Haaretz: the lies continue
And the half-truths. And the use of discredited sources.
I have had to debunk Haaretz’s distortion of the truth before. Nobody in Israel reads them, so this confuses my Israeli readers, but they have a disproportionate impact in the wider English-speaking world. This week, they are really on fire.
To start with, there is a shady underbelly of academia that spent 18 months telling us how accurate Hamas’s casualty figures were. They scoffed at our qualitative Henry Jackson Society paper, which highlighted all the errors that could be easily identified in the Hamas death lists through open-source research. Then Hamas undermined their ghoulish cheerleaders by removing 3,000 names from the death lists of their own accord. These academic clowns are now desperately scrabbling around in the ashes of their credibility, trying to recover even a scrap by reassuring Hamas that, no, they were correct in the first place. It is pathetic—and of course, it is on the pitiful new “findings” of these discredited, malign buffoons that Haaretz chooses to report.
Even worse, this week saw more lies from Haaretz about events in Gaza. This time, their reporting is so brazen that they didn’t even bother to keep their translations consistent.
Here’s merely one aspect that reveals it plainly:
As flagged by @YairElsner and posted on X by the relentlessly excellent Eitan Fischberger, Haaretz’s English edition claims that IDF soldiers were ordered to fire at unarmed Palestinians waiting for food in Gaza, but the original Hebrew version? It states they were told to fire towards crowds to keep them away from the aid sites. This represents a significant difference in intent, legality, and moral implications.
That is only the start of Haaretz’s deceptive sleight of hand in this grotesquely misleading piece of propaganda masquerading as journalism. Here’s the full article, if you can bear to read it. Western journalists and media have reported it verbatim.
The article opens with the thunderous claim:
“The army has deliberately fired at Palestinians.”
A grim and damning line, if true. However, the story soon begins to collapse under the weight of its contradictions. A quoted soldier allegedly describes the IDF creating a “killing field,” complete with heavy machine guns, mortars, and grenade launchers. Yet this supposed “killing field” results in — wait for it — just one to five casualties per day. That’s not a massacre; well, not of Gazans. Perhaps of journalistic standards by Haaretz.
Once again, we are faced with the suggestion that not only are the IDF murderous maniacs, but they also have the worst aim on the planet. The monstrous IDF are such terrible shots that they fire heavy machine guns, mortars, and grenade launchers at crowds of tens of thousands, yet manage to wound no more than 1 to 5 Gazans at a time.
Later, Haaretz quotes an officer saying the intent behind the live fire was crowd control, not carnage. However, it buries this clarification so deeply that it becomes effectively irrelevant. The reader has already been presented with the moral horror headline, and that’s what will endure.
Then comes another journalistic bait-and-switch.
The author admits they don’t know who is shooting at civilians near these aid distribution centres. Still, rather than consider the possibility that, for example, Hamas might be involved, the article shifts with the loaded line:
“The IDF does not permit armed individuals in these humanitarian zones without its knowledge.”
Get it? If someone’s firing, and the IDF doesn’t permit any shooters other than themselves in the area, well... wink, wink. Conspiracy complete.
There’s no mention of the possibility that gunmen (Hamas, criminal gangs, or rogue actors) could infiltrate these chaotic areas without IDF permission, nor is there any curiosity about how IDF soldiers are getting wounded near those same food sites. Not exactly an idle question, especially in light of some of the video footage released in recent weeks showing Hamas opening fire on their own people.
Speaking of which, if the IDF is committing daily massacres, where is the footage? Every Gazan has a mobile phone, and numerous videos of other events have been released. Why is there a total absence of any credible footage of these supposed IDF combined arms assaults on queuing civilians?
Now, let’s discuss logistics. The piece depicts the aid distribution centres as Kafkaesque hellscapes. That’s not entirely wrong, but Haaretz again manipulates by omission.
Yes, the GHF aid mechanism is chaotic. Hundreds or thousands of desperate civilians rush to the aid centres for limited supplies, and supplies vanish within minutes. However, Haaretz fails to explain why these centres are open for only short periods. It is because allowing crowds to grow beyond control raises the risk of stampedes and violence. The system is flawed but not malicious.
I interviewed an IDF soldier who has taken part in crowd-control situations in Gaza. Let me explain what “firing toward” means: warning shots. That might mean rounds hitting 100 meters short, up in the air, or well off to the side—anything to disperse a potentially dangerous crowd without causing casualties.
This is not a tactic the British Army typically employs, but it is important to note that they have never faced a comparable situation. To provide context, I served as the British Army’s public order lead for 16 Air Assault Brigade in 2018-9. My role involved validating the public order training of the other company commanders within the brigade. I possess an expert-level understanding of this subject in a military context.
I can assure you: in a kinetic, combat environment, it would be unfeasible for the IDF to don riot gear and deploy forces for public order drills (as pictured above) in situations like those at the GHF in Gaza. Such an approach would likely lead to disaster. The IDF has very few crowd control options available, given the immediate and serious threat posed by IEDs and ambushes from Hamas. Warning shots are an extreme option, but not unreasonable in the circumstances.
Most importantly, Haaretz wants you to forget this central, inconvenient truth: this is happening during a war. A real war. Not a riot on the streets of Belfast, nor a protest in central London. This is a hostile territory where terrorists have repeatedly launched attacks, including near aid sites, and soldiers are forced to make split-second decisions under mortal threat. To judge IDF actions in Gaza using the standards of peacetime police or military crowd control is to replace analysis with ideology.
Could some soldiers accidentally miss and hit someone? Yes. That is tragic and warrants investigation. However, the article itself acknowledges that the IDF is already examining those incidents. To jump from that to “deliberate killing fields” is not responsible reporting. It is narrative laundering.
In short: Haaretz deliberately mistranslated its source material to feed an English-speaking audience a lie. Then it pieced together half-truths, one-sided quotes, and convenient omissions to create a cartoon villain narrative of Israeli brutality, even when its sources contradicted that story.
This is not journalism. It’s information warfare, and Haaretz is fighting for the other side.
The publisher and owner of Haaretz hates Bibi so much he doesnt care if the lies and half truths he writes causes the slaughter of Jews worldwide or more antiIsrael hate as long as it dislodges Bibi. How he could even defame the IDF makes him a traitor and he should be treated as such. And now with Iran being such a spectacular success, Bibi is actually more entrenched than ever in Israeli politics, so haaretz's publisher is completely losing his mind.
Excellent analysis. Builds on the important Henry Jackson report. Tied in with Fox’s combat experience (something that few commentators have), it is all the more credible and compelling.