Israel is fighting two wars against Hamas. The first is the grinding military campaign in Gaza. The other is the battle over narrative and legitimacy.
On the first front, Israel is winning resoundingly: Hamas leaders and commanders eliminated, thousands of terrorists killed, its rocket arsenal depleted, its labyrinth of tunnels badly degraded.
On the second front, Israel is taking a beating. Or, as US President Donald Trump said on Friday, Israel “may be winning the war, but they’re not winning the world of public relations.”
A new 311-page study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University (BESA) highlights just how distorted the conversation has become. This report systematically dismantles some of the most frequently leveled charges against Israel – genocide, deliberate starvation, indiscriminate killing – by reexamining casualty figures, food-truck deliveries, and UN reports.
It shows how Hamas has manipulated numbers, how UN agencies have quietly “corrected” data without acknowledgment, and how aid organizations inflated needs in order to spur action.
The report is not a whitewash. It concedes negligence, tragedy, and individual acts of IDF misconduct. But it demonstrates clearly that the sweeping allegation of genocide is without foundation. In short, it provides Israel with the kind of factual ammunition needed to fight the narrative war.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that it comes long after the damage has been done.
Take the claim of an Israeli-induced famine. For months, UN officials and international media declared that Gaza required 500 food trucks daily and that Israel was deliberately starving civilians. That figure became gospel.
Yet prewar averages were closer to 73 trucks a day. During long stretches of the war, more food entered Gaza than before the October 7 massacre.
Those facts are only now surfacing. But it’s too late. The accusation – that Israel weaponized famine – has already hardened into conventional wisdom.
Hamas’s Gaza Health Ministry
Or consider casualty figures. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reported nearly every death as civilian, excluded combat-age men, and included natural deaths. International media parrot the numbers without question. Researchers are now exposing the statistical anomalies. Again – too late.
And while the BESA report was being released in Israel, Reuters ran a wire story that illustrates exactly what is happening. The International Association of Genocide Scholars voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to declare that Israel’s “policies and actions in Gaza” meet the definition of genocide.
Fifteen paragraphs long, the story included applause from a Hamas-affiliated source in Gaza – Hamas, which openly calls for Israel’s eradication, the very definition of genocide.
And Israel’s side? A single boilerplate sentence that quoted the Foreign Ministry denying the charge. When the world is presented with a resolution by a “scholarly” organization on one side and only a perfunctory rebuttal on the other, the verdict is inevitable: The accusation sticks.
The Foreign Ministry would have done well to provide context: that less than a third of the members of this organization actually voted, and that the way the vote was conducted was problematic. Additionally, it would have been worth noting that one need not even have to be a “genocide scholar” to be a member of this association.
That failure highlights the larger problem: Israel too often contents itself with a flat denial, while its enemies wage an organized campaign to shape the narrative.
Hamas has always understood that this is a crucial part of the overall battlefield. That is why Abu Obeida, Hamas’s masked propaganda wizard who was killed by the IDF this week, built a 1,500-man propaganda and psychological warfare corps – a vast operation devoted to spin.
According to an Army Radio report, every Hamas brigade had a propaganda command center. Field videographers were deployed with fighters, streaming footage back to editors who cut and packaged clips, regardless of whether the cell survived. Every hostage video, every gruesome “release ceremony,” every staged certificate or gift bore Obeida’s personal touch.
For years, no Hamas operation – from the Gaza border marches to Guardian of the Walls to the October 7 massacre – was carried out without his approval of the propaganda plan. He personally coached hostages, decided what they would say, and used them as human shields around himself.
For Hamas, propaganda is not an afterthought; it is a doctrine and a weapon of war. It invested in narrative warfare as systematically as it invested in rockets.
Israel did not do the same. It has spokespeople but no organized “narrative corps.” It issues occasional rebuttals and sporadic statistics. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer will occasionally conduct English interviews with friendly media, and – like this week – academic studies rebutting accusations long after they have been made will be released.
Critics will dismiss Israeli reports as propaganda. But that is beside the point. The issue is not convincing the already hostile; it is ensuring that Hamas’s version of events is not the only one out there. If Israel is silent, the only figures in circulation are Hamas’s. If Israel delays, the accusation becomes an accepted fact.
What Israel needs is an institutional response that combats Hamas’s propaganda with facts in real time – immediately, not weeks or months later. That means providing regular reports on aid flows and casualties – weekly, transparent, and accessible. Why should the only casualty numbers available be coming from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry?
It means setting up a rapid-response team that counters Hamas’s lies, NGO accusations, and UN claims not in weeks but within hours. Why did it take an independent British journalist to debunk the photo of an emaciated Gaza child as proof of starvation? Why does Israel not have a response team on call to do that immediately?
And finally, it means providing visual tools – charts, infographics, and video explainers – that can travel as quickly and be as easily digestible as the accusations.
The BESA study shows how the accusations against Israel can be punctured. The lesson is that Israel cannot wait two years to do so. It must institutionalize the process and make it routine.
None of this requires Israel to claim perfection. Urban warfare produces tragedy; no army in history has avoided civilian casualties. The question is intent and proportion.
The study demonstrates that genocide – a deliberate campaign to eradicate a people – was not Israeli policy. On the contrary, Israel invested heavily in warnings, evacuation zones, and humanitarian corridors. Civilian-to-combatant ratios compare favorably with Western campaigns in Iraq or Afghanistan.
That context must be provided and repeated again and again. Without it, every battlefield scene will be cast by Israel’s enemies as a crime scene.
The BESA study is important not for the myths it debunks but for the lesson it delivers. Israel must make this type of work systematic, relentless, and immediate.
As former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s senior adviser and spokesperson Raanan Gissin once put it: “The Palestinians want the world to treat a war zone as a crime scene.”
Increasingly, that is exactly what is happening: Israel’s war of survival is recast as a crime, with the Jewish state treated as the criminal.•