ITAI’s Special Bulletin # XXVI

By: Joseph Puder

August 12, 2025

The readiness of large portions of the western mainstream media to buy into Hamas Health Ministry announced figures of Palestinian casualties in the Gaza Strip is baffling, but perhaps not surprising. The western media has been less than friendly towards Israel, and insensitive about the upsurge in antisemitism on a global scale.

The same media would, however, be skeptical about Russian government information about casualties in Putin’s war in Ukraine. Yet knowing that Hamas is a terror organization whose leaders vow time and again their intent to destroy the Jewish state, western media should at the very least try to parse if not question Hamas’ disseminated propagandist information.  

Palestinian casualties in Gaza coming out of Hamas’ Health authorities never distinguish between Hamas fighters and civilians, and the alleged figure of 60,000 dead Gazans is hardly verified. Moreover, it doesn’t consider the scores and scores of Gazans murdered by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) armed gangs. They kill anyone who turns to sources of food other than the stolen humanitarian aid that Hamas controls and sells.

It isn’t just the media, but European government officials and radical pro-Hamas progressives in the U.S. Congress who echo the same Hamas propaganda about starvation in Gaza and genocide committed by Israel. Some individual Gazan might be starving just as some people in the U.S. might reach the point of starvation. Food aid is entering Gaza, and Israel is parachuting food parcels into the enclave.  Yet, it is rarely acknowledged that Hamas is stealing the aid trucks coming into Gaza, and sell the stolen food for money that it uses to feed its fighters, procure arms, and recruit new fighters.

There is a war in Gaza that Hamas provoked and started following the worse massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, but there is no genocide that often times is alleged and aired by some politicians and in the media. The Israeli army, IDF, that phones Gazans to alert them to evacuate from dangerous fighting zones, and drops leaflets that do the same, is an army that endangers its soldiers to prevent the death of innocent uninvolved civilians. It is not an army that commits genocide, but rather the most humane army in the world.