Mick Hartley

Further to that post about the BBC and Hamas…

The media is the problem:
"A significant number of headlines from mainstream media outlets thus elevated one side of the story – the side promoted by a designated foreign terrorist organization – without waiting for forensic clarity and countervailing evidence".
New report on How… pic.twitter.com/I74Lm2MUSS

— Natasha Hausdorff (@HausdorffMedia) July 18, 2025

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Report here:

In May 2025, the U.S. Department of State began a special aid initiative through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to deliver meals and direct food assistance to Palestinian civilians throughout the Gaza Strip. The mandate was straightforward: to securely move aid into a network of Secure Distribution Sites which would facilitate the distribution of millions of meals to hungry civilians1. The effort has delivered over 60 million meals since its inception.

Within days of GHF’s first meal deliveries, it became the target of a deliberate narrative assault, driven less by verifiable facts than by the demands of a competing narrative. Reports and evidence of violence at aid sites began to surface, and international and U.S. media outlets, social media influencers, and NGOs started publishing articles that ascribed blame to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) or GHF for intentional violence against civilians, war crimes, and complicity in the crime of genocide.

The reports quickly condensed into viral headlines, but the claim that the IDF was systematically murdering civilians was usually sourced from Hamas-run ministries or anonymous accounts, and often unverified. Moreover, evidence that Hamas could be responsible for violence around aid sites – evidence provided by non-Hamas Palestinian sources, by Hamas’s online communications, and by video that in some cases shows Hamas operatives deliberately firing on Palestinian civilians – was almost never suggested.

A significant number of headlines from mainstream media outlets thus elevated one side of the story – the side promoted by a designated foreign terrorist organization – without waiting for forensic clarity and countervailing evidence. Although in some cases the body texts of news articles did make an effort to present a more holistic exploration of sources, the verdict or tone in the headlines – that the IDF and/or GHF was responsible for the killings at aid sites – was already given.

A core failure of media coverage is the routine elevation of the Gaza Health Ministry, a Hamas-run agency, as a trusted source on culpability for violence. While violence itself is not always in dispute, the headlines overwhelmingly frame Israel or GHF as responsible, burying in the body text that these claims originate from Hamas if this fact is revealed at all. The result is a narrative that masks its source and misleads the public about who is to blame.

The Gaza Health Ministry itself is run by Hamas and for that reason alone cannot be quoted as a politically neutral source for answering questions of culpability or fact. The Ministry has a proven and systematic history of lies, deceptions, duplicated data, and exaggerations which strain credulity of any nonpartisan observer….