Staging the Gaza Famine
Maintaining the famine narrative by confiscating humanitarian aid, starving the Gaza population, and staging emotional photographs is Hamas’s deceptive war strategy to vilify Israel.
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by Bennett Tucker
December 22, 2025
One of the most powerful weapons Hamas has wielded against Israel over the past two years is not used on the battlefield, but propagated through the media.
Not standing a chance in combat against the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), Hamas’s most effective war strategy has been the global propagation of false narratives that accuse Israel of war crime violations, such as genocide and famine. These allegations work to delegitimize the IDF’s presence in Gaza and distract the world from Hamas’s atrocities.
With help from the U.N., select heads of state across the so-called civilized world, and the biggest names in mainstream media (what Lee Smith called the Global Empire of Palestine), Hamas managed to wrangle global sympathy almost immediately after Oct. 7 as the victims of an Israeli genocide and famine in Gaza.
Last summer, however, the famine narrative came under new scrutiny. Evidence surfaced revealing that severe food shortages in Gaza were not caused by the IDF military campaigns or the alleged war crimes of Israeli leaders, but rather by Hamas’s strategy to starve the Gazan population to keep the famine story going. (RELATED: The Gaza Famine Myth: Refuting NYT’s Kristof’s Libelous Claims)
Propagating the Famine Narrative
In early 2024, major news outlets interpreted the predictions of food shortages in Gaza from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS) and other U.N.-backed food and health organizations to mean that there was a famine in Gaza. CNN reported as early as January 2024 that “Israel’s war in Gaza has brought famine with ‘such incredible speed,’” and warned that “hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are starving in the besieged enclave.”
By the late spring of 2024, various other reports and analyses, together with a flood of viral images depicting emaciated Palestinian women and children (some not even from Gaza, or from the current war), had convinced the world that Israel’s intervention in Gaza was to instill famine and genocide on the civilian population as a war tactic against Hamas.
The reports were convincing enough to make the Biden administration focus on combating the Gaza famine (not rescuing the American, Thai, and Israeli hostages, or brokering a ceasefire) its foreign policy priority.
The famine narrative rang so loud throughout the world that it drowned out simple facts on the ground. As The American Spectator reported last year in May, “often lost in the fog of this war are the tireless efforts taken by the IDF to alleviate civilian suffering and facilitate humanitarian aid into Gaza.” (RELATED: US and Israel’s Humanitarian Mission to Gaza)
The main Israeli-Jordanian border crossing became the starting point for international aid trucks to convoy across Israel and reach the humanitarian access points for the Gaza Strip. Roughly 300 trucks were reportedly entering Gaza each day. In March 2024, a “maritime corridor” was established between ports in Cyprus and Gaza and Ashdod in Israel to facilitate the World Central Kitchen’s shipments of international aid. These initiatives were facilitated by Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) with security provided by the IDF.
Former official in the IDF Spokesperson Unit, Rachel Lester, noted in the summer of 2024 that “even according to the most conservative calculations made by the very people who have been crying ‘famine’ in Gaza, what the pro-Israel movement has been saying for months is actually true: Israel has been delivering more food to Gaza than ever before.”
But it was too late for hardline facts. The international community had bought the famine narrative wholesale, and Hamas entered the second year of war confident that this strategy could be used as leverage against Israel.
Maintaining the Famine Narrative
If tons of humanitarian aid are reportedly entering Gaza each day, where is it all going? A thread of new reporting, starting last summer, has shed light on the fact that Hamas is orchestrating the detriment of the Gazan people for propagandistic effect.
In May 2025, the Shin Bet (Israel’s counterterrorist agency) revealed that 60 percent of the international aid entering Gaza is confiscated or looted by Hamas. That same month, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that the Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas, criticized Hamas “gangs” for looting humanitarian aid intended for civilians. Abbas held “Hamas-affiliated gangs primarily responsible” for the “looting and theft carried out by criminal gangs targeting warehouses and storage facilities of humanitarian aid.” (RELATED: Who Is to Blame for Civilian Deaths in Gaza?)
Last week, on Dec. 9, the New York Post published a story, first exposed by the Palestinian, anti-Hamas activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, on how Hamas has been hoarding food in a boarded-up warehouse. “During the worst of the days of the hunger crisis in Gaza in the past six months, Hamas deliberately hid literal tons of infant formula and nutritional shakes for children […] to worsen the hunger crisis and initiate a disaster as part of the terror group’s famine narrative,” Alkhatib stated on X, accompanied by footage of the food inside a Gaza warehouse.
The U.N. must also be held partly, if not wholly, responsible for Hamas’s actions. All international aid passes through Israeli security checkpoints before entering the Gaza Strip, where it is then turned over to U.N. agencies for distribution. The abundant evidence of U.N. agencies in Gaza partnering with Hamas and hiring Hamas operatives further reveals the U.N.’s complicity in maintaining the famine narrative by allowing Hamas access to the incoming aid.
The U.N., therefore, has been highly critical of turning over complete responsibility of aid distribution to the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) because it will expose their level of complicity and corruption. Furthermore, without the U.N.’s facade of authority, Hamas will lose its main collaborator in maintaining credibility for the famine narrative.
Staging the Famine Narrative
The threads in Hamas’s deceptive scheme continue to unravel as the authenticity of famine images is brought into question. One widely published image of the emaciated body of 5-year-old Osama al-Rakab went viral as evidence of severe malnutrition in Gaza, when, in fact, Osama suffered from a genetic disease and was being treated in Italy. Another photograph of a supposedly starving Gazan girl, supposedly taken by photographer Abdel Kareem Hana for the Associated Press, caused a media scandal when evidence surfaced that it was actually the image of a Yazidi girl fleeing ISIS in 2014.
In August, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung questioned whether the images coming out of Gaza are purposely selected and manipulated to trigger emotional reactions, a tactic known as “Pallywood.” Contributing to the report was professor emeritus of history and photography expert Gerhard Paul, who has been researching war images from Israel and Gaza for over 25 years. The “starvation’ images from Gaza are not fake,” concluded Paul, but “are presented in a certain way or provided with a falsifying caption to mobilize our visual memory and emotions.”
The German paper BILD explored this further with the headline: “Gaza photographer Anas Zayed Fteiha stages the real suffering of the Palestinians for the global public — for the benefit of Hamas and its propaganda.”
Fteiha, a freelance photographer who contributes to Reuters, BBC, and other major news outlets, was on assignment in Gaza last July for the state-owned Turkish news agency Anadolu to produce a photo essay on the hunger crisis. He was on location at the Khaula al-Badri field kitchen when he snapped his now-famous image of women and children desperately waving empty bowls and pans behind an aluminum fence.
The staging of this photo, the German reporters argued, comes in part because the women and children were not waiting in line to receive food, but posed in front of the cameraman. Additionally, other images that Ftieha took at the same field kitchen, such as those depicting men peacefully waiting in line and receiving food, were not published.
“The hunger is (almost always) real — but the photos may not be,” the BILD reporters stated. The article concluded that Fteiha’s photos were carefully selected for publication by big-name publishers because they showed “chaos and destruction […] and especially: children, mothers, suffering in close-up and in perfect lighting conditions.”
The BILD investigation, Israel’s foreign ministry stated, “underscores how Pallywood has gone mainstream with staged images and ideological bias shaping international coverage, while the suffering of Israeli hostages and Hamas atrocities are pushed out of frame.”
— This article first appeared at The American Spectator.
If there is media manipulation its Israel leading the way financed by U.S. Let’s stop funding all foreign countries and persue peace. Merry Christmas and peace to all.