This week, the world was fed another lie: that Israeli troops deliberately opened fire on Palestinians waiting for food in Gaza.

The usual chorus responded on cue — crying “massacre” and “war crime” — while much of the media once again acted as an amplifier for Hamas propaganda.

The reality couldn’t be more different.

Not only was there no massacre, but the Israel Defense Forces were actively securing a humanitarian corridor to enable deliveries by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US-Israeli initiative designed to get aid directly to civilians.

And for the first time since Hamas started the war on Oct. 7, the terror group was losing control over the distribution of humanitarian assistance in Gaza.

The GHF was created to bypass Hamas entirely — cutting it out of the aid supply chain it has long exploited as a tool of war.

Hamas has operated like a terrorist mafia: hijacking trucks, stockpiling supplies for its fighters and then inflating prices to fund its war effort, and violently punishing any Gazan who dares to take food outside its control.

In its first full week of operation, the GHF distributed nearly 7 million meals, on average a million a day.

Tens of thousands of Gazans received food safely and without incident — no Hamas middlemen, no inflated black market and no political strings.

The GHF is now working to open more distribution sites to reach even more Gazans in need.

This is the first serious, large-scale aid operation that undermines Hamas’ most powerful weapon: control over the people of Gaza.

And Hamas is panicking.

Why? Because food has long been part of its arsenal.

Hamas has used aid as leverage — diverting, distributing and denying it as a means to enforce loyalty and preserve power.

The GHF threatens to dismantle that system by delivering directly to civilians, bypassing the terror group that has used starvation as a strategy.

So Hamas has turned to a two-pronged response.

First, disruption on the ground: sending armed operatives to provoke chaos at aid sites, firing on civilians attempting to access food and deliberately manufacturing volatility.

Second, disinformation: flooding social media and compliant news outlets with false casualty counts, doctored images and fabricated narratives — all to paint Israel as the aggressor and itself as the victim.

This isn’t theory.

It’s strategy.

It’s textbook Hamas.

And more than 600 days into a war they began, too much of the world’s media still parrots its talking points without question.

That’s not journalism — it’s complicity.

Yes, the suffering in Gaza is real.

But its cause is not Israel’s military operations or efforts to rescue the hostages Hamas still holds; it’s Hamas’ own strategy of exploitation and terror.

Meantime, the international community, led by UNRWA, had been the primary source of humanitarian assistance in Gaza and for years willfully turned a blind eye to Hamas’ exploitation of aid — failing to enforce meaningful oversight, even employing Hamas members (many who took part in the Oct. 7 attacks) as local staff and using its facilities to hoard aid for terror operations.

Now, UNRWA would seemingly rather see the GHF fail, and the people of Gaza actually starve, so it can continue using the Jewish state as its forever-scapegoat.

Israel has taken unprecedented steps to minimize civilian harm, facing an enemy that embeds in civilian areas, hoards humanitarian aid and sacrifices its own people to gain global sympathy.

Humanitarian aid must never be a bargaining chip for terrorists.

But by insisting on a system that leaves aid in Hamas’ hands, much of the international community has allowed exactly that.

Hamas would rather starve its own people than lose control over them.

Those who truly care about the welfare of Palestinian civilians must support a system that bypasses Hamas altogether.

That system is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

The GHF is delivering what countless international actors have failed to provide: direct, accountable, large-scale humanitarian assistance that does not empower a terrorist group.

It breaks Hamas’ monopoly over aid and strips it of one of its most dangerous tools — using food as a means of control.

That’s why Hamas is trying to sabotage this initiative.

Supporting the GHF means more than feeding the hungry.

It means breaking Hamas’ grip on Gaza’s civilians.

It means dismantling the group’s strategy of domination through deprivation.

And it means backing a bold US-Israeli initiative that delivers not only food — but hope.

Arsen Ostrovsky is CEO of The International Legal Forum, which combats terror and antisemitism. Follow him on Twitter at @Ostrov_A. John Spencer is chairman of urban-warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, host of the “Urban Warfare Project Podcast” and co-author of “Understanding Urban Warfare.” Follow him at: @SpencerGuard.