The New York Times Repeated Israeli Claims of Hamas Stealing Aid Without Evidence

The New York Times repeated Israel s baseless claim that Hamas was stealing aid nearly two dozen times before its own sources contradicted that talking point an Intercept analysis has ascertained as Palestinian people suffered mass starvation and risked their lives to find food amid Israel s blockade During its near-total blockade on humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip Israel has repeatedly claimed that Hamas steals aid and that restricting it will help the two parties achieve a ceasefire The U S and Israel pointed to that argument in May when they handed aid operations over to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation a contested American nonprofit that funnels Gazans to limited aid sites where the Israeli army has repeatedly opened fire on starving civilians At each turn the New York Times dutifully printed the official justifications Then the Times published an article on Saturday reporting that there was no proof that Hamas was stealing aid from the United Nations citing four anonymous Israeli sources The story noted that the U N aid system which provided the bulk of the aid to Gaza was largely effective and there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the U N though the unnamed sources claimed that Hamas did steal from smaller organizations But in articles related to Gaza s hunger dilemma the Times published since January included Israel s accusations that Hamas was stealing aid Nine of those stories did not include opposing statements refuting Israel s claim Twelve articles of the analyzed by The Intercept cited concerns about Hamas diverting aid without an explicit accusation At the time of publication the Times had not added a correction or update to these stories to indicate that the suggests were false None of the articles provided any evidence in assistance of the alleges except for the comments of Israeli functionaries who work for a governing body that has repeatedly spread disinformation including in its record-breaking fatal attacks on journalists aid workers and children In a comment to The Intercept New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander explained that the paper s journalists have done deep reporting on both Israel and Hamas actions and tactics during the war and will continue to document hard and publish facts The Times has revealed deeply fairly and accurately on the war in Gaza since it began including the hardships and food shortages faced by Gazans and when leadership executives provide asserts and accusations our reporters put them in context Stadtlander commented Even before the Times s Saturday story aid groups on the ground in Gaza had repeatedly refuted the Israeli ruling body s proposes of aid theft The U N agency tasked with distributing aid in Gaza the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East or UNRWA has maintained for months that it has received no specific evidence that Hamas or other armed groups were diverting its humanitarian aid in Gaza These proposes are used as a pretext to justify the aid distribution system supported by the Israeli functionaries and the United States of America so called GHF which falls far from abiding to the humanitarian principles and international humanitarian law an UNRWA spokesperson notified The Intercept in a message Related Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Head Boasts Success as Palestinians Starve Israel s illegal blockade of Gaza has now subjected people nearly a quarter of the occupied territory s population to famine-like conditions according to the latest Integrated Food Measure Phase Classification Alert The rest of the population is facing exigency levels of hunger and every child under the age of is at jeopardy of acute malnutrition The Israeli leadership s blockade and ensuing starvation has killed over Palestinians UNICEF announced Eighty percent of them are children UNRWA says it has thousands of trucks waiting in Jordan and Egypt that could surge aid to Palestinians and prevent fatal hunger But instead of resuming U S funding for UNRWA which President Joe Biden ended last year President Donald Trump has opted to advocacy GHF even as Israeli soldiers have killed hundreds of aid-seekers at its food distribution sites since late May As the starvation catastrophe began to draw international condemnation Israel explained that it would allow aid airdrops in Gaza a strategy human rights groups have rebuked as ineffective and dangerous On Sunday Al Jazeera informed Palestinians were injured after a pallet fell directly on the tents of displaced people Last month the International Emergency Group published a description titled the Gaza Starvation Experiment which located that while Hamas likely extracts various revenue audits have shown less than percent of assistance has been lost to theft Aid administrators and Gaza residents explained the group that the Abu Shabab gang armed by Israel has been the single majority of prolific looter during the war on Gaza Other reports challenging asserts of Hamas diverting aid have come out in new weeks from USAID the EU Commission and Israeli media Reuters announced last week that a USAID analysis discovered that out of informed incidents of theft or loss of U S -funded supplies between October and May at least were related to Israeli military actions Despite the mounting evidence the Times continued to parrot Israel s proposes including on July June and June after the ICG disclosed its statement The Times also published an article on Monday that included statements by Trump claiming that Hamas was stealing aid The article did not clarify that no evidence had been shown to prove this claim Past Intercept analyses and investigations have uncovered that the New York Times and other mainstream outlets have demonstrated a bias against Palestinians Related Leaked NYT Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words Genocide Ethnic Cleansing and Occupied Territory In April The Intercept published a analysis on an internal Times memo that instructed journalists to restrict use of the terms genocide and ethnic cleansing and to avoid using the phrase occupied territory when describing Palestinian land The memo also instructed against using the word Palestine and to steer clear of the term refugee camps to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians despite the fact that the United Nations recognizes the areas as refugee camps and they house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees A quantitative analysis of the New York Times Washington Post and Los Angeles Times s coverage of the first six weeks of the conflict presented a consistent bias against Palestinians finding that major U S newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis but not Palestinians and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U S while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October Pro-Palestinian activists have accused major publications of pro-Israel bias and protested at the Times headquarters in Manhattan for its coverage of Gaza Read our complete coverage Israel s War on Gaza The Times and other major mainstream media outlets have often minimized top Israeli leaders genocidal remarks calling for collective punishment of Palestinians and failed to note that using starvation as a weapon of war is a violation of international law Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned as early as October that the regime will continue to tighten the siege until the Hamas threat to Israel and the world is removed National Protection Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir noted a week later that the only thing that should enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of air force explosives not a gram of humanitarian aid No one in the world will allow us to starve two million people even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich mentioned last year And last week Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu noted in a radio interview his authorities is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out describing Palestinians as indoctrinated Nazis There s no hunger in Gaza Eliyahu noted dismissing reports of starvation as anti-Israel propaganda But we don t need to be concerned with hunger in the Strip Let the world worry about it The post The New York Times Repeated Israeli Alleges of Hamas Stealing Aid Without Evidence appeared first on The Intercept