They’re doing it again. The same medieval antisemitic slander once used to justify pogroms and persecution is back – rebranded for modern media. This time, the lie is that Israel is deliberately starving the people of Gaza.
What’s the weapon of choice this time? Images and videos of Palestinian children, spun into media-grabbing headlines that Israel is committing “genocide.”
International attention is implying, or outright claiming, that Israel is to blame for the situation in the Gaza Strip.
Make no mistake – Hamas is the aggressor here and is to blame for withholding food and other critical supplies from children. It is this terrorist organization that uses human shields and twists the narrative to claim that Israel is to blame.
Who is to blame?
The media reports coming out of the Strip are being used as a cudgel, knowingly or not. It’s part of a coordinated campaign, backed by pro-Hamas voices and even UN officials, accusing Israel of starving Gaza.
According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF:
- Israel is allowing humanitarian aid to enter the Strip.
- There is food, water, and medicine inside Gaza.
- The UN and NGOs are refusing to distribute the aid.
- Hamas blocks deliveries and steals supplies, using them to control the population. The ones keeping food from civilians are the very ones accusing Israel of famine.
Where were the cries of genocide when Syrian president Bashar al-Assad killed over half a million of his own people? In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 49 Christians at worship were hacked to death last month by machete-wielding Islamists. Yet the world is silent about these facts.
Do you see any gas chambers or crematoriums in Gaza? What about mass executions or dumping bodies into trenches?
The accusations against Israel regarding Gaza are a perversion of truth, aimed at stripping the Jewish state of moral legitimacy and stoking antisemitic rage. The public needs to know the facts.
Internationally-circulated front page newspaper photos of a chronically ill child, passed off as a starving child, are meant to break your heart. The lie behind them is meant to break Israel.
We’ve seen this before, and we won’t be silent.
The writer is the spokesperson for the Be A Mensch Foundation.