Western journalists — having promoted Israel’s claims for more than a year and half — have grown entirely insensible to their active collusion in genocide.
Gaza 2023-2025 by Jaber Jehad Badwan, undated. (Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
Israel’s claim that Hamas is “stealing aid” is so preposterous no serious journalist or politician ought to give it any kind of airing – yet there it is continuously cropping up in the coverage of Gaza.
How do I know Israel’s claim is utterly worthless? For this simple reason:
Israel has a fleet of surveillance drones constantly hovering over the tiny strip of land that is Gaza, monitoring every inch of the territory. The incessant whine you hear every time you watch someone there being interviewed is from one of those drones.
They are Israel’s eyes on the enclave. If you are outside in Gaza, you might as well be living in the Truman Show.
Were Hamas stealing aid in Gaza, Israel would easily be able to document it. It would have the video footage from its drones.
The fact that it has not provided any footage showing Hamas’ theft of aid — its ransacking of aid trucks, or its fighters smuggling themselves into aid warehouses — is confirmation enough that Israel has simply invented this claim to rationalise its plans to starve the people of Gaza to death through months of an aid blockade or force them to flee into neighbouring Sinai, whichever comes first.
“If you are outside in Gaza, you might as well be living in the Truman Show.”
Without its disinformation campaign about “Hamas stealing aid,” Israel knows popular revulsion at its starvation campaign would grow quickly and Western governments would further struggle to keep opposition in check.
There are lots of others reasons, of course, to reject Israel’s lies about “Hamas stealing aid.” Not least of these is because every single charity and aid agency dealing with Gaza says that aid is not being stolen by Hamas.
But also because, were Hamas fighters doing so, they would be stealing from their own families: from their children and grandparents, who are much more vulnerable to Israel’s starvation campaign than they are.
“Every single charity and aid agency dealing with Gaza says that aid is not being stolen by Hamas.”
The idea that Hamas is stealing aid makes sense only to a racist, European colonial mindset in which Hamas fighters are viewed as bogeymen figures indifferent to the deaths of their own children, wives and parents.
What undoubtedly is happening is that Israel is allowing the strongest extended families in Gaza — often crime families with significant private arsenals — to loot the aid. That has become a serious problem since Israel killed off Gaza’s civilian police force (in violation of international law), leaving no one to enforce public order.
When everyone’s starving, the most powerful families mobilise their strength to grab an unfair share of the aid. That was an entirely predictable outcome of Israel’s policy to smash all of Gaza’s institutions, including its hospitals, government offices and police stations, on the bogus pretext that they were “Hamas.”
“Israel is allowing the strongest extended families in Gaza — often crime families with significant private arsenals — to loot the aid.”
Note too that Israel has long cultivated close ties to Palestinian crime families, because they provide a potential alternative, and more co-optable, power base to the Palestinian national movements and are a good source of collaborators.
The evidence suggests Israel is encouraging these crime families to loot the aid precisely to justify its dismantling of an existing aid system that works remarkably well, given the catastrophic circumstances in Gaza, and replace it with its own militarised, completely inadequate “aid distribution” system, which is designed only to herd Palestinians into the southern-most tip of Gaza, ready to be expelled into Sinai.
[See: Head of Condemned US-Israel Aid Plan for Gaza Quits
No journalist ought to be repeating Israel’s transparent disinformation. To do so is to collude in the promotion of lies to justify genocide.
But the Western media class have been doing that now for more than a year and half. They have grown entirely insensible to their own active collusion in the genocide.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
“Israel is Lying”
Could have said just that, and covered it well. Except, that would not be a “news flash” that surprises the world. The disadvantage of getting old is that I can’t really put a date on when I realized that Israel is lying. Certainly every time they pretended not to have nuclear bombs, or that bombing the USS Liberty was an accident, those were times that I already knew that Israel is lying.
Credibility matters. Do not listen to liars. Why? Once they have lied to you, and you know it, then there is no reason to listen to a word they say after that. Certainly not until they have noticeably acted to regain credibility. If they have lied to you in the past, and there is no reason to believe that there is any change, and you know human nature will tend to make the problem worse as the lying gets easier and becomes routine …. there is no reason to listen to a single word they say. They have lost credibility.
Do not listen to people you know have lied to you. Keep score if you need to. Although, in this modern world, its undoubtedly a shorter list of the people who have never lied to you. Israel got crossed off that list of mine back when I was reading the reporting of Robert Fisk from Lebanon.
Note, nothing about this is ‘racial’ or ‘religious’. Just good advice not to listen to people or groups that you know have lied to you in the past.