uncritically cites Save the Children and the World Food Program, entities with similar track records. As NGO Monitor has documented, Save the Children has claimed that Israel intentionally targets children—an updated version of the blood libel. The organization has also admitted to using data that is “not a statistically significant or representative sample” in its reports on Israel. In short: when it comes to the Jewish state, they are not a trustworthy source.
The report also errs by faulting Israel for “targeting civilian police officers who had been guarding humanitarian convoys, citing their affiliation with the Hamas-run government.” This is absurd. In many cases, Hamas itself has looted aid. The idea that Hamas operatives would somehow have thwarted looting is the sort of asinine logic that would only make sense to the Washington Post.
The Post goes into depth on how certain crossings between Israel and Gaza have been shut down, further restricting the flow of aid. But the dispatch omits that many of these crossings were restricted due to security concerns that they were being used to smuggle weapons instead of just food and emergency supplies. Such concerns are justified.
Indeed, on November 11—a week before the Post’s story—the Foundation for Defense of Democracies published an article, “Israel expands humanitarian area in Gaza, intercepts weapons smuggling,” which detailed how aid convoys run by international organizations were being used to facilitate weapons smuggling into Gaza. Several news outlets have even published pictures and video evidence of the convoys being exploited for smuggling. “Terrorists seek to exploit humanitarian corridors and convoys in Gaza,” warned Seth Frantzman, an adjunct fellow at FDD. “Hamas has sought to stay in power by humanitarian aid and by continuing to control areas where humanitarian aid is delivered,” he added. Yet the Post didn’t provide readers with these details.
Nor did the newspaper note the extensive lengths that Israel has undertaken to ensure aid arrives in Gaza. As David Adesnik, a senior fellow and director of research at FDD, noted in November 2024: “Israel has facilitated the entry of 56,000 trucks and 1.1 millions tons of aid into Gaza since the war began.”
This isn’t the first time that the Washington Post has failed to omitted facts and context about aid being sent to Gaza during the latest war. As CAMERA noted in March 2024, “at seemingly every turn, the Post has downplayed or ignored Israel’s efforts to get aid to the people in Gaza while simultaneously ignoring the root of the problem: Hamas.” Several Post reports in March and February of this year committed this error. And nearly a year later it seems that the newspaper had learned nothing. Indeed, the Post has recently published op-eds by Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Bernie Sanders (D-VT) which both regurgitate Hamas-supplied casualty stats and put the onus on Israel, and not Hamas, for the problems in Gaza. As CAMERA has frequently noted, the Post’s longstanding practice of repeating casualty statistics supplied by a U.S.-designated terrorist group defies common sense and journalistic integrity—both traits in short abundance at the newspaper.
There is a reason behind the Post’s decision, however. The news outlet has a narrative to sell.
A recent Washington Post video made the absurd claim that the war in Gaza is “the most destructive in a century.” This claim not only relies on Hamas-supplied casualty stats, but it also overlooks history and key facts. Hamas’s strategy is one of “human sacrifice.” The terrorist group intentionally hides its men and munitions in schools, hospitals, and other densely populated areas. It does so with the hope of incurring civilian casualties to use as a cudgel against the Jewish in the court of the public opinion. As CAMERA has noted in the pages of the Washington Times and elsewhere, Hamas’s strategy relies on news outlets like the Washington Post. In short: much of the destruction of the current war can be laid at the doorstep of Hamas and other Iranian-backed proxies who not only launched the war against Israel, but actively worked to ensure that it would be deeply destructive. There can be no honest accounting of the war in Gaza, with all its destruction, without noting Hamas’s strategy.
Moreover, to claim that the current war is “the most destructive in a century” is ahistorical, overlooking conflicts like the First and Second Congo Wars, which have killed more than six million people, or the Syrian Civil War, which has killed in excess of 600,000 people. The estimate of civilian casualties from the Second Iraq War varies but is usually around 200,000—multitudes higher than the figures cited by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health—and this doesn’t even include the later casualties from the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria known as Inherent Resolve.
In short: the Post’s claim is a libel, a false claim meant to depict the Jewish state as uniquely evil and destructive. And it overlooks the pioneering efforts undertaken by the Israeli Defense Forces to limit and reduce civilian casualties while fighting in urban combat against a foe whose objective is the precise opposite. But too often blood libels are what seem to pass for journalism at the Washington Post, an outlet increasingly worthy of contempt. When its writers and columnists aren’t celebrating Hamas terror attacks, they’re working to attack Israel in other ways, disqualifying the newspaper from being considered a fair and impartial observer.