Families irreparably shredded at the hands of genocidal maniacs. Formerly peaceful communities stained with the blood of innocents. Foreign armies ethnically cleansed towns that had been lulled into a false sense of security. Defenders fighting for their families branded as extremist murderers.

This is what happened with Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion and the ensuing war, and it is the most common media narrative. But in a stunning number of cases, it’s not Israel being cast as the victim. Many claim Hamas is the victim in this conflict—that its people are the ones being unjustly slaughtered—that Israel is the aggressor and the villain.

Much propaganda is circulating regarding Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent war effort. Some of it is well meaning but uninformed. But much, if not most, of it is part of a deliberate attempt to hide facts and obscure the roles of both Hamas and Israel. Here are some common false claims—and the truth behind them.

LIE Hamas is a trustworthy source for information.

“[The Hamas Health Ministry’s] numbers may not be perfectly accurate on a minute-to-minute basis. But they largely reflect the level of death and injury.”
—Michael Ryan
World Health Organization official

In calculating the Gazan death toll, the only organization with an official tally is the Hamas-run Gazan Health Ministry. At the time of writing, the ministry claims that over 11,000 Gazans have died. Until the war concludes and more observers can make a tally, it is practically impossible to independently verify its numbers. The Health Ministry’s figures in previous wars have apparently been corroborated by bodies like the United Nations (institutional anti-Semitism notwithstanding).

But the Health Ministry’s unreliability was demonstrated in one case where the death toll was looked at by outside observers: the al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion. A blast occurred at this Gaza City hospital on October 17. Hamas claimed an Israeli strike caused the explosion and resulted in 500 casualties. It turns out the blast was caused by a failed rocket launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terror group ally of Hamas. It didn’t even hit the hospital directly; it exploded in the parking lot. The Church of England, which manages the hospital, stated that roughly 200 people died. United States intelligence estimates the number could be even lower. As news leaked out on the actual circumstances surrounding the blast, Hamas revised its figures.

“Hamas has a clear propaganda incentive to inflate civilian casualties as much as possible,” a former Reuters Jerusalem bureau chief tweeted October 24. “There was a time when the figures from the ministry could be relied upon. The doctors and administrators knew what they were doing [and] were professional about it. But Hamas has now been in charge in Gaza for 16 years. It has squeezed the life out of honesty and probity. Any health official stepping out of line and not giving the death tolls that Hamas wants reported to journalists risks serious consequences.”

Hamas does not run a liberal democracy but a totalitarian Islamist state that tortures and executes whistleblowers, defectors, collaborators and anybody that poses a challenge to its rule in Gaza. Even well-meaning doctors face serious risk for so much as a statement that casts Hamas as anything but an innocent victim.

Hamas has also been proved to fabricate evidence of Israeli war crimes. Photographs of bloodied Gazan infants have since been proved to be AI-generated. They have reused videos from years past claiming them as evidence of what Israel is doing now. In one instance, Hamas released a video claiming to show Israeli soldiers kidnapping Palestinian girls. Fact-checkers found the video to be two years old and involving crying girls asking Israeli policemen to release their brother.

If there were abundant evidence for Israeli war crimes, why would Hamas have to manufacture fake evidence?

LIE Israel was occupying Gaza.

“Israel remains the occupying power in the occupied Palestinian territory, which also includes the Gaza Strip.”
—United Nations Human Rights Council

Calling Gaza “occupied territory” ignores the fact that Israel hasn’t controlled Gaza for almost 20 years. Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005, Israel completely withdrew from Gaza. From 2005 to now, none of Gaza was under the control of the Israeli military. Israel was blockading Gaza—strictly monitoring who and what could come in and out—but that is not an occupation.

LIE Gaza is an “open-air prison.”

“Israel, with Egypt’s help, has turned Gaza into an open-air prison.”
—Omar Shakir
Human Rights Watch Israel and Palestine director

Yes, conditions in Gaza are harsh. That is because of Hamas. It is Hamas that tortures dissidents. It is Hamas that engages in turf wars with terror group rivals. It is Hamas’s continuous antagonism toward Israel that forced the Jewish state to cut off access to trade—the same reason the United States had a blockade on Cuba, the same reason South Korea has a blockade on North Korea, and the same reason Armenia and Azerbaijan have a closed border. That didn’t prevent Israel from letting Gaza share its electricity and water. And that didn’t prevent Israel from letting hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of foreign aid from entering Gaza.

Also, calling Gaza an “open air prison” implies that Gazans can’t leave. This is demonstrably false. The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center estimates that between 250,000 and 350,000 Gazans have emigrated since Hamas took power in 2007. Gazans can emigrate by applying for visas, as any national can. Thousands of Gazans had permission to work in Israel prior to October 7.

Gaza also is not completely surrounded by Israel. It shares a border with Egypt. Egypt’s border policies were similarly restrictive before October 7. Egypt has no claim on Gazan territory; it hasn’t occupied Gaza since 1967. Egypt has no “dog in the fight” as far as the “two-state solution” goes. Yet it still had restrictions on who could and couldn’t enter Egypt from Gaza—as one would expect when dealing with a terrorist regime.

LIE All the Palestinians want is a two-state solution.

“[T]he two-state solution is much more probable than it was months or years ago.”
—Ursula von der Leyen
European Commission president

If this were the case, October 7 would not have happened. This is because Gaza was the two-state solution. Gaza was independent.

Hamas has its own government, laws, military and foreign policy. It has its own border force monitoring who goes in and out of Gaza. It has its own economy, mainly comprised of humanitarian aid and clandestine funding from Iran and Qatar. The only things Israel shared with Gaza were the shekel as currency and some utilities.

Compared to the West Bank, Gaza’s relations with Israel were much more straightforward. There were no squabbles over who controlled which sectors. There were no conflicts between Gazans and Israeli settlements; all Israeli settlements were abandoned in 2005. There were no disputes over who would control holy sites on the border. Israel treated Gaza as an independent state. And if Gaza had declared independence and peace, Israel would have recognized it in a heartbeat.

Gaza does not exist as a diplomatically recognized entity mainly because that would imply recognition of Israel, something Hamas would never do. It also wants control of the West Bank, but Hamas’s priority is the destruction of the “Zionist regime.”

LIE Hamas wants to live in peace with Israel and recognizes Israel’s right to exist.

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
—Covenant of Hamas preamble

LIE It wasn’t Hamas that murdered over 300 partygoers at the Supernova music festival on October 7—it was the Israeli government.

“[The Israeli government] allowed the occupation police and army to kill everyone.”
—Palestinian Authority Foreign Ministry

The Palestinian Authority (PA) claimed in a now-deleted social media post that Israel was responsible for the death of all 364 people at the Supernova festival. The PA referenced the Hannibal Protocol as a government policy supposedly authorizing the Israel Defense Forces (idf) to do this. The Hannibal Protocol was a military order repealed in 2016 that allowed the idf to do whatever it took to stop the kidnapping of a fellow soldier, even if this would have endangered the soldier’s life.

The basis for the PA’s claim was most likely a November 18 Haaretz article that cited an anonymous police source claiming an idf helicopter may have accidentally hit a handful of civilians as it was going after Hamas, which the idf denies. Claiming Israel was responsible for the murder of over 300 Israelis disregards the testimony of thousands of witnesses—as well as the fact that the PA backed away from its claim.

LIE Israel is not doing its due diligence to avoid civilian casualties.

“[T]here was a failure to take necessary precautions to avoid excessive harm to civilians and civilian property, which is against international humanitarian law.”
—Amnesty International UK

Gaza shares a border with Egypt. It was Egypt that at first rejected a humanitarian corridor to let aid in and civilians out of Gaza. Since then, Egypt has allowed both. Since November 9, Israel agreed to daily four-hour pauses to allow civilians to flee northeast Gaza, ground zero of the fighting. Israel has opened up corridors itself allowing civilians to get out of Gaza City safely. Before it launches air strikes, the idf warns Gazans through leaflets, phone calls and text messages. After Israel captured al-Shifa Hospital, which Hamas had used to hold Israeli hostages, Israel helped the hospital continue operation by supplying incubators, baby food, water and other supplies.

LIE Israel is an apartheid state.

“As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government [in Israel], this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue.”
—Rashida Tlaib U.S. representative

People often compare Israel’s treatment of Arabs and other minorities with South Africa’s disenfranchisement of blacks during the apartheid era. This is far from the truth. Israel’s Arab community contributes to society as politicians, actors, journalists, entrepreneurs, soldiers, hospital workers and humanitarian agents. Israel’s Knesset has Arab legislators. The previous government, which was in power until 2022, had Arab cabinet members. Arab citizens enjoy equal rights and are exempt from Israel’s mandatory conscription. Unlike many of Israel’s neighbors (including Gaza), Arabs are free to convert from Islam without getting their heads lopped off. Muslim women can walk in public without a headscarf or male guardian. Through the Jordanian Waqf, the Muslim community can worship at the al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock without Israeli government control.

LIE The Palestinian Authority is a worthy replacement for Gaza’s government.

“The solution [to the conflict] comes from the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza.”
—Josep Borrell
European Union high representative

Many in the West, including the U.S. government, see the Palestinian Authority as Hamas’s natural replacement as the governing authority in Gaza once the war is over. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled this out.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas is no Islamist jihadi. But he has been ruling what territory he controls as a dictator. There have been no presidential elections since 2005, nor legislative elections since 2006. Abbas’s PA has financially sponsored families of terrorists incarcerated in Israeli prisons. The PA’s educational curriculum is well documented to include anti-Israel propaganda. West Bank school material encourages children to hate Jews and aspire to be martyrs in the cause of “liberation.”

There is also evidence Fatah itself participated in the massacre. The terror group al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade posted videos of its members attacking kibbutz Nahal Oz on October 7. Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade claims to be the military wing of Fatah, which Fatah denies. But in 2004, PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei stated, “We have clearly declared that the Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade [is] part of Fatah” to British media. “We are committed to them, and Fatah bears full responsibility for the group.”

There is no way Abbas was unaware of the Brigade’s participation in the massacre. Either he supported what they did or felt powerless to stop them. Either way, it shows Fatah is not a security partner Israel can trust in Gaza.

Why the Lies?

John Adams famously said, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Many claim that Israel is waging an unjust and unnecessary war, that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, that Hamas has somehow become the “good guy” in the conflict. Peddling that narrative means willfully ignoring a plethora of evidence to the contrary, as well as fabricating (easily disprovable) evidence. If Hamas was in the right in this conflict, such mendacity would be unnecessary.

Hamas doesn’t have to lie. They have been blatant about their goals to destroy Israel for decades. If they were so concerned about good public relations, they could have started by not using their own people as human shields or torturing defectors among Gaza’s population. Hamas wants international media on its side to pressure Israel to stand down, so it isn’t surprising that it is making false claims. But the sheer scale of lying—and that the perpetrators have been able to get away with it in the minds of so many—is remarkable.

A famous Jew from the land of Israel once said: “[Y]ou belong to your father the devil, and you want to do what your father desires; he was a slayer of men from the very beginning, and he has no place in the truth because there is no truth in him: when he tells a lie, he is expressing his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44; Moffatt translation).

Jesus said that lying and murder go hand in hand. When one compares the Tower of Babel-size level of lying coming from Hamas and others regarding the death toll of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, one can’t help but notice the connection.

Jesus also said that “you will understand the truth, and the truth will set you free” (verse 32; Moffatt). The more that truth is ignored in the Israel-Hamas war, the more Israel will be forced to back down. That means the more Hamas will be able to cling to power, and the greater the likelihood it will replicate October 7.

Truth exposes evil. Truth shows a nation the right course of action. And truth brings fundamental justice to those who have been wronged. If there was ever a time when Israel and the world needed to cast aside lies and embrace the truth, it is now. Lest history repeat itself.