Kristof’s Looking Glass and Hamas’s Information War

If Truth Is the First Casualty of War, Gaza May Be the First Casualty of Post-Truth Journalism.

Nicholas Kristof presents his recent New York Times op-ed as an even-handed look at Israel’s war with Hamas. In “Answering My Critics About the War in Gaza,” he acknowledges that Hamas started the war and committed war crimes when it invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. Yet he glosses over the savagery—beheadings, burnings, sexualized torture, gang rapes and the executions of victims—perpetrated that day and extensively documented, some of it gleefully livestreamed by the attackers. And he omits a key fact: before October 7, sexual violence was never a feature of Israel’s decades-long conflict with Hamas—crucial context still missing from media coverage. He ends with an indictment of American complicity: because the US supplied munitions to Israel, he writes, “We have blood on our hands.”

Do we? Tragically, yes—but not for the reason he gives.

Kristof’s accounting begins much too late. An honest reckoning must examine both what made October 7 possible and what prolonged the war it began. From this wider view, the nexus between legacy media and the Biden administration becomes clear. As events showed, Hamas correctly anticipated that both would bring intense diplomatic and public pressure to bear on Israel after the attacks.

Kristof is emblematic of a larger problem at the Times. Two months into the war, he sensationally compared “the pace of killing civilians” in Gaza to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide—a gross distortion he has never retracted. Just weeks earlier, the Times had rushed out a story blaming Israel for the Al-Ahli Hospital blast, running a front-page image of a gutted building (later revealed to be from elsewhere in Gaza). Within days, US intelligence confirmed that a misfired Palestinian rocket struck the hospital’s parking lot, leaving the hospital itself intact. The Times eventually issued an editor’s note acknowledging over-reliance on Hamas’s claims, but not that the original attribution to Israel was unfounded. By then, the diplomatic damage was done, and any lessons learned from the debacle were quickly forgotten.

On October 9, 2024, the Times published scans ostensibly proving that Israel had executed children with gunshots to the head. When independent radiologists and ballistics experts identified the brain-scan images as fakes—there was no projectile deformity or damage to surrounding tissue—opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury claimed to possess corroborating photos—photos, she said, that were too graphic to publish. But how would these photos resolve doubts about the authenticity of what had already been published?

On July 25, 2025, the Times splashed a photo of a child with cerebral palsy across its front page—with a caption implying the child had been “born healthy”—as proof of starvation in Gaza. The Times later issued a retraction, but only on its X account, where few readers were likely to see it. As The Free Press recently reported, all twelve widely circulated images of “starving” children it investigated were, in fact, cases of pre-existing medical conditions, creating a media distortion ripple effect.

A recent report by the Network Contagion Research Institute—“The 4th Estate Sale: How American and European Media Became an Uncritical Mouthpiece for a Designated Foreign Terror Organization” —found that the Times and other major outlets often amplified Hamas’s narratives—publishing deceptive claims and images and repeating Hamas talking points with little scrutiny. And the Henry Jackson Society’s “Questionable Counting: Analyzing the Death Toll From the Hamas-Run Healthy Ministry” spotlights these outlets’ uncritical acceptance of Hamas’s casualty figures.

The Times and other outlets weren’t merely misinforming their audiences. They were helping Hamas win the information war, giving it an incentive to keep fighting—and dragging out the kinetic war that led Kristof to bemoan American complicity.

And the media wasn’t Hamas’s only shield. It also had the Biden administration for the critical first 15 months of the war. The Times and other outlets amplified unfounded USAID claims about famine in Gaza and deceptive State Department (and UN) narratives about “settler violence.” These narratives predictably shifted pressure from Hamas to Israel. But misleading stories and images were only half the problem.

Just as important was what went unreported. In February 2025, Gregg Roman of the Middle East Forum and Max Primorac, a former USAID official now at the Heritage Foundation, told the House Oversight Committee that USAID had used emergency waivers—bypassing the usual oversight mechanisms—to extend a financial lifeline to Hamas when the group’s war effort began to falter weeks into Israel’s ground campaign. Roman added that “90 percent” of the $2.1 billion in US aid sent to Gaza since October 7 ended up in Hamas-controlled areas, so that the US effectively “underwrote [Hamas’s] ability to survive until the ceasefire” brokered on November 24, 2023. The bombshell testimony has been viewed 125 million times, yet those who rely on the Times and other legacy outlets for their news coverage are none the wiser about it.

Immediately after October 7, Israel’s military leadership and government determined that a siege of Gaza was their best chance to bring Hamas quickly to heel and free the hostages. Yet as senior Biden official Brett McGurk recently acknowledged on the Call Me Back podcast (16:15 in the interview), Washington pressed Jerusalem to change course. Even as Israel reeled from the worst calamity in its history, its very survival still in question, the Biden administration insisted that it place the interests of Gazans before its own strategic imperatives—arguably to the grave detriment of both. Yet this crucial detail hasn’t informed the public’s understanding of the ensuing war.

The public may recall then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer—Biden’s closest Congressional ally—calling from the Senate floor for Netanyahu to step down. What isn’t widely known is that a House committee memo in July 2025 reported that US government money—channeled through the State Department and USAID—had gone to Israeli NGOs organizing disruptive anti-Netanyahu protests. This was truly extraordinary interference in the internal politics of a democratic ally fighting an existential war.

On the starvation narrative, few Times readers know that, under UN Security Council Resolution 2720, the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) began publishing “dashboards”  in early August that track aid consignments from crossing to destination—or interception. The dashboards don’t attribute incidents to specific groups, but they record sustained, high rates of interference across multiple periods. It strains belief that diversions on that scale—with nearly 9 in 10 UN aid trucks intercepted between May 19 and August 5—occurred without Hamas’s organizational muscle. Yet Kristof doesn’t mention these data, which align with official Israeli assessments that the Times—citing unnamed Israeli officials—has treated skeptically.

These observations raise an unsettling question: did Hamas factor Western media support into its invasion plans? One clue is the Open Letter on U.S. Media Coverage of Palestine, signed by hundreds of journalists after Israel’s 2021 war with Hamas. “Every time we fail to report the truth,” it concludes, “we fail our audiences, our purpose and, ultimately, the Palestinian people.” The letter tacitly rejects impartiality, recasting journalism as advocacy.

Kristof tells readers he “would celebrate if Hamas were forced out of Gaza. But that’s almost certainly not happening, and it’s not clear what military objective the slaughter and starvation today are advancing.”

Elsewhere, he recycles the charge that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for personal and political reasons. He said the same thing after Israel’s 2021 war with Hamas in his column, “Were My Criticisms of Israel Unfair?” There, he maintained that Hamas’s rocket barrages toward Israel’s cities were “complicated” because “most experts consider Israel to be occupying Gaza (because Israel controls it, even though it withdrew in 2005).” But this statement is hardly self-explanatory.

In reality, Hamas chose to escalate the conflict when Israel withdrew, just as media and “most experts” chose to hand Hamas an open-ended pretext to continue hostilities. These two choices paved the way for October 7 and the war that followed. I unpack this history in “Our Strange Gaza Amnesia: How the History of Israel’s Withdrawal Was Rewritten in Real Time.”

Kristof is wrong on all counts: from “starvation” in Gaza to Netanyahu’s motives, Hamas’s staying power, and the conflict’s history. The truth is that the Biden administration, world leaders, the UN, and legacy media erected roadblocks on the path to defeating Hamas. In doing so, they didn’t shorten the war; they prolonged it. Together, they formed a nexus of complicity. This nexus made Hamas’s strategy of human sacrifice viable.

Now remind us, Mr. Kristof: who has blood on their hands—and why?