Is Anything We’ve Been Told About Gaza True?

 In the nearly three years since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and tortured, raped, murdered, and imprisoned innocent Israeli citizens, we’ve been treated to countless claims of Israeli depredations in its reprisals that have turned out to be bogus. But none is as bewildering as the claim that Gazans were being starved to death.

In 2023, the New York Times reported that “The deluge of online propaganda and disinformation is larger than anything seen before, according to government officials and independent researchers.”

It noted that Iran, Russia, China, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, to say nothing of Hamas itself, “have used state media and the world’s major social networking platforms to support Hamas and undercut Israel.”

The Times itself earlier regurgitated Hamas propaganda about a hospital bombing only to admit that “early versions of the coverage … relied too heavily on claims by Hamas and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.”

And just a few months ago, Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristof claimed, in print, in the pages of the New York Times, that Israel had trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.

Now we learn that the Gaza famine was apparently another media-fueled myth.

The Free Press this week notes that a report from UNICEF finds Gaza has one of the lowest rates of acute malnutrition in the region, and that the rate of “stunting” from poor nutrition is less than half the region’s rate.

“The UNICEF-led team’s presentation also revealed that Gaza now faces a new challenge: obesity and excess weight, which affect a combined 4% of children under the age of 5,” the Free Press said.

Just a year ago, however, the same agency was claiming that half a million people in Gaza were at risk of dying from starvation, that “starvation is present and is rapidly spreading,” and that Gaza was in “a race against time.”

The Free Press notes that “The latest findings do not conclude that no one in Gaza went hungry, nor do they diminish the suffering endured by Palestinians in Gaza or ongoing health concerns. But the stark reversal documented in the July report demands a closer examination of how a famine was declared in the first place.”

That’s been the problem with coverage of this war since its beginning. Any claim by Israel is triple-checked, doubted, or ignored, while “facts” about Israel’s brutality, genocide, targeting civilians, etc., get repeated as gospel truths.

Why bother having an independent news media if they can’t be counted on to apply the same standards of veracity to both sides of a conflict?

https://issuesinsights.com/2026/08/27/is-anything-weve-been-told-about-gaza-true/