“Don’t use seven words when four will do,” Brad Pitt’s character in Ocean’s Eleven tutors a fellow con man.
Good advice in general, though yesterday’s Washington Post report on Hamas uses 2,141 words when three will do. All it had to say was: “Israel was right.”
I get that it’s a hard phrase for journalists to utter these days, but let’s save the ink. Here are the key passages from the story:
“Earlier in the war, Hamas relied on taxes imposed on commercial shipments and the seizure of humanitarian goods, according to Gazans and current and former Israeli and foreign officials. According to a Gazan who has worked at the border, plainclothes Hamas personnel routinely took inventory of goods at the Rafah crossing, until it closed last year, and at the Kerem Shalom crossing, though it was under IDF control. They also surveyed warehouses and markets. Most of the Palestinians interviewed for this story spoke either on the condition of anonymity or that only their first name be used, for fear of reprisal by Hamas.”
And:
“Hamas profited ‘especially off the aid that had cost them nothing but whose prices they hike up,’ said a Gazan contractor who has worked at Gaza’s border crossings during the war.
“Over nearly two years, he said, he saw Hamas routinely collect 20,000 shekels (about $6,000) from local merchants, threatening to confiscate their trucks if they did not pay. He recalled that civil servants for the Hamas-led government said several times that they would kill him or call him a collaborator with Israel if he did not cooperate with their demands to divert aid. He said he refused. But he added that he knew at least two aid truck drivers who he said were killed by Hamas for refusing to pay.”
Finally:
“‘Hamas sees aid as its most important currency,’ said a man from Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, who helps manage the distribution of aid. He said that while most of the population had to scrape for water and food, people affiliated with Hamas had been gifted boxes of aid meant for wider distribution.”
Of course there’s plenty of throat-clearing throughout the piece, for example the repeated insistence that Israel hasn’t proved that Hamas steals the aid. Which is weird, because the article is about the writers discovering beyond any shadow of a doubt that Hamas steals the aid. Palestinians in Gaza are risking their lives to detail to American publications what Hamas is doing to them, and the journalists make sure to insinuate that everybody—literally everybody, Israelis and Palestinians alike—is lying and that Hamas is good, actually.
Is this just another example of media bias? Ho-hum, right? Not exactly—there’s more to this particular story. The same day the Post ran the preceding story, it also ran a second story on humanitarian aid in Gaza. This one was an attempt to paint the one group delivering aid to Gazan civilians directly—an effort backed by the U.S. and Israel and involving Western companies—as the problem.
The piece repeats evidence-free accusations, parroted directly from Hamas, that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is acting as some kind of lure to hungry Palestinians so that the IDF can shoot them. Rumor-mongering such as this has consistently led to firms backing out of working with the aid group, other aid groups boycotting them, and restaurateurs abroad being physically attacked for providing food for the GHF to distribute to Gazan civilians. Hamas is starving Palestinians, and some of the critics of the GHF are gleefully advancing that starvation agenda.
The main point of the GHF is to provide aid to Gazans without letting Hamas commandeer that aid instead. Here is what this second Washington Post story has to say about that: “Hamas is demanding a return to the U.N.-coordinated system of aid delivery that operated in Gaza for decades. Israel charges that Hamas has corrupted that system.”
“Israel charges.” If only there were some way for reporters to investigate the situation and publish a 2,000-word story in one of America’s largest daily newspapers!
Israel also says water is wet but offers no proof. So who knows.
We don’t have to he-said-she-said the living daylights out of the news. Everybody involved knows the facts, and those facts comport precisely with what Israel has been saying all along.
