Propaganda and the Press: The Information War Against Israel

Lessons From Two Recent Media Misadventures in Gaza

Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hamden on 25 August 2025 || image source: Gaza Humanitarian Foundation

The effort to combat media disinformation about Israel during the war in Gaza over the last two years has largely failed.¹ Still, that does not mean one can give up the task. Two particularly egregious instances of anti-Israel misbehaviour from the press last week are worth examining because, for once, the errors were actually exposed, which often takes years even in conflicts not involving Israel, and taken together they provide a window into the disinformation ecosystem that has bedevilled the Israel-HAMAS war from the moment it broke out.

“THY DEAD SHALL LIVE”²

Without getting into the controversy about what the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) actually is,³ it began work in Gaza in late May with the stated aim of bypassing the United Nations-led aid mechanism for supplying food to Gazans that had been coopted by HAMAS,⁴ thereby weakening HAMAS’s hold over the Strip’s population, and separating the terrorists and civilians. The arguments about how much aid HAMAS was “stealing” are irrelevant; the issue is HAMAS’s control of aid distribution, which gives the group the ability to foster co-dependency with, and to coerce, the Palestinian population. So, in theory, the GHF mission was sound—even if it was something that should have been implemented in the first month of the war, not the nineteenth. In practice, it was a shambles, with insufficient distribution centres quickly overwhelmed by chaos and violence.

The Horror Story

This was the background when, in late July, amid claims of a famine in Gaza, Anthony Aguilar, a U.S. Green Beret veteran, appeared as a “whistleblower” from GHF. Speaking to the BBC, Aguilar was treated as an unimpeachable expert when he said, among other things: “In my entire career, have I never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population—an unarmed, starving population. … Without question, I witnessed war crimes … by the Israeli Defence Forces.”

Aguilar’s tone of moral outrage was maintained when he added details to his story on France 24 days later:

A young boy, hard to tell what his age was because of the starvation. Maybe seven-years-old. No shoes, tattered clothes, covered in dirt, no parents or adult supervision or anyone with him; he was alone. And he held out his hand and I called him forward. He held my hand and he kissed my hand. … As he walked out with this crowd, as the UG solutions contractors were shooting warning shots and throwing stun grenades and teargas, and the Israeli Defences Forces at the position at the intersection were firing into them … I came up on the berm and I could see Palestinians, civilians, you could see their white bags lying on the ground, items spilled. I saw that and I felt that I don’t want to be a part of this.

Aguilar showed pictures and a video clip of the boy and showed them again during a podcast with Israeli Leftists on 28 July, where Aguilar added yet further details: the boy’s name was Amir, and the shooting described earlier as “warning shots” now became lethal fire:

Palestinians, civilians, human beings, are dropping to the ground, getting shot. And Amir was one of them. Amir walked twelve kilometres to get food, got nothing but scraps, thanked us for it, and died.

Aguilar said this happened on 28 May. By the end of August, Aguilar was describing a “shot to the torso [and] a shot to the leg” he had seen on Amir.

A sceptic might have noted the elaboration of the story with each retelling, and the strange discrepancies, such as Aguilar at one point specifying Amir had said ‘thank you’ “in English”, only to then say Amir had said, “Shukran”. The public claim from Amir’s stepmother on 4 August that no body had been found, despite the boy having been shot down in the open, was barely noticed, nor did her revelation that his name was Abdul Rahim seem like a red flag; nobody even asked for an explanation.

The story about Amir being killed by the IDF became a stand-alone feature on MSNBC and at Middle East Eye, and other ostensible news outlets like Drop Site then circulated these pieces to their large audiences. The websites and social media channels of regional outlets, notable the privately-owned Roya TV in Jordan, ran with the story. Aguilar told the story to the ABC (Australia’s BBC) and Amir featured prominently as Aguilar swept through a very recognisable ideological slice of the “alternative” media scene: Tucker Carlson, Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, the Breaking Points podcast of Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, and so on.

Alongside this, on TikTok and Twitter and every other social media platform, clips of Aguilar talking about Amir went viral, immediately and intermittently for a month afterwards.⁵ In a theatrical coup de grâce on 3 September, Aguilar disrupted a Senate hearing, claiming to be “an activist defending Palestinian rights”, retelling the Amir story once more, and ranting about “death traps” and “genocide”.

The Unravelling

The next day, it became clear that the boy, whose full name is Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hamden and who is known as “Aboud” (not “Amir”) to his family, was alive and well. The catastrophic embarrassment the media had inflicted on itself,⁶ and its possible legal liability for acting as a megaphone for libel, was the least of it. In amplifying the story that the IDF had murdered Abdul Rahim, the media had put his life in danger. It was not in HAMAS’s interests for Abdul Rahim to be found alive and HAMAS is most efficient in ensuring the deaths of Gazans it finds inconvenient. The media in effect set up a race between HAMAS realising Abdul Rahim was still alive and the GHF finding him, which happened at the end of August. Thankfully, Abdul Rahim and his family, one of whose members had been directly threatened by HAMAS, were extracted from Gaza to safety on 4 September.

What makes the media’s uncritical treatment of Aguilar so unforgiveable is that the GHF had responded as early as 29 July, with “receipts” as we now say, showing that Aguilar not only had an incentive to lie but a stated intention of doing so. Aguilar’s employment as a contractor for GHF was terminated on 13 June for “poor performance, volatile conflicts with staff, and erratic behaviour”, and he had then spent six weeks alternately pleading to be hired back “in any capacity” and threatening to cause PR trouble for GHF if they did not comply. It was thus a flat-out lie when Aguilar said, “I felt that I don’t want to be a part of this”. He very much did want to be part of it and his media appearances since the end of July were retaliation because he was not reinstated as part of it.

As Aguilar only worked for UG Solutions for twenty-seven days, spent more-than-half that time in a hotel in Israel, and never left the GHF distribution sites once he was in Gaza—which were surrounded by high berms, with the IDF on the other side of them—it is most unlikely Aguilar could have seen the things he claims to have. But one need not rely on inference.

Aguilar’s messages to the GHF staff in late May and early June—the period when he said “Amir” was killed and he had sent a memo about serious misconduct to superiors—were wholly positive, showered exorbitant praise on GHF, and attacked its critics. The memo Aguilar had supposedly sent on 28 May, the metadata showed, was fabricated on 21 June, eight days after he was fired. More than that, Aguilar had sent pictures of Abdul Rahim that he would later use as part of his “war crimes” accusations to the team on 29 May, along with a lengthy commentary praising GHF for having “brought families back together”, adding: “It’s a privilege and an honour to see America’s best doing America’s most important work”.

The gaps and shifts in Aguilar’s story, his manner as an interviewee,⁷ and his broader behaviour, particularly some of the podcasters he chose to associate with, should have raised some suspicions. War correspondents like the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen must have had an inkling of what Aguilar is; he is far from a unique character in warzones.⁸ If truly none of this tipped journalists off, there is still the immovable fact that all of the above information above was in the public domain as soon as Aguilar appeared and the media chose to treat him as a brave truth-teller, rather than a “disgruntled former employee”. It is impossible to believe this was solely incompetence. Aguilar told a story most of the media wanted to believe—so they did.

ACADEMICS AND ACTIVISTS

Throughout 2024, an information operation built up to present Israel’s defensive operation in Gaza as a “genocide”. The centrepiece was a “legal” case brought in January against Israel by South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) regime and other HAMAS allies at the U.N.’s “World Court”. This was added to by “findings” of United Nations officials, and the year was capped off with the coordinated release of reports by Amnesty International⁹ and Human Rights Watch.¹⁰ This was merely the institutionalisation of a broader political warfare campaign that began before the 7 October massacre had even ended. A few hours into the slaughter, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) applied for a permit to stage an anti-Israel demonstration in London.¹¹ At the event itself, three weeks before Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, one of the main slogans was, “We charge [Israel] with genocide”.

Now, genocide per se was clearly not the problem for the PSC crowd. By the precedents of the international courts, specifically over the Srebrenica massacre, HAMAS’s Simchat Torah pogrom was an act of genocide, and the PSC-led march was organised mostly to celebrate that carnage. “Oh Jews, the army of Muhammad is returning”, was a notably prominent chant that day. The PSC’s counterparts in Australia gathered in front of the Sydney Opera House on 9 October 2023 to chant: “gas the Jews”. On it went. Despite the myth-making about an outpouring of popular sympathy for Israel, the immediate reaction to 7 October was a wave of extasy around the globe at seeing Jews raped and burned alive. This context is important because Israel’s primary intent in Gaza is to make another 7 October impossible,¹² and much of the leadership of the campaign to delegitimise as “genocide” Israel’s actions in Gaza quite expressly wishes to see 7 October repeated until Israel is destroyed.

In trying to shape global opinion, motivated street activists, “human rights” groups, the United Nations, “international law” practitioners, and anti-Israel governments, i.e., most of them, is a powerful coalition. It brings together the international commanding heights, the grassroots, and almost limitless resources. The media is the key battlefield, and the above-mentioned sectors of the coalition overlap with the press so extensively as to be functionally indistinct (we will get to this in more detail below). This is also true of the final member of the coalition, academia.

The Scholarly Gloss

Academia is relied on to provide the intellectual heft for the disinformation campaign accusing Israel of “genocide”. In this era of declining educational standards and attention spans, it is not necessary for academics to do anything so vulgar as prove their claims. The dense reports academics occasionally produce in fluent legalise, with bar charts and apparently impressive footnotes, are not really meant to be read or understood, let alone assessed for validity: they simply provide the hook for news reports about another prestigious source that believes Israel is committing “genocide” and a chance for academics to give sensationalist media quotes to that effect.¹³ Vibes are all that matter now and the role of academics in the anti-Israel political warfare has been to position themselves as the arbiters of truth,¹⁴ and from this standpoint, as supposedly sober neutrals dealing only in facts, to foster a narrative that there is an increasing scholarly consensus Israel is guilty of “genocide”. The beauty of information war conducted this way is that it imposes costs on anyone minded to dissent, since they can be branded a “denier”, morally equivalent to Nazis and others who claim the Holocaust is a hoax.

The culmination of the academia element of the campaign was a resolution passed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) on 31 August declaring: “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide”.