Tom Gross 25 October 2025. For full article see https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-westerners-helping-hamas-win-the-propaganda-war/
After two years of war, and despite Israel’s many successes
on the battlefield, Hamas can also claim a kind of victory – at least for now.
The terror group has survived and is once again exerting control in the areas
of Gaza under its authority. Public executions, whippings, stonings and
kneecappings have returned. In the first five days of the ceasefire, Hamas
executed at least 100 Gazans.
Hamas’s survival was achieved not only through its remaining
fighters and its holding of hostages, but also thanks to a chorus of western
apologists. A coalition of so-called progressives and professional activists
has excused, rationalised and defended the group’s actions across universities
and in newspaper editorials. The BBC, Sky, the Guardian, the FT and the New
York Times have all parroted Hamas talking points.
Tales of impending famine in Gaza, for instance, were
broadcast as fact, sourced from UN bureaucrats and ‘aid agencies’ with long
records of anti-Israel bias and, in some cases, open sympathy for Hamas. This
isn’t journalism: it’s agenda-driven activism disguised as news. What the BBC
and others failed to grasp is that, for Hamas, the western media is the
battlefields.
From the outset, even before Israeli troops had entered
Gaza, Hamas’s operatives and sympathisers in the West were shouting about
‘genocide’ and ‘famine’. It was a propaganda trap – and the western media
walked right into it.
Consider, for example, these headlines from the early weeks
of the conflict in 2023:
11,15,30 October, 6 November: “Fuel in Gaza will run out in
48 hours”
The pattern speaks for itself. It’s been the same story with
Gaza being ‘on the brink of famine’ for the past two years. This is how it
works:
Step one: The Hamas ‘health ministry’ makes up a casualty
number which could be debunked by the most cursory statistical analysis.
Step two: Aid organisations repeat the number without
independent confirmation.
Step three: UN agencies in Gaza (some staffed by Hamas
members) cite the aid organisations.
Step four: Media outlets quote the UN agencies.
Step five: Hamas’s supporters in the West claim the numbers
are ‘UN verified’.
UN officials have also contributed to the fiction directly.
In May, Tom Fletcher, a humanitarian coordinator for the organisation, told BBC
Radio 4: ‘There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we
can reach them.’ Almost no babies died as a result of the war in the following
days. But that didn’t stop the BBC running the claim in bulletins and news
outlets around the world repeating it, citing the BBC as a reliable source.
The Hamas narrative has been amplified, too, by
disinformation campaigns driven by Iranian, Russian and Chinese state-linked
bots on social media, which have exploited Gaza as a means of destabilising
western societies. These regimes understood how easily such narratives could
tap into a pre-existing willingness among many in the West to believe
anti-Semitic libels.
Today, falsehoods are disseminated by journalists, academics
and UN officials – cloaked in the language of human rights but echoing ancient
prejudices.
Why were Hamas’s inflated casualty figures reported as
facts? Why were incorrect claims of Israel bombing hospitals repeated without
scrutiny – while confirmed cases of Hamas rockets hitting Israeli hospitals in
Ashkelon and Beersheba were ignored? In part, this was down to journalistic
complacency. The facts were accessible.
Independent researchers discovered that some of the most
widely shared images of ‘starvation in Gaza’ were from Yemen. One prominent
photo showing a skeletal child was highlighted by the media as evidence of
famine. In reality, the child wasn’t malnourished due to famine. He had
cerebral palsy, hypoxemia and other genetic conditions. That didn’t prevent the
Guardian, Times and New York Times running it on their front pages, inflaming
the emotions of millions of readers. Despite its resources, the much-touted BBC
Verify unit missed these falsehoods.
The good news? Large swaths of the British public aren’t
buying it. Scroll through the reader comments under articles about Israel, and
you’ll find thousands of ordinary people who haven’t lost their critical
faculties. They know casualty figures from terrorist regimes aren’t a sacred
truth. They can spot propaganda when they see it.
Unlike some intellectuals, they don’t lose all logic the
moment the word ‘Israel’ is uttered. As George Orwell once quipped: ‘You must
be an intellectual. Only an intellectual could believe something quite so
stupid.’ Today, he might have aimed that line at Guardian readers or BBC news
staff.
In this war, it is not Israel or even Hamas that has lost
its purpose, but the media.

