Perhaps the true indication of anti-Israel media bias is not when reporters start listening to Hamas but when they stop.
A few days ago, the Free Press interviewed a New York Times whistleblower who provided a fair amount of evidence for the claim that the paper has been captured not by run-of-the-mill Israel-skeptics but by the progressive movement’s anti-Zionist, conspiracist zealots.
One of the many forms this takes is reporters’ instinctive willingness to believe anything Hamas says and distrust anything coming from the Israeli side. At one point, a reporter suggests in a company Slack chat that a Hamas official is more credible than the Gazan who tells the Times that Hamas is shooting at Palestinian civilians who are trying to flee the conflict zone. (The civilian was telling the truth, and the terrorist leader was lying.)
The problem for Western media is that Hamas has been spending the postwar period providing reams of statistical proof to back up the Israeli side of the narrative.
In Gaza, the Hamas narrative is dead. It lives on only in the zombie newsrooms of the U.S. and Europe.
And this, I suspect, is one reason for the increasingly ill tempers displayed by high-profile anti-Zionist figures like Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, to say nothing of the Tucker Carlson wing’s very public emotional spiraling. For if the New York Times and others were to parrot Hamas’s talking points now, they would sound a lot like Israel’s claims during and after the war.
For example, during the war Israel claimed it was doing its best to avoid civilian casualties and that many of those claimed as civilian victims were actually Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants. In February, I wrote about Hamas’s own postwar revisions to the data when it was finally separating combatants and noncombatants in its own records:
“The list has enough information to cite 68,800 deaths. Hamas has lost 25,000 fighters, which leaves 44,000 war deaths to account for. Included in that 44,000 are about 10,000 natural deaths. The remaining 34,000 would include civilians killed by Israel and those killed by Hamas and associated militant groups—either by execution, rocket misfires, turf wars, and the like.”
In other words, Israel had been more careful to protect civilians than it had claimed. Now Hamas has released more data, and the trend keeps rolling in the same direction. It shows, as Eirik Schroder-Bratane notes in detail, that most of the bodies Israel has returned to Gaza since the cease-fire were those of combatants who infiltrated Israel on October 7, 2023. Not only that, but they have been “systematically” included, along the way, in the earlier casualty lists. Which means the casualty list already was filled with terrorists and that the bodies discovered and returned after the cease-fire are unlikely to add materially to the death count.
Again, according to Hamas.
Israel denied accusations that it caused a famine in Gaza in 2025. Hamas’s numbers (along with UN statistics on food security) back that up.
Israel insisted that many of the “journalists” it was accused of killing were actually members of terrorist groups. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have been posting “martyr” notices that make Israel’s point for it.
Israel’s defenders said Hamas was using child soldiers, which was driving up the supposed death count for children. Hamas now says the same thing.
Israel said numerous doctors, nurses and other health officials were actually members of terrorist groups fighting Israel. Hamas agrees.
If you believed that Israel was committing genocide, that it was creating a famine in Gaza, killing journalists and medical workers wantonly, and many other discredited conspiracies, you have been fully abandoned by Hamas. And if you’re more radical than Hamas, you should probably reconsider your approach to current events.