NR spoke with military and foreign-policy pros about the renowned paper’s credulous treatment of Hamas.
The Washington Post’s coverage of the Israel–Hamas war has been a case study in moral confusion and anti-Israel bias, according to foreign-policy and military experts who argue that the renowned paper has, on an almost daily basis, violated traditional journalistic principles that have shaped coverage of foreign conflicts by American newsrooms for decades.
While other U.S. outlets have on occasion fallen into the trap of credulously parroting Hamas propaganda, none as prominent have done so with the frequency and brazenness of the Post, which has uncritically cited casualty figures provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry in 148 separate articles published since the October 7 Hamas terror attack, according to a National Review analysis.
In addition to its reliance on casualty numbers provided by Hamas, which has a history of lying about Israeli actions for propaganda purposes, the paper has passed off anti-Israel activists as neutral subject-matter experts, joined disreputable Middle Eastern media outlets in parroting long-standing antisemitic conspiracy theories, failed to reach out to Israeli officials before publishing an article critical of the Jewish state, and misrepresented an attack later revealed to be the result of Palestinian terror-group activity.
Given that the Post is a leading American newspaper, its coverage has far-reaching implications for the conflict.
“In an asymmetric war, the influence that influential media outlets like the Washington Post have is especially important,” Douglas Feith, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy in the George W. Bush administration, told National Review. “Hamas is not trying to defeat the IDF. The essence of this war, as is true with other asymmetric wars, is political. Asymmetric war aims to have a political effect without having to defeat the other guy’s army.”
Hospital Blast
When a rocket launched by the terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad landed in the parking lot of a Gaza hospital on October 17, killing dozens of civilians, the Post raced to publish an online report that gave its readers a perfectly inverted understanding of the event.
“NUSEIRAT REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip — A strike on a hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday left hundreds dead, Palestinian authorities said, sparking outrage across the region and elevating fears of wider conflict as President Biden left for Israel on a trip intended as a show of support after Hamas’s deadly assault on the country this month,” reads the article’s lead paragraph.
Indeed, the Post’s initial report simply relayed the version of events immediately offered by Hamas-run ministry officials, referred to in the article as “Palestinian authorities”: a strike on the hospital had killed roughly 500 people, with the Palestinians alleging an Israeli airstrike, which Israel denied.
As the dust settled in the hours and days following the blast, the Biden administration and reputable news outlets conducted video analyses that confirmed Israel’s claim that the destruction was caused by a misfired rocket launched from within Gaza. But not before the initial reports fueled furious denunciations of Israel, including from prominent progressive lawmakers, activists, and foreign heads of state. Massive protests broke out around the globe, including in front of U.S. embassies in several Muslim countries, and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas canceled a scheduled meeting with President Biden.
Two days after the Post reported the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s claim that “at least 500 people were killed at the hospital,” Agence France-Presse cited a senior European intelligence official who estimated the number of dead to be no greater than 50. A video analysis by open-source intelligence outfit Bellingcat showed “at least two dozen bodies” near the impact crater.
Then there is the location of the explosion itself. The Post’s original article described the hospital as having been the site of the blast, but further reporting would bear out that the misfired rocket landed in a parking lot in the hospital’s courtyard.
While other major news outlets, such as the New York Times, also got the story wrong in their initial reports and even promoted misleading push-alert language, the Post’s behavior after the facts became clear puts it in a league of its own.
Malcolm Nance, a former Navy counterterrorism intelligence expert and Ukrainian army legionnaire, explained that images of the blast site circulating on social media the day after the attack made clear that Hamas’s version of events was inaccurate.
“When the analysis was done, I mean, I saw the crater,” Nance, a former MSNBC contributor, told NR in an interview conducted from Israel. “That’s a mortar.”
Several outlets, including NR, were able to report by mid afternoon on October 17 credible evidence shared by Israel challenging Hamas’s claims that an Israeli missile struck the hospital. Meanwhile, the Post tweeted a video later that evening “of what Palestinian authorities say was an Israeli strike on al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza show[ing] the moment an explosion hits the hospital grounds.”
Video of what Palestinian authorities say was an Israeli strike on al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza shows the moment an explosion hits the hospital grounds. The video, verified by The Washington Post, captures the first sounds of an explosion and then a blast. https://t.co/ApBJlxYIPF pic.twitter.com/8vtS4AwXMu
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 17, 2023
A Post spokesperson defended the initial reporting, saying, “We handled the news differently than the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal,” and continuing, “Our initial alert language did not attribute the hospital blast to an Israeli airstrike.”
While it’s true that the Post did not specifically name Israel in its alert language and initial headline, the headline did refer to a “strike on [a] Gaza hospital,” and cited “Palestinian authorities” claiming hundreds were killed.
Feith, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ascribes the Post’s shortcomings to the publication’s progressive drift; he believes political factionalism has supplanted straightforward news reporting.
“You get the impression that some people who run the New York Times are conscious of their political bias and actually believe that diversity of viewpoint is valuable,” he told NR. “With very few exceptions, you can’t say that about the Washington Post.”
Mothers Separated from Their Babies
A month after the hospital-blast misstep, the paper ran a front-page story accusing Israel of systematically separating Palestinian mothers from their prematurely born babies and forcing the women to return to war-torn Gaza while their children remained in Israel and the West Bank with medical professionals.
The bombshell report was written by a team of three reporters led by Louisa Loveluck, the Post’s bureau chief in Baghdad and co-author of the October 17 al-Ahli hospital report.
Weeks after the report about the babies was published and the firestorm of condemnation began to dissipate, the Post finally issued a mea culpa revealing a stunning oversight: Loveluck and her team never bothered to ask Israeli government officials for comment. “The Post neglected to seek comment from Israeli officials for this article, an omission that fell short of The Post’s standards for fairness,” an editor’s note affixed to the article reads.
When the paper did reach out, Israeli officials predictably explained that the October 7 terror attack created an unstable security situation that necessitated stringent vetting of travel visas for mothers to move between Israel and Gaza. Despite the Post’s initial reporting, which suggested that Israel had systematically deported all new Palestinian mothers, visa applications were evaluated on a case-by-case basis, with some mothers approved to remain in Israel.
“The article incorrectly said that all Palestinian mothers who received authorization to leave Gaza for humanitarian reasons had to return to Gaza to reapply after their permits expired. In fact, it was not always necessary for mothers to return to Gaza,” the editor’s note added.
Unlike the Post reporters, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute bothered to ask Israeli officials for an explanation before publishing an article on the situation. “The original story gnawed at me,” Satloff later reflected in the Times of Israel. “It cried out for more details. Could Israeli officials really be so heartless as to separate mothers and their preemie infants just hours after birth? Could Israeli officials really be so cruel as to repeatedly deny those mothers access to reunite with their babies?”
“So, over the past three weeks, I have done what three Washington Post reporters – Louisa Loveluck, Sufian Taha and Hajar Harb – did not do: I asked relevant Israeli government agencies for their side of the story,” Satloff continued.
That such an explosive story sailed through the Post’s editorial process without raising any eyebrows is disturbing, Bonnie Glick, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS), told NR.
Glick, a former USAID deputy administrator, confessed: “I can’t read their coverage of the conflict. I read the Wall Street Journal, which has been extremely fair. I’m so disappointed by the Post. I think the mainstream media has failed its readership in the Israel–Hamas War.”
Even after issuing the correction on December 28, the Post was unchastened: The paper has continued in recent weeks to reflexively cast Israel as the aggressor in its coverage of the ongoing conflict.
Asked whether the paper had introduced any new processes to ensure balance after its reporters neglected to reach out to Israeli officials, a Post spokesperson declined to comment.
Al-Shifa Hospital
On December 21, the Post published a report arguing that al-Shifa Hospital, the largest medical complex in the Strip and the site of a drawn-out siege in November, was not being used as a Hamas military base, despite the IDF’s earlier claims. Yet another report written by a team led by Loveluck contended that “the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center,” pointing to the outlet’s “analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery, and all of the publicly released IDF materials.”
The article further argued there was no evidence Hamas used the tunnel network beneath al-Shifa, directly contradicting IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari’s comments during an October 27 press conference. Video footage publicized by the Israeli military on social media showed captured weapons and munitions stored in al-Shifa.
In fact, the Post had acknowledged nearly a decade ago — in a 2014 article written by William Booth, the paper’s current London bureau chief — that the hospital served as “de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” Asked about the apparent contradiction, a Washington Post spokeswoman said the 2014 article “did not assert in any way that the hospital was a military headquarters or a command-and-control center.”
Notably, neither the Times nor the Journal joined the Post in arguing that the hospital was not in fact a Hamas base. Neither did the Biden administration, with an official saying the White House had “information that continues to support our conclusion that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad used the al-Shifa Hospital complex and sites beneath it to house command infrastructure, exercise certain command and control activities, store some weapons, and hold at least a few hostages.”
Among the ‘Most Destructive’ Wars of the Century
Two days after the al-Shifa report, on December 23, the Post ran an in-depth visual analysis of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, arguing that it was among the “most destructive wars” of this century and “has outpaced other recent conflicts.” The paper relied on a combination of satellite imagery, airstrike data, and U.N. damage assessments to reach its conclusion. Based on its review of the evidence, the Post concluded that the Gaza war far outpaced the destruction of Aleppo during the Syrian Civil War and the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition’s assault on Raqqa.
“To compare Gaza to the deliberate, nationwide destruction of Ukraine is not just a stretch, it’s idiotic,” Chuck Pfarrer, a former squadron leader of Navy Seal Team Six, told NR.
“WaPo also ignores a glaring fact: Hamas deliberately co-locates military assets with civilian infrastructure, with a special proclivity for embedding command and control networks in and under hospitals,” Pfarrer, an author and host of the Mriya Report, added. “Ukraine does not, yet more than a THOUSAND Ukrainian hospitals and clinics have been targeted and destroyed, along with as many high-density urban dwellings. Russia has engaged in a 670-day-long campaign of murder against UKR civilians. There is no comparison.”
Nance agreed. “I’ve been to Dresden and 95 percent of that city was rebuilt.” The former naval cryptologist also volunteered with the Ukrainian Foreign Legion in 2022 to help push back Russia’s invasion and cited his recent experience on the front lines of the war zone to dismiss the claim. “I’ve also seen Mariupol. I fought in Ukraine. I’ve been through a hundred little villages that were leveled,” he continued.
“When I say leveled, [I mean] no rooftops burned out,” Nance elaborated, pointing to the widespread IDF policy of “roof-knocking” where ordnance is dropped on a building to warn civilians to leave the premises ahead of an impending strike. “So to make an amazing statement like that, facts be damned, will lead you to a reverse analysis that will mean all of your analysis is now biased by your belief.”
“There is a bias that has been built into the global news organs today,” Nance maintained. “I cannot start off with a bias and make the data fit it because it looks bad. There’s a big difference between looking bad and being bad.”
“The Washington Post saw a level of destruction that, quite honestly, they should have been clear that they, as analysts, had never seen before. Because, I’ve seen that level of destruction in a lot of places,” the military veteran added, “but what they were doing was farcical.”
Hamas terrorists fled southern Israel after brutalizing civilians on October 7, with some taking hostages to Rantisi Children’s Hospital. The facility also doubled as a “Hamas command and control center” where they stored “suicide bomb vests, grenades, AK-47 assault rifles, explosive devices, RPGs, and other weapons,” an IDF spokesman said in mid November alongside video evidence.
In the Post’s hospital report, the entire sequence of events surrounding Rantisi is exclusively retold from the Gaza Health Ministry’s perspective. The article claims that Israel’s siege of the complex led to the deaths of “premature babies left behind on breathing machines.” No credence is given to the evidence released by Israel over a month earlier that Rantisi was used by Hamas as a weapons cache and a hostage detention center, and was a hub within the terror tunnel system.
IDF troops are uncovering Hamas’ tunnels inside and around multiple hospitals within Gaza.
The Rantisi Hospital is just another terrorist stronghold used to connect and transfer terrorists and weapons throughout Gaza to be used against Israelis. pic.twitter.com/aYBkpgsfn9
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) December 27, 2023
Notably absent from the Post’s analysis of the more than two dozen medical institutions damaged by Israeli bombing is Kamal Adnan Hospital, whose manager confessed to being a Hamas leader who permitted the terror group to operate throughout the complex.
Al-Quds hospital does make an appearance on the Post’s list, but the article ignores video evidence released by Israel showing a terrorist leisurely walking across the premises of the hospital with an RPG slung over his shoulder a day after the facility was reportedly closed. Again, the only video evidence the Post shares is from the Palestinian Red Cross showing Israeli air strikes. “These bombardments caused fear and panic among internally displaced civilians and the medical staff at the hospital. #Gaza #NotATarget.”
Any evidence of Hamas terrorists operating near the medical facility is overlooked.
Fittingly, too, al-Ahli makes no appearance in the Post’s study. Roughly one out of every twelve Palestinian rockets fired from the Strip, Israel says, malfunctions and lands back in Gaza. That amounted to over 500 misfired projectiles before October even ended. By mid November, that grew to a thousand. The idea that Hamas or PIJ have directly contributed, to any degree, to the destruction of Gaza is not even mentioned by the Post.
Nance believes there was internal pressure within the Post to be the first major international outlet to make an explosive claim that Israel’s conflict was historically unprecedented — but they overshot the mark. “But what they did was, they showed me and other professionals what amateurs that don’t know what they’re doing can say,” Nance noted.
“There was an intense air-to-ground campaign which impacted a series of targets above the ground that are visually detectable,” he joked. “Well, thanks. In other words, there was a war here and a s***load of explosions. There you go. That’s it. That’s all you can tell from the Washington Post analysis.”
David Adesnik, the director of research at the pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), agreed.
“The Post analysis includes a profoundly misleading comparison of IDF tactics with those of Assad and Putin, who deliberately targeted hospitals as a means of sowing terror,” Adesnik, a specialist on Iranian-sponsored terror and proxy groups across the Middle East, explained to NR.
“The article notes that tunnels were found under al-Shifa hospital, but suggests there is no proof Hamas used them, despite weapons found at the hospital and video showing the presence of Israeli hostages,” he continued. “Subsequently, U.S. intelligence confirms Hamas used Shifa hospital as a command center and fled shortly before the IDF captured the site.”
Reviewing the Post’s study, Adesnik actually found that the visual analysis should have yielded conclusions opposite to those arrived at by the Post. “The Post’s own evidence demonstrates Israel’s commitment to avoid striking hospitals except in cases of dire urgency. In a graphic entitled, ‘Hospitals with damaged structures within 180m,’ the Post illustrates how frequently Israel struck targets in the vicinity of hospitals. Yet the extraordinary thing about each of these maps is their demonstration that the IDF can and will strike targets near hospitals without ever striking the hospitals themselves.”
Antisemitic Conspiracies
Once more, three days after the Post’s flawed military analysis, a team of the outlet’s senior reporters, including its Istanbul and London bureau chiefs, wrote about Israel returning dozens of Hamas bodies recovered in northern Gaza.
The IDF initially brought the bodies back to Israel to determine whether they were in fact Israeli hostages. The IDF then returned those bodies it had identified as Hamas fighters.
In its report on the body return, the Post cites a statement from the “Hamas-run government media office,” advancing the well-worn antisemitic conspiracy that the Jewish state had “stolen” the organs of slain Palestinians and “mutilated” their bodies. The Post quoted the ministry as saying, “After examining the bodies, it is clear that features of those killed had changed greatly in a clear indication that the Israeli occupation had stolen vital organs from them.”
“The media office denounces in the strongest terms the Israeli occupation army’s disdain for the dignity of the bodies of our 80 martyrs that Israel had stolen during its genocidal war because it delivered them mutilated,” Hamas said.
“The claims could not be independently verified,” the Post wrote of the Hamas-ministry reports. “The IDF referred questions about the bodies to the Israeli agency for civilian coordination with the Palestinians, which did not immediately respond.”
Virtually all other reputable news outlets — Reuters, Barrons, the French wire service AFP, and the Times of Israel — decided not to lend any credibility to the preposterous allegation. But not the Post. The outlet stood alone in airing Hamas’s antisemitic conspiracy. Outlets across the broader Middle East such as the Yemen Press Agency, Al Jazeera, Iran Press, and Al Mayadeen English were not so circumspect, joining the Post in advancing Hamas’s claims.
“It’s factually absurd. They’re harvesting organs from dead terrorists who’ve been lying around for days?” Reed Rubinstein, deputy associate attorney general for the Trump administration, said. “For years, there has been, primarily in academia and Palestinian propaganda outfits, this claim that the Israelis are harvesting organs.”
“It evokes the worst of the blood libel; ‘taking the blood from little children’ kind of stuff which is still recycled to this day,” Rubinstein continued. “The fact that the Post would publish this, and that somehow it got by the editors, is frankly a damning indictment of the operation over there now.”
The “blood libel” claim Rubinstein refers to is a centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theory that holds that Jews use the blood of non-Jews in religious ceremonies. The ancient smear has in recent years morphed into the claim that Israel routinely harvests the organs of oppressed peoples: When Israel established a hospital in Haiti in the wake of that country’s 2010 earthquake, allegations that the IDF service members staffing the hospital had illegally procured patients’ organs to sell for a profit went viral.
Reached for comment, a Post spokesperson did not explain why the outlet chose to include Hamas’s blatant antisemitic conspiracy mongering in its coverage while most other reputable international outlets disregarded the remarks.
That the Post hewed closer to Middle Eastern outlets such as Al Jazeera in disseminating Hamas’s blood-libel claim is unsurprising given that many of the journalists leading its coverage of the Israel–Hamas conflict cut their teeth at the Qatari-government-funded outlet.
Before joining the Post, Evan Hill, the visuals expert who oversaw the Post analysis arguing that the Israel–Hamas conflict is among the “most destructive wars” this century, had a reporting gig at Al Jazeera. Loveluck has written for the outlet previously, as has prominent op-ed contributor Shadi Hamid.
When reporting on the exchange of Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages, Hill and co-author Hazem Balousha, another one-time Al Jazeera contributor, labeled Palestinians released by Israel as “captives,” indistinguishable from the civilians abducted on October 7.
Even the Post’s very own Middle East editor is an Al Jazeera alum.
Funded by a government that shelters Hamas leaders, Al Jazeera has a long history of anti-Israel bias in its coverage.
Relying on a Terror Group’s ‘Ministry of Health’
All of the aforementioned articles — and many reports that are only tangentially related to the Israel–Hamas conflict — include uncritical citations of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
A review by NR of the Post’s coverage since 10/7 revealed no fewer than 148 individual articles that cite the ministry’s casualty statistics. Some of the articles refer to the Gaza Health Ministry as “Hamas-run” while others lack any modifier that would inform a naïve reader who might view the Gaza Health Ministry as a neutral agency. On several occasions, the Post has even crowbarred the ministry’s figures into articles covering the domestic political response to the conflict, including reports on the House Education and Workforce Committee’s December hearing featuring three university presidents and a piece on the November 2023 March for Israel in Washington, D.C.
The paper even went so far as to mark the Hamas-run ministry’s claim that casualties in Gaza had surpassed 10,000 by leading the site with a headline that blared the figure.
“Gaza Health Ministry: Death toll in Gaza surpasses 10,000 after four weeks of war,” a headline at the top of the site read on November 6.
The Post published a piece in October defending its use of ministry numbers, arguing that “in conflict coverage, official numbers often provide the only view of casualty levels.” The article references Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) Israel and Palestine director Omar Shakir testifying that the Hamas-run ministry’s tabulations “are generally proven to be reliable.” Even if the casualty totals provided by the health ministry were accurate, the ministry does not differentiate between deaths of Hamas terrorists and deaths of civilians, leaving Post readers with a skewed picture.
“The relationship between the Gaza Health Ministry and the Hamas-run government has been fully established in our reporting, along lines similar to Israel’s IDF reporting to Israel’s elected leadership or that its ambassador is appointed by Netanyahu,” a Post editor said.
More troublingly, ministry numbers are laundered across the broader U.N. constellation of organizations and thus given credibility. Adesnik pointed to the December 23 article, alleging the conflict was among the most destructive in the 21st century, to illustrate this point. The piece does not link to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) report, though it was published a day after the report’s release and uses the same statistics.
“There is no indication that OCHA independently compiles the number of fatalities,” Adesnik said, “yet the Post tells readers that figures for the number of women and children among the dead have the OCHA imprimatur, rather than being Gaza ministry numbers.”
OCHA itself, responding to a National Review inquiry, confirmed that it uses Hamas statistics.
“The United Nations relies on the Health Ministry in Gaza as a source for casualties figures in that area,” OCHA spokesperson Eri Kaneko told NR. “We continue to include their data in our reporting and it is clearly sourced. It is nearly impossible at the moment to provide any U.N. verification on a day-to-day basis.”
The Post’s Favorite Source
Initially known as Helsinki Watch, Human Rights Watch (HRW) was founded in 1978 to monitor Soviet compliance with human-rights agreements with America. Over the ensuing decades, HRW evolved into a global human-rights advocacy group and a frequent source for the Post’s Israel reporting.
The group, which the Post represents as a neutral watchdog group, has a long-standing history of lobbing unfounded accusations of war crimes at Israel for its use of both conventional munitions and drones against terrorist organizations. The group only rarely condemns terror groups for indiscriminately firing rockets into densely populated areas. In fact, HRW’s founder Robert Bernstein publicly condemned the group in 2009 for its disproportionate fixation on the Jewish state and for aiding “those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” A senior editor resigned in late November, citing the group’s anti-Israel bias.
“HRW’s initial reactions to the Hamas attacks failed to condemn outright the murder, torture, and kidnapping of Israeli men, women, and children,” former employee Danielle Haas wrote in a public letter sent to 600 staffers in late November after she resigned. “They included the ‘context’ of ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’ before blood was even dry on bedroom walls.”
“As the organization grew and its composition shifted, so too did the focus, tone, and framing of its Israel-Palestine work. Following the Hamas massacres in Israel on October 7, years of institutional creep culminated in organizational responses that shattered professionalism, abandoned principles of accuracy and fairness, and surrendered its duty to stand for the human rights of all.”
Shortly after 10/7, Loveluck co-authored another piece arguing that the early stage of Israel’s military campaign was historically unprecedented in its destructiveness. In the report, she cited Marc Garlasco, who was identified as “a military adviser at the Dutch organization PAX for Peace,” and a former war-crimes investigator. Garlasco cited his experience during the Libyan Civil War and drew on the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to buttress the Post’s claim that Israel’s response was disproportionate.
Soon after the article was published, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) debunked Garlasco’s claim that “the highest number of bombs and other munitions dropped in one year during the war in Afghanistan was just over 7,423.” As CAMERA noted in its write-up, that number represents the highest number of explosives employed in Afghanistan in a single year since 2006, and does not account for the number of explosives dropped from 2001 to 2006. In fact, according to the U.S. Air Force, 17,500 bombs were dropped during the first 76 days of bombing in Afghanistan. The Post has since affixed a correction to its article, noting that the claim that the number of bombs is higher than was dropped in any single year during the war in Afghanistan is false.
Loveluck’s article also does not reveal that Garlasco was suspended by HRW in 2009 for being a Nazi memorabilia enthusiast. “The leather SS jacket makes my blood go cold it is so COOL!” Garlasco wrote in an online forum under the pen name Flak 88. A Post spokesperson pointed to Garlasco’s commentary in the Times, CNN, Associated Press, NPR, and PBS, among others, to demonstrate that he is a widely cited source in mainstream reporting on international conflicts.
Ultimately, the Post’s coverage of the ongoing war represents a vindication of Hamas’s propaganda strategy and a real blow to those who wish to see the terror group exterminated, Feith explained.
“The Washington Post, claiming to be an upholder of humanitarian law and claiming to be sympathetic to the Palestinians, is actually rewarding a Hamas strategy that’s catastrophic for the Palestinians,” Feith said. “They’re rewarding this perverse determination by Hamas to maximize Palestinian civilian casualties so as to win condemnation of Israel.”