The New York Times has a well documented obsession with Gazan hunger that fuels hostility toward Israel and Jews, by falsely suggesting that the world’s only Jewish state is maliciously responsible for the greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet, even though there are exponentially worse famines underway, and the blame for Gaza’s hunger is far more complex than the NYT’s coverage would suggest.
The newspaper reinforces this incorrect impression through its many failures to cover stories that exculpate Israel and/or blame others for Gaza’s food shortage. Here are thirteen notable stories reported by Israeli news organizations that give crucial moral context — where Hamas and/or aid group incompetence caused Gazan hunger — but are completely missing from “the paper of record”:
- October 16: “[UNRWA] … indicated Sunday that Hamas authorities in the Gaza Strip had stolen fuel and medical supplies meant for refugees from its premises in Gaza City, during the fighting triggered by the terror group’s deadly shock attack on Israel. Shortly after posting the claim on X, UNRWA deleted the posts. It later asserted that nothing had been looted.”
- November 12: “[Footage shows] Hamas officials beating up civilians and preventing them from accessing a truckload of food sent as aid to the civilian population. The report says that after this was filmed, the Hamas operatives took away the food for the terror group’s own purposes.”
- December 5: “A video circulating on social media shows armed people, presumably Hamas members, looting humanitarian aid trucks crossing into the Gaza Strip from Rafah. The video was filmed Monday by Gazan civilians as they threw stones at the looters wearing civilian fatigues, who shot back in response. The civilians can be heard insulting the looters, and shouting ‘This is all being filmed!’”
- December 7: “In a rare display of public criticism, a Gaza resident tells the Al-Jazeera TV channel that the lack of aid to residents of the Strip is due to Hamas stealing it. Asked about the supposed trickle of aid coming into Gaza, the woman says there is plenty of aid, but ‘all aid goes down (into Hamas tunnels).’
“‘The aid does not reach the nation, all the people,’ she says.
“When the journalist from the pro-Palestinian Qatari channel tells her that only a small amount of aid is coming in and it is all being distributed, she shakes her fingers at him and says: ‘All of it goes into their houses. They take it and will even shoot me or do whatever they want, Hamas.’”
- December 11: “Videos out of Gaza show the fight over the limited humanitarian aid entering the territory. One clip shows an armed gunman atop a truck, as civilians rush to grab supplies left in the street. Some media reports claim Hamas stole the truck.”
- December 13: “Israel’s military liaison to the Palestinians posts footage of what it says are Hamas fighters seizing a convoy of humanitarian aid after it entered Gaza.”
- December 17: “Videos circulating on social media Sunday showed gunmen, reportedly Hamas operatives, stealing trucks delivering humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip from Egypt, as aid convoys also started entering the Palestinian enclave through the Kerem Shalom border crossing for the first time since the outbreak of the war on October 7.”
- December 21: “President Isaac Herzog averred Thursday that the United Nations has been failing to keep up with the amount of aid Israel is inspecting, and that the world body is to blame for the little amount of aid entering the Strip even after Israel has opened up its Kerem Shalom crossing to ease the bottleneck.
“‘Unfortunately, due to the utter failure of the UN in its work with other partners in the region, they have been unable to bring in more than 125 trucks [of aid] a day,’ Herzog said in a meeting with visiting French Senate President Gérard Larcher.
“‘Today it is possible to provide three times the amount of humanitarian aid to Gaza if the UN — instead of complaining all day — would do its job,’ Herzog said.
“In recent weeks, multiple videos have circulated on social media of Gazans discovering stockpiles of aid in UNRWA facilities, and expressing anger at the organization for not distributing desperately needed supplies to citizens.”
- February 16: “A Palestinian teen named Muhammad al-Araja who tried to grab from a humanitarian aid shipment at the Rafah Crossing was shot dead earlier today, apparently by Hamas police, according to unconfirmed Arabic media reports. After the shooting, many members of the victim’s large extended family began rioting at the crossing, setting fire to parts of the complex and clashing with authorities there.”
- February 16: “[Israel] chastised the United Nations on Thursday for not keeping up with humanitarian aid operations in the Gaza Strip. … [T]he Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) posted photos on X of what it said is ‘the content of 500 trucks of humanitarian aid on the Gazan side of Kerem Shalom, AFTER Israeli inspection, waiting to be picked up and distributed by UN orgs. It is the 3rd day in a row that hundreds of trucks are not picked up. The UN needs to scale up their operations,’ COGAT said.
“Israel has accused humanitarian actors of not doing enough to distribute aid since the beginning of the war. Particular criticism has been directed at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which stands accused of failing to visit hostages held by Hamas and provide them with adequate assistance.”
- February 23: “Gaza has received 13,834 trucks of humanitarian aid since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, according to a Friday update by Israel’s military liaison to the Palestinians, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories. According to COGAT, 254,210 tons of supplies have been transferred to the Gaza Strip, including 167,080 tons of food.”
- March 19: “Since December, Mark, an aid worker with a large international relief organization, has entered Gaza eight times to bring food, water, and other essentials to the enclave’s civilian population. … According to Mark … relief trucks are increasingly being emptied by both desperate civilians and armed looters before they can reach their intended distribution points.”
- March 27: The Jerusalem Post interviewed a Gazan writer in the south of Gaza who says, “The Rafah crossing is operating well, and aid enters in a very large amount, and there is never a shortage. However, the distribution of aid is in the hands of Hamas, which means it does not reach all the displaced people.”
In addition to ignoring those thirteen stories that shift the blame to Hamas and NGOs, the NYT also hid these three stories that cast doubt on the “famine” that the paper’s skewed and alarmist reporting suggests:
- March 13: The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported claims that ”As of 12 March … 27 people … have died of malnutrition and dehydration [in] Gaza.” But instead of sharing that key data point, the NYT’s obsessive coverage of Gaza’s “famine” makes readers think that hunger has killed vastly more than 27 people.
- March 31: Ynet reports that “Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) Director Major General Ghassan Alian published a report … which disproves recent claims against Israel on the state of food security in Gaza, and points to factual and methodological errors made by a United Nations report on the matter.”
Instead of covering that news, the NYT ran a headline reinforcing its preferred anti-Israel narrative: “Aid is slow to enter Gaza, despite a top U.N. court ruling demanding ‘unhindered’ access.”
- April 2: Ynet reports that Gazan food prices dropped and “Hamas reduced taxes on market goods, prompted by the increased and protected flow of aid and food into the territory[.]”
That crucial information is never reported by the NYT. A search for NYT articles mentioning “Gaza” and “food” that day instead reveals ten stories about the World Central Kitchen tragedy, for which Israel apologized (even though Israel gets zero credit for such honesty, and Hamas never apologizes for anything). The coverage emphasis reinforces the NYT’s pattern of amplifying news that smears Israel while avoiding whatever vindicates it.
A particularly instructive example of the New York Times’ anti-Israel bias is from March 15, when at least 20 Gazans died around an aid convoy and the paper gave the Israeli side of the story 74 words, in the final paragraph, with too little detail to seem credible. By contrast, the Times of Israel included a far more detailed account from the IDF (totaling almost 400 words) and the aerial footage that the IDF shared in support of its claims.
With such slanted coverage, readers of the New York Times are practically presented with an alternative reality, in which Israel alone has caused Gazan misery, with some nefarious plan to worsen hunger wherever possible (despite risking Israeli soldiers’ lives to create humanitarian aid corridors), and where aid agencies don’t fail in their aid distribution tasks, and Hamas didn’t break the last ceasefire in place on October 6 and doesn’t loot humanitarian aid and shoot anyone who crosses it when trying to access food supplies.
The volume of information that would shift blame away from Israel (to Hamas and others) that the New York Times chooses not to cover dangerously fuels the antisemitism that has exploded on college campuses and in major capitals around the world. Thus, the “paper of record” has become an instrument of Hamas incitement.
Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic submarine thriller about Iranian nukes, Hamas, and Hezb’allah.
Image: Adam Jones via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).
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