Did Hamas Co-Produce ’60 Minutes’ Piece on War?

If only “60 Minutes” had paused that famous stopwatch before it aired a recent segment on the Hamas-Israeli War.

When the piece ended, I expected to hear: “This piece was directed and produced by Hamas, the democratic non-violent, civic organization that governs Gaza.”

It was sad to see “60 Minutes”, which since 1968 has produced some of the best investigative journalism on TV, offer such a one-sided and slanted story.  Let’s take a close look.

Reported by correspondent, Cecilia Vega, the 13-minute piece opened with a 35-second reference to October 7. After that, you don’t even know that Hamas was a party in the conflict.

Vega immediately mentions that a medical journal, Lancet, estimates that the death toll in Gaza had likely surpassed 70,000. That is about 25,000 higher than even Hamas said have died due to Israeli attacks. Like the rest of the media, she did not consider in her report how many might have been combatants.

Nor did she mention that Lancet also had published, in its correspondence section, a piece claiming it is “not implausible” the toll may reach 186,000. When Lancet received fierce blow-back, the magazine published a stinging attack on the authors, accusing them of a “blood libel.” Yes, the magazine blasted the writers to whom they lent its pages.

Then Vega alerts us that we will see children playing with ammunition casings and “a close look reveals where they come from —the Department of Defense.”

While she implies this is some kind of secret, the Biden administration has provided Israel with 50,000 tons of armaments and President Biden continually touted his assistance to Israel and did so proudly.

Vega reminds us, lest we forget, this support comes “in the form of taxpayer-funded weapons.”

Much of the segment is devoted to Vega interviewing Hala Rharrit, an American diplomat who resigned in protest over US support of Israel.

At one point, Rharrit claims she was told not to send images of suffering children in her reports. Vega asked who made the demand and, after a few seconds of hesitation, Rharrit responded, “A colleague.” That was the end of that.

Rharrit got her day in the sun, doing interviews on several TV news shows. She also spoke last August on a panel sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) which charged Israel with committing genocide.

The title of the program? “Muslim Resignees Speak: How Islamophobia & Anti-Palestinian Racism Fuel Biden Administration’s Gaza Policy.”

Camera, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, wrote that Rharrit has repeatedly appeared on behalf of CAIR, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2009 Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial, the largest terrorism financing case in US history.

Vega did not report that. Also, while she said the State Department declined to participate in her story, no mention was made of her approaching Israeli spokespeople for comment.

But the “highlight” of the piece comes when she speaks with Josh Paul, director of the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. Vega does not report that Paul resigned just 12 days after October 7, meaning, since the war hardly begun, he did not want the US to offer any help to Israel.

Paul tells Vega that immediately after October 7, “…Israel should have leveraged that moment to press for a real, just and lasting peace.”

Who can argue with that? Right after suffering the worst massacre since the Holocaust, Israel should have reached out and partnered with Hamas which pledged to commit another October 7, “again, again and again.”

Vega also did not find the following newsworthy: Camera reported that Paul is now a senior advisor for DAWN, whose chairman is Nihad Awad, executive director and co-founder of CAIR, who praised Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, saying he is “happy to see” Palestinians “break the siege” of the Gaza Strip.

The story ends with Vega and Rharrit discussing the plight of a young Gazan girl who died in the war.

The story is gut-wrenching; Who cannot grieve for or with her parents?

But the question is not the suffering; it is who is causing the suffering.

Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken, time and again, blamed Hamas and said the war could end at any moment if the terrorist organization just laid down its arms.

Vega also “forgot” to mention that Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas killed by Israel, believed the spiraling civilian death toll in Gaza would work in Hamas’s favor, according to Sinwar emails published in the Wall Street Journal.

“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar wrote in the emails published by the Journal. They [the deaths] were “necessary sacrifices.”

Sinwar’s cold-blooded depravity aside, sadly, in war, civilians, generally, suffer more than combatants. While estimates of the fatality toll in World War II vary widely, all agree that twice or three times more civilians were killed than combatants.

How many non-combatants did the US kill with the two A-bombs, “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” or by leveling dozens of German and Japanese cities, or in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan?

In an “open letter to “60 Minutes” in the Times of Israel, Marjorie Davis, wrote:

“Lacking journalistic integrity, your story omitted that the reason so many Gazans have died lies in Hamas’ strategy of hiding behind as many civilians as possible. Placing terrorists and weapons in schools, mosques, and hospitals, Hamas strives for a high civilian death total. In their view, children make the best casualties because they evoke the most sympathy, and Hamas counts on the media to report on their behalf. Unfortunately, 60 Minutes fell right into their trap.”

Vega’s report itself deserves the traditional responsible “60 Minutes” treatment of how such a story — one is tempted to call it propaganda — came about.