The breathless and voluminous reporting on Israel’s alleged atrocities stands in stark contrast with the news that GHF has been attacked by Hamas.
From the outset of the joint U.S.-Israeli initiative that has distributed millions of meals to Gaza’s civilian population, the usual suspects — the United Nations, European socialists, and the international press, among others — have trafficked the implication that this humanitarian operation is a ruse: that the Israel Defense Forces use the aid sites operated by the U.S.-based charity Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as kill boxes into which the IDF lures civilians so they can be massacred.
At times, journalistic outlets are careless enough when laundering this allegation of cartoonish malevolence that they are compelled to retract their reporting. The reality on the ground in Gaza is that these aid disbursement sites, which GHF’s private contractors secure, are situated in a war zone. Outside those sites, combat operations are still underway, and Hamas conducts hostile operations near them because it has a vested interest in disrupting this charity’s activities and preserving its monopoly on the distribution of foreign aid.
That fact might dampen the activist left’s enthusiasm for its anti-Israel agitation, which is why it rarely finds its way into the copy accusing Israel of monomaniacal cruelty. Such is the hunger in the press for claims that cast Jerusalem and its American partners in a wicked light that elementary discretion must be dispensed with.
The breathless and voluminous reporting on Israel’s alleged atrocities stands in stark contrast with the news that GHF has been attacked by Hamas.
According to the group, a bus carrying a team of aid workers to a distribution site near Khan Younis was “brutally attacked by Hamas” on Wednesday. At least five GHF team members were initially confirmed to have been killed, and multiple more were seriously wounded. “This attack did not happen in a vacuum,” a statement from the group added. “For days, Hamas has openly threatened our team, our aid workers, and the civilians who receive aid from us. These threats were met with silence.” GHF “holds Hamas fully responsible” for what they described as an “attack on humanity.”
The death toll rose to eight overnight as some of the aid workers who were attacked succumbed to their wounds. In addition, GHF subsequently revealed that they “fear that some of our team members have been taken hostage.” The charity remains, however, undeterred. “We decided that the best response to Hamas’ cowardly murderers was to keep delivering food for the people of Gaza who are counting on us,” the organization insisted.
It’s not that the international press is ignoring the assault on the philanthropists spearheading this charitable initiative. Rather, the bloodshed serves as a platform from which to launch into familiar diatribes about how desperate the situation in Gaza is and why the United Nations, which has allowed Hamas to requisition and ration aid to Gaza’s civilians so as to extort them into pliancy, must have a monopoly on humanitarian aid.
As CNN observed after some throat-clearing about GHF’s slaughtered aid workers, “the organization has been controversial from the get-go and criticized by multiple international aid agencies,” specifically the U.N.
The GHF “did not offer evidence” to substantiate its claim that its workers were, in fact, killed by Hamas, the Washington Post observed in paragraph three. “Many humanitarian organizations have refused to participate in the GHF operations,” the report continued, “which they charge violate their principles of neutrality and further Israeli war aims by limiting the places where food is available to Gazans and exposing them to increased danger.”
The French outlet i24 quoted “Hamas-affiliated media outlets,” which alleged that the terrorist outfit merely “executed five fighters of the Popular Forces, a rival militia led by tribal leader Yasser Abu Shabab,” while twelve more were only “shot in the legs.”
The BBC cast similar doubt on the veracity of the GHF’s claims. “Meanwhile,” read the outfit’s rapid pivot in a story ostensibly dedicated to the violence against charity workers, “Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said 103 Palestinians were killed and more than 400 wounded across Gaza in the past 24 hours. This included 21 people who the ministry said were killed near areas designated for aid distribution on Tuesday morning.”
It may be difficult to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hamas was behind the attack. But a Sunday statement from the terrorist organization in which it claimed that any “entity or individual collaborating with the enemy’s plans” are “considered legitimate targets” that they have “full authority” to strike does suggest at least a willingness to conduct an operation like this one.
The international news media’s disinterest in the killings, save the extent to which they serve to rehash stale indictments of Israel’s conduct, is revealing. Over 2.5 million meals were handed out by GHF at its various distribution sites on the day that its workers were murdered – over 16 million meals in total, all gratis and entirely absent the political pressures that accompany Hamas’s reluctant humanitarian concessions. Severing Hamas’s control over aid is one critical component of a larger strategy to decouple the Gaza Strip’s populace from the terrorists that reign over them.
If the so-called international community were genuinely concerned for the safety and security of the Gazan people, it might welcome this endeavor. But it isn’t, so it doesn’t.