NYT, WSJ Laundering Israel's Obviously Bogus UN "Hamas Links" Story Helped Starve Gaza

Uncritically passing along Israel’s racist tabloid misinformation paved the way for mass starvation of Palestinians. There needs to be accountability.

When one suggests a US media organization is responsible for incitement to genocide, they are met with eye rolls. Certainly, this is fringe, far-left hysterics, overstatement, and crass hyperbole. But I will argue in this piece there’s a good argument to be made that how the New York Times and Wall Street Journal covered the alleged United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) “Hamas ties” non-story in January and February is a fairly textbook case of racist incitement in the context of a well-documented and ongoing genocide. Clearly, I’m a media critic, not a lawyer, so I won’t make the legal case. But I will make the ethical and textual one that what occurred in January and February when Israel heavily implied—and sometimes explicitly said—the aid agency primarily responsible for providing food, medicine, and shelter to 2 million Palestinians was actively involved in the October 7 attacks, is a fairly textbook case of incitement against a besieged and vulnerable population.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal laundered baseless smears against the most important aid organization in Gaza. And now, as of Tuesday, US Congress has voted to defund—and thus severely gut—the most important organization distributing food, medicine, water, and shelter to a population undergoing ethnic cleansing and collective punishment, 1 million of whom are now actively starving to death. 

Central to Israel’s smear campaign against UNRWA were the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, which laundered unsubstantiated Israeli claims in the most credulous and tabloid terms time and time again. Their role would kick off in earnest on January 27, when both publications did breaking news stories about alleged UNRWA Hamas “links” and claims that “12 UNRWA employees” were involved in the October 7 attack on southern Israel. These sensationalist claims came, suspiciously, just hours after the International Court of Justice ruling that found Israel was committing “plausible genocide.” The most basic journalistic skepticism would have noted the timing as exceedingly convenient, but journalistic skepticism is for directing at US enemies, not at allies—who, despite months and months of baseless accusations and self-serving lies, are treated as Neutral Government Officials making sober, reasonable claims.  

For reference, here was the New York Times homepage the morning of January 27. The UN court finding that Israel was committing “plausible genocide” and calling on the state to cease doing so is presented as “The International Court of Justice ruled that Israel must prevent genocidal acts in Gaza, but did not call for a cease-fire.” 

In font twice the size, Israel’s tabloid claims of UNRWA-Hamas conspiracy are presented as per se credible because the UN fired the employees in question. No investigation, no due process, no evidence—just accusations and meta coverage of the UN’s response:

The New York Times front page for January 27 put their story about Israel’s baseless UN accusations in similar prominence to their story about a UN court finding that Israel is committing “plausible genocide” in Gaza, using the cryptic, agency-free framing of Israel needing to “shun acts of genocide” whatever that means.

Dozens of Western countries initially pulled funding for UNRWA in knee-jerk reaction to these allegations. But quietly, over the past two months, all but the US and UK have gone back to funding UNRWA, because Israel’s claims are—at worst—entirely meritless, and—at best—overhyped and premised on racist innuendo. The US has stuck by its plans to cut funding, even as its own intelligence assessment determined that UNRWA does not coordinate with Hamas on a systemic level, and could not verify that a small handful of the agency’s staff had allegedly participated in the October 7 attack. Close Biden ally Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), pushing for a restart of UNRWA funding, went further, calling UNRWA-Hamas connection claims a “flat out lie”. 

Put another way: Even Israel’s closest allies found the UNRWA smears to be bullshit. 

This is why outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal were so central to selling these lies to the US Congress and the US public more broadly. The goal was to get the US on board gutting UNRWA, the most essential organization to sustaining life in Gaza both before and after October 7. This mission was accomplished, and now that the dust settles, US intelligence officials can quietly concede they do not support the underlying claims. Israel depended on major Western publications to launder their smears, knowing they could leak snippets selectively to friendly reporters, and rely on lurid and racist innuendo. And so long as the reporters in question had a throw-away line about how the claims could “not be independently verified,” the PR damage could be done to maximum effect.  

This PR effort worked, and has many times already during Israel’s siege and bombing of Gaza—from the al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing misinformation campaign to now-debunked al-Shifa “Hamas command center” hospital conspiracy theory. It requires that reporters check their brains at the door. This feigned objectivity and “officials say” framing, I will argue, is a deliberate journalistic posture designed to help Israeli war time propaganda—not by accident, or inertia, or because of the trappings of professional norms that are easily exploitable by cynical actors, but as a specific ideological choice to assist Israel’s assault and siege of Gaza. The reporters in question—Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley of the New York Times and Carrie Keller-Lynn, Dov Lieber, and David Luhnow of the Wall Street Journal—given the context and history of Israel’s actions up to their UNRWA reporting, should have known these claims were lies and almost certainly did. They simply, I will argue, did not care and were willing participants in this genocidal incitement.

Some context of Israeli claims and motivated reasoning leading up to the release of its explosive and prime facie consequential claims about Hamas-UNRWA “links” that high level Times and Journal reporters were no doubt aware of:

• Clear Israeli conflict of interest omitted in initial reporting. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long been clear that he opposes UNRWA, on the grounds that (A) the agency provides humanitarian aid to a population his government is leveling collective punishment against and (B) because, central to UNRWA’s mission is that it maintains Gazans’ refugee status, the erasure of which is central to well-documented Likudite plans for the erasure of Palestinians as a people. A recent report in The Guardian, citing internal UN documents, reveals a widespread pattern of obstruction and harassment of UNRWA employees by occupying Israeli forces in the West Bank where Hamas does not exist. “It is time UNRWA be dismantled,” Netanyahu said in 2017. Was this essential context mentioned in any of the reports of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal? It was not. Israel’s clear conflict of interest to lie about UNRWA “Hamas links” was omitted or glossed over entirely. 

• Israel had been caught lying and doctoring evidence countless times leading up to its January 26 claim of UNRWA staff involvement in October 7.  Credibility of the source ought to matter, but it never does to the New York Times Times and Wall Street Journal when it comes to Israeli officials. Even setting aside Israeli government fabrications, lies, and distortions prior to October 7, since their most recent bombing of Gaza began, they have been caught in a series of shoddy lies and racist smears. From a fake video of a nurse inside al-Shifa hospital denouncing Hamas shared on official Israeli social media, to doctored “Hamas phone intercepts,” to lying about a sprawling Hamas Bond villain lair under al-Shifa hospital, to the IDF boosting rumors of “40 beheaded babies,” to denying they block aid from coming into Gaza, to denying Palestinian death tolls (despite the fact that Israeli intelligence relies on them), Israeli officials leading up to their explosive UNRWA “dossier” have told numerous, easily debunked lies with high frequency. Why is their pattern of unreliability not mentioned when reporting on their alleged intelligence findings? Is a simple throw-away line about how these claims “could not independently verified” sufficient given the pattern of self-serving deception from the party in question? 

• The entire premise, even if true, was absurd and made no sense. Let’s take their most conservative claim at face value and remove all the lurid tabloidism: Even if a dozen employees of UNRWA had moonlit as Hamas operatives, how would UNRWA officials possibly be expected to know this? How would they be able to monitor 30,000 employees’ off-hours activity? How would this logistically be possible? When there have been random terrorist attacks in the US, has the media historically held their employers accountable? The whole story was based on salacious innuendo that, when one thought about the implications of the accusation, made zero sense.

• Glaring double standard. Are the employers of Israeli settlers, who are labeled by many Western governments as terrorists, also accountable for the actions of their workers, even though they do so openly and with their knowledge? Does funding West Bank settlers, as many Western nonprofits openly do, render them legitimate military targets? Why is UNRWA being held to both an impossible standard, and a totally different one?  

None of these obvious questions were asked, and none of this key context was mentioned by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal—all of which their reporters were almost certainly aware of. 

Parroting baseless, sensationalist claims of “terrorism” and conspiracy-mongering against the most essential aid organization serving a besieged population is incitement to genocide in effect, if not intent. And to those impacted by this propaganda campaign, to those currently starving in Gaza because aid organizations are being circumvented and gutted, whether these reporters did so knowingly or unknowingly is irrelevant. Reporters Ronen Bergman, Patrick Kingsley, Carrie Keller-Lynn, Dov Lieber, and David Luhnow omitted key context, passed along sloppy “intelligence,” ignored Israel’s long list of previous post-October 7 lies and disinformation, and deliberately pandered to racist assumptions and innuendo. Legally, their role in an incitement campaign that contributed to the starvation of Palestinians is an open question. But ethically, professionally, morally, and as a matter of course, their role is clear as day.