Israel is turning Gaza famine into a hasbara war. It won’t make it less real

In the photo that all Israeli officials commented on, Hidaya, 31, cradles her 18-month-old son Mohammed, who is sick and also displaying signs of malnutrition, at a refugee camp west of Gaza City, July 2025

Dahlia Scheindlin writes in Haaretz on 1 August 2025:

One story dominated Israeli headlines this week, in Israeli radio, news portals, television outlets. The former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was on the case, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories. The story was not about famine and starvation in Gaza. It was about how the world is conspiring against Israel to invent famine and starvation in Gaza.

The plot goes like this: The whole world published a photo of a child who looked like he was starving, in order to blame Israel. But the picture, Israelis across the spectrum insisted, was a lie: the child has a pre-existing genetic condition that explains his appearance. Ergo: There is no starvation in Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself said so (though his biggest supporter, Donald Trump, did not agree).

In fact, Israel is doing nothing wrong in Gaza. If there is hunger, Palestinians themselves are to blame. Ynet’s analysis reached a new low by implying that all the outraged countries are to blame, since, citing an anonymous security official, they did not “pick up the phone” and offer to take the boy in for treatment.

Well over a year after hunger spread to catastrophic levels in parts of Gaza, long after I denounced starvation denialism back in March 2024, it is soul-crushing to have to respond again.

The effort is so paralyzing, the meaning of these lies so profound, that sometimes art is more effective. The 2019 HBO historical fiction series “Chernobyl” was an arresting portrayal of a society falling into an abyss, a near-hermetic ecosystem of lies that cost people their lives.

In the opening monologue, set two years after the world’s biggest nuclear disaster and the cover-ups that contributed to both the accident and worsened its consequences, the main character ruminates: “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?”

Then, he hangs himself.

Toolbox for Truth

Why even address this propaganda and risk amplifying it? There are at least two practical reasons beyond merely chastising Israel.

First, to practice recognizing the truth. Perhaps dissecting the anatomy of lies, and how they work, can give readers a tool to identify similar tactics in the future, so we can all come closer to the truth – painful as it is.

One type of lie tries to deflect, accuses the enemy of fabrication, and ignores all other evidence. The fact is that a child can both have a genetic disease and be starving. The New York Times did not need to apologize, because it didn’t make a mistake; it added information about his condition – information it has provided about other cases of sick, starving and dying children in the past, as far back as March 2024.

Thousands of other children, and adults, are hungry, fainting, and starving, with or without this photo. This photo is only one fragment of overwhelming firsthand documentation of famine in Gaza. The information has been staring us in the face, through the eyes of starving children all year, from credible, firsthand sources – available to anyone with a smartphone who cares to look.

Another incident this week displays a more subtle type of denialism. Well, sort of subtle. This one involves interpretations that sound credible – except that they’re off the wall.

If this was the week that Israelis could no longer avoid starvation in Gaza, if only to deny it, it was also the week of the much-feared international diplomatic onslaught. In New York, UN member states held the French- and Saudi-led initiative to advance the two-state solution, postponed since June. Everything about the portrayal in Israel was designed to traduce the efforts.

Terse coverage of the event portrayed it as a worrying but nearly-insignificant development. Hardly any outlet noted information that could be positive for Israel: that the declaration, backed by numerous allies, 27 EU members, and the entire Arab League, condemned terrorism, Hamas’ October 7 attack, and hostage taking. It demanded that Hamas ends its control of Gaza and hand over its weapons, and endorsed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ offer of a demilitarized state.

What Israelis did notice was that France, the U.K. and Canada have formally announced their intention to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September – naturally portrayed as a blow to Israel and a gift to Hamas (it’s not). Even Germany is dropping hints. This week, the Netherlands also announced a ban on Israel’s religious fundamentalist ministers who, the Dutch foreign minister wrote, incite ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.

The reaction of Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gideon Sa’ar, to these developments was bizarre. His English statement accuses the efforts to advance a Palestinian state of giving into Hamas’ wishes, but “it ain’t gonna happen,” as if moldy American slang from the 1980s will somehow strengthen Israel’s case.

Sa’ar’s next argument – echoed with uncanny consistency by nearly every right-wing commentator this week – was that international pressure on Israel “has already caused Hamas to harden its position,” thereby “directly sabotaging the chances for a ceasefire and hostage deal.”

This point is baffling, considering that both parties have sabotaged countless negotiation efforts for a cease-fire all on their own, plenty of times by Israel’s government. Over the 21 months leading up to today, during a brutal war of destruction, Hamas’ position has almost exclusively hardened.

And when you don’t believe your own arguments, you add more: France, Britain, and the Netherlands are simply trying to appease their Muslim populations for electoral purposes. This is the equivalent of the “pre-existing condition” line to deny starvation in Gaza: bonkers. Yet the foreign minister used it. Zeev Elkin, a minister in the Finance Ministry repeated it as a matter of fact.

Yes, about 10 percent of the French population is Muslim, about 6.5 percent of British identify as Muslim, and 6 percent in the Netherlands. But it’s hard to argue that this proves politicians cater to them; after all, about 70 percent of Israelis want a hostage release and a cease-fire deal, and that hasn’t caused the Israeli government to bring the last 50 home.

All alone
The second reason to expose the lies Israel is drowning in is this: anyone who believes them must internalize that they may as well be living on another planet. In the 1960s, anti-Vietnam war protesters argued that “the whole world is watching.” Here too, the whole world is watching – it’s watching Gaza. Lie as you might, no one in the world is listening.

Israelis are talking only to themselves, like a patient locked in a cell, or like Russians who dismissed their own Ukrainian family members’ accounts of being bombed.

Ask the scientists of Chernobyl how well the lies worked out.

This article is reproduced in its entirety