You may not know Omar Hamad, but he’s a pharmacist, author, and social media reporter from the Gaza Strip. He’s also a performative liar — and someone who, when caught in his lies, does the manly thing and deletes his accounts.
But alas, for him, the internet is forever.
Hamad’s work has been published in or parroted by numerous journalists and outlets, including a piece published in Irish magazine Image and a photo passed around social media by New York Times and CNN commentator Nicholas Kristof:
In his piece for Image, Hamad is described by the magazine as being “a Palestinian writer and pharmacist bearing witness to genocide in his home of Gaza.” That first part of the description may indeed be accurate — he writes, and I have never been dispensed medicine by the man, but I have no reason to doubt that could be his profession. As for the “bearing witness” part, that assumes he’s telling the truth. Perhaps empurpled passages like these might have convinced Image, if they cared, that this was someone more interested in attention via words that evoke emotions but may not perhaps ring true:
I never chose my homeland, just as I never chose my mother or father. Love for the homeland seeped into me the way trees sprout along the equator. I knelt down to offer it a ring of loyalty—promising to remain and struggle for it. I carried my family in my right hand and my pen in my left—the pen that no army in the world can break. And while I played with my pen, one family member slipped away. But their slipping was an ascent. Then the second slipped away too. Both of their departures passed through the heart, the axis of their fall.
Treacherous bullets from hyenas who stole our town, our home, and our dreams—like a rose plucked from a garden. They stole our safety, our love, and our peace, and we were left sleeping on the sidewalks of doubt—sometimes lifted by winds of longing, and other times devoured by the sulfurous yellow light.
This sounds like bad fiction — not to mention more than a little anti-Semitic — but not necessarily verifiably false. Then came a claim that simply couldn’t be believed: that American aid workers were using sophisticated devices to trap Gazans for their own amusement.
“The price of sugar in Gaza is extremely high, and the Americans involved in the American aid know this very well. What happened today is one of the worst crimes ever committed,” Hamad said in a Monday post.
Do you support Israel?
“Read carefully what I’m about to say: as soon as the first wave of American aid arrives, people rush to get sugar first. Today, the Americans deliberately placed the sugar in a separate area. Then, they dug a deep pit just before the sugar zone, covered it with nylon, and lightly sprinkled it with dirt so that no one would see it or notice,” he continued.
“The starving reached the sugar first, and seven people fell into the pit. Then a bulldozer came and buried them alive,” he added.
“Meanwhile, a man in his fifties was returning from the aid area, nearly collapsing. I held him, and he said to me: ‘I’d rather die of hunger than go back to that aid—it’s aid of death.’”
Yes, that’s right — in a world of constant surveillance, where anyone can whip out a mobile phone and take video of something, the Americans managed to commit an appalling war crime by trapping Gazans in a ditch and then burying them alive. This sick accusation sounds like Wile E. Coyote stuff, only apparently in real life. Yet, according to an archived version of it taken later in the day on Monday, it had garnered over 22,000 views and 474 reposts.
This wasn’t the only time Hamad had made such a preposterous allegation, either: He’d previously said that the drug oxycodone was being added to bags of flour, another claim that went viral.
This was followed by another assertion on Tuesday which was even more outlandish: that the Israelis were using a new kind of bomb that was akin to the atom bomb.
“Tonight, Israel bombed Gaza with extreme and intense force, using all types of bombs. What was strange is that there was a new sound among the explosions—one I had never heard before. It felt like we were lab rats,” he said.
“But that’s nothing new for these swine. After World War II, the U.S. established a committee called the ABCC, and its mission wasn’t to treat victims, but to monitor them—to study radiation symptoms and the effects of the bomb. It was as if the Japanese were experimental animals. One of the researchers even lifted a brain from a Japanese corpse and said: ‘Yesterday, it was rabbits. Today, it’s the Japanese.’”
“Just as Israel dehumanized us before our extermination by calling us ‘human animals,’ America did the same to the Japanese before the nuclear bomb. People were even asking: Are the Japanese really human? Even the filthy Time magazine wrote: The average Japanese is ignorant and cannot be reasoned with. He may be human, but nothing proves it,” he continued. “What I want to say is that anything you see in the media about America being against Israel, or about Trump insulting Netanyahu, is pure lies and serves their agenda.”
I don’t know that this needs to be debunked, but the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — which handles the food distribution in Gaza — did the job anyway:
This Hamas propagandist is back with an even more fanciful lie.
Fact check: GHF is not distributing sugar.
While Hamas continues to spread misinformation, we’ll continue to distribute free food aid directly to those who need it. https://t.co/zE3EIht0Lf pic.twitter.com/YFJu90WIse
— Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (@GHFUpdates) July 1, 2025
They had also debunked some of Hamad’s earlier claims in another post:
Next up: a new Hamas-backed social media campaign that GHF flour is laced with…wait for it…oxycodone.
The “evidence?” A few photos, a supposed pharmacist, and a claim conveniently pushed by Hamas-linked accounts.
The flour we distribute is commercially packaged and not…
— Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (@GHFUpdates) June 27, 2025
Conveniently, Mr. Hamad seems to have deleted his X account, or had it deleted for him, after this debunking — although not before trying to rebut GHF, rather unsuccessfully. Thankfully, the posts were preserved for posterity:
Omar Hamad is doing a test: At what point will he write something so ridiculous that the watermelonians will stop believing him?
So far, he has not reached that point.
Palestine always lies.https://t.co/3buDNfR5YMhttps://t.co/O8uynNLDy0 pic.twitter.com/uXvUPhG3tB
— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) July 1, 2025
Here’s the follow-up post that Omar Hamad Darwish made shortly before deactivating his propaganda account. pic.twitter.com/BvJjoElARp
— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) July 1, 2025
To a certain extent, this story is less about Hamad, who — despite his far reach on social media — isn’t that well-known outside of that sphere. Instead, it’s the media who uncritically gave this guy attention.
While his stories have grown more outlandish the longer the war drags on and the more he’s desperate for attention, the signs should have been there long before Image or Kristof, among others, gave this guy free publicity. Both repped this Hamas propagandist long after, according to snapshots of his webpage, he called social media companies which censored some of his posts “slaves to Zionism” and other happy stuff like that. That’s always been the tenor of his missives — talk of blood and extermination and genocide, all at the hands of the perfidious Jewish state. He’s not the only crazy who says stuff like that. He is one of those misinformation peddlers whose ramblings are getting echoed by people who should know better, however.
Perhaps the deletion of his account — along with the rebuttal of these profoundly implausible stories — will cause the people who believed this guy’s ramblings a moment of self-reflection. But I doubt it; the copy is too good and the backlash too minimal for them to worry about.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
