Debunking Coleman Hughes' Genocide Denial Article.

Debunking The Free Press' Latest Genocide Denial Screed.

The Free Press has yet again published a vile screed denying the genocide in Gaza and lying to cover for Israel.

For context, the Free Press is a pro-Israeli genocide propaganda rag founded by Bari Weiss, a supposed “journalist” and daughter of the AIPAC lobbyist Lou Weiss, who has said that he only votes for president based on who is “good on the issue of Israel”.

Bari Weiss has previously bragged about entering journalism so she could connect “my Zionist activism to my journalism”.

Weiss has done that with the Free Press, publishing fake news screed after a fake news screed defending Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The latest screed was a podcast along with an article by the Free Press contributor Coleman Hughes titled, “The Simple Truth About the War in Gaza”.

The podcast, however, and the article that backs it up, shows that it is actually a simple repetition of Israel’s lies about Gaza.

Hughes argues in the article that Hamas is “running a highly effective campaign of information warfare” and then goes on to run a highly ineffective information warfare campaign for Israel.

Denying Well-Documented Starvation

In his first dishonest claim, he tries to say that the New York Times retracted an article about starvation in Gaza, claiming that a little boy named Mohammed photographed in the article, “wasn’t emaciated due to a lack of available food; he was born with cerebral palsy” and that “Six days after the article came out, the Times issued an editors’ note, stating that the boy was born with unrelated health issues that account for his skeletal appearance”.

This is just blatantly false. What the New York Times note actually says is “Mohammed, according to his doctor, had pre-existing health problems affecting his brain and his muscle development. But his health deteriorated rapidly in recent months as it became increasingly difficult to find food and medical care, and the medical clinic that treated him said he suffers from severe malnutrition.”

The note at the bottom of the article said, “This article has been updated to include information about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza suffering from severe malnutrition. After publication of the article, The Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems.”

This addition changes nothing about the article, given that starvation blockades tend to affect people with disabilities first. As writer Nathan J. Robinson noted, “This actually makes it even more grotesque. Of course, the first people to die have pre-existing health problems. Starvation is a eugenic policy which first kills off the weakest and sickest”.

Hughes then goes on to claim that Mohammed’s doctor apparently “withheld this crucial detail” even though the New York Times note clearly states that it was his doctor who told the paper about the child’s condition,(“Mohammed, according to his doctor, had pre-existing health problems” and “The Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems”).

Coleman Hughes writes this in an attempt to discredit his doctor, going on to say, “And since the entire article is based on the testimony of similarly placed doctors, you have to wonder: How many of the doctors in Gaza who talk to Western journalists are making similar omissions”.

This is bizarre because Mohammed’s doctor is not quoted at any point in the article as a source, so even if he was discredited (he isn’t) it would in no way discredit the doctors quoted in the piece.

The piece actually quoted:

Dr. Ahmed al-Farra: the lead pediatric surgeon at Nasser Hospital who said, “There is no one in Gaza now outside the scope of famine, not even myself. I am speaking to you as a health official, but I, too, am searching for flour to feed my family.” and said that “the number of children dying of malnutrition had risen sharply in recent days”.

Mohammad Saqr: the head of the nursing department at Nasser Medical Complex who said that “on Monday afternoon alone, the hospital received 25 women and 10 children requesting intravenous glucose solution,” saying that “Some arrive shivering from hunger” and that “the hospital’s limited supply of IV solution cannot meet the growing demand”.

Mohammad Abu Salmiya: the hospital director at Al-Shifa Hospital who said that he had “recorded three deaths from malnutrition in the previous 36 hours”.

This testimony has also been backed up by international doctors working in Gaza. Professor Nick Maynard, an Oxford-based gastrointestinal surgeon currently in Gaza said to the Telegraph newspaper, “‘unprecedented levels’ of severe malnutrition were directly contributing to preventable deaths among patients receiving surgery.”

He was quoted saying, “The malnutrition I’m seeing here is indescribably bad. It’s much, much worse now than a year ago”.

The paper also reported that he said “injured patients were dying because malnutrition was preventing them from healing properly” quoting him saying “the repairs that we carry out fall to pieces, patients get terrible infections, and they die. I have never had so many patients die because they can’t get enough food to recover”.

He also said, “I saw a seven-month-old who looked like a newborn. The expression ‘skin and bones’ doesn’t do it justice”.

Dr. Victoria Rose, another British Doctor working in Gaza, backed up this testimony, telling CBC News, “the population (of Gaza) are so malnourished, none of them have normal immune systems, so they are not able to fight infection, and on top of that, there are very few antibiotics left”.

Anthony Aguilar, who was in Gaza through UG solutions, the U.S. mercenary group hired to guard the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” death traps and blew the whistle also said to Democracy Now, “For anyone who says that there is no starvation or mass hunger, or that not only are we at the precipice, but we have stepped over the line of wide-scale famine, to anyone who says that that’s not happening, shame on you. Shame on you. It’s inhumane”.

Bluntly put, Palestinian doctors, International doctors, and whistleblowers have all testified to the man-made famine, and Colman Hugues’ pathetic attempt to discredit Palestinian doctors will not change that fact.

Smear Of The Gaza Health Ministry

Hugues goes on to say that “This isn’t the first time misinformation has spread in Western media”, going after the media for citing the Gaza Health Ministry, which he claims is “part of Hamas’s political infrastructure”, “fundamentally broken, biased, untrustworthy, and weaponized against Israel” and “disseminates misinformation without penalty”.

To back this up he cited a 2023 New York Times piece that cited the Gaza Health Ministry saying an Israeli rocket hit the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, which he claims was actually hit by “a misfired rocket launched from Gaza by Palestinian Islamic Jihad”.

In reality, the hospital was likely hit by an Israeli rocket- and not a Palestinian Islamic Jihad misfired rocket, like Israel claimed- as multiple open-source investigations found.

The video footage put out by Israel, claiming to prove that it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad misfired rocket, actually shows a rocket being intercepted by the Iron Dome before the Israeli bombing of the hospital. The footage actually shows that the rocket fired from Gaza was “completely destroyed and broke apart in the sky”.

The open source outlet Forensic Architecture found that “all seventeen visible rockets in the salvo the Israeli military claimed were responsible had finished burning their fuel mid-flight,” and the German open source researcher Michael Kobs found that “The picture of destruction (craters, fragmentation pattern, radius of destruction) at Al Ahli hospital does not match the picture at other Hamas rocket impact sites.”

In the podcast portion of the article, Coleman Hughes says that the Gaza Health Ministry’s “incentive is to exaggerate as much as they can get away with”.

This, like most of what Hughes says, is the exact opposite of the truth.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that “Israeli spokespersons, journalists and influencers reject with knee-jerk disgust the data of the Palestinian Health Ministry, claiming that it's inflated and exaggerated. But more and more international experts are stating that not only is this list, with all the horror it embodies, reliable – but that it may even be very conservative in relation to reality”.

The paper reported that in reality, “the combination of casualties from violence and those who died from diseases and hunger led to the death of 83,740 people prior to January” and that “since then, more than 10,000 people have been killed, and that doesn't include those in the category of excess mortality”.

The paper reported that the Gaza Health Ministry's numbers are actually a major undercount because, “The ministry's records are based primarily on bodies that have been brought to hospital morgues” but “thousands of people are still buried under the rubble of tens of thousands of buildings”, “some people were close to the epicenter of explosions and nothing remains of them” and “families who lost loved ones simply buried them without bringing the bodies to the hospitals and without reporting the deaths to the Health Ministry”.

Michael Spagat, the expert quoted in the article, said, “Some families just don't want to report or are unable to report, maybe the parents die, and the children, and an 8-year-old remains. How is the 8-year-old going to report this?”.

Vice News reported that “Israeli intelligence services have studied civilian casualty figures released by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza and concluded the figures were generally accurate, despite earlier public claims by U.S. and Israeli officials that the ministry’s statistics are manipulated”.

Comical Propaganda

Coleman Hughes transfers from parroting disturbing propaganda to outright comical propaganda, writing:

That’s the case with Israel. Israel’s goal is to live in peace with its neighbors. Throughout its 77-year history, it has agreed to half a dozen peace deals with the Palestinians. It voluntarily left Gaza in 2005. If it had any interest in wiping Gaza off the map, it could have done so any time in the last several decades.

Without trying to take up too much time debunking this joke, going through it claim by claim:

Israel’s goal is to live in peace with its neighbors: Israel helped push for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, took part in the dirty war in Syria, and, since starting a genocide in Gaza, has invaded Lebanon and bombed Yemen, Iran, and Syria while expanding West Bank settlements.

It has agreed to half a dozen peace deals with the Palestinians: In reality as the private intelligence contractor Stratfor noted, Israel “seeks to force the failure of these negotiations by making unrealistic demands and then blame that failure on the Palestinians' unwillingness to meet those demands” something Netanyahu is on tape bragging about doing with the 1999 Oslo Accords.

Israel voluntarily left Gaza in 2005: While technically true that Israel withdrew settlements from Gaza in 2005, the real purpose as then Israeli advisor Dov Weisglass admitted was that, “The disengagement (From Gaza) is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians” saying that leaving Gaza would “prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem”.

Israel also put a brutal blockade on Gaza after leaving, which Dov Weisglass said was designed to “put the Palestinians on a diet” and the former UK prime minister David Cameron said turned Gaza into “a prison camp” and “an open-air prison’.

Israel also routinely massacred Palestinians in Gaza since “leaving” using the “Dahiya Doctrine” which calls for "the use of massive, disproportionate force and the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure” including in 2018 when they opened fire at peaceful protestors against the Israeli blockade.

Israel has no intention to wipe Gaza off the map: Aside from the fact that Nissim Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and Member of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, openly called to “erase the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth” Israel has destroyed 70 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure literally wiping it off the map.

In the podcast section, Coleman Hughes says, “Hamas, on the other hand, does want to conquer Israel and wipe it off the map,” another blatant lie, given that Hamas’s charter says, “Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus”.

Coleman Hughes goes on to write another absurd paragraph, writing:

When an IDF soldier goes berserk, he is subject to criminal punishment. Hamas’s entire reason for being—its entire mission—is a war crime. Hamas fighters don’t wear uniforms. They have stolen enough aid from civilians to survive in their tunnels for a prolonged period of time. They are completely unaffected by the suffering of their own people.

In reality, IDF war crimes are not only not punished but encouraged.

For example, in Haaretz’s article on Israel’s aid massacres, an IDF soldier said, “When we asked why they opened fire, we were told it was an order from above and that the civilians had posed a threat to the troops. I can say with certainty that the people were not close to the forces and did not endanger them. It was pointless – they were just killed for nothing. This thing called killing innocent people – it's been normalized. We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza, and apparently that message sank in among the troops,” and another said, “My greatest fear is that the shooting and harm to civilians in Gaza aren't the result of operational necessity or poor judgment, but rather the product of an ideology held by field commanders, which they pass down to the troops as an operational plan.”

In the documentary, “Gaza: Doctors Under Attack,” an IDF soldier said, “one of the soldiers who had beaten a (Palestinian)detainee, he wouldn’t shut up about it, and I remember the commander being in on it and showing his respect for that”.

Another whistleblower said in the documentary, “You can do almost whatever you want when it comes to Gazans, honestly, I think that is how Israeli society has been dehumanizing Palestinians for years”.

A recent report from the conflict watchdog Action on Armed Violence found that “88% of Israeli Military Investigations Into Gaza War Crimes Stalled or Closed Without Findings”.

Furthermore, the claim that Hamas has “stolen enough aid from civilians to survive in their tunnels for a prolonged period of time” is an outright lie. Coleman Hughes repeated the lie that Hamas is “building up its forces using stolen aid” earlier in the article.

In fact, Hamas has never stolen aid, something even the United States and Israel have admitted to.

The New York Times reported that “the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations,” while Reuters reported that “An internal U.S. government analysis found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group Hamas of U.S.-funded humanitarian supplies”.

In reality, as investigations in the Financial Times and the Washington Post found, the aid looting was actually done by an ISIS-linked drug smuggling gang led by Yasser Abu Shabab, which is armed by Israel.

The Financial Times reported that “These gangsters act, humanitarian officials and Palestinian transporters allege, with the tacit permission of the Israeli military: what a UN memo seen by the Financial Times called ‘the passive, if not active benevolence’ of the Israel Defense Forces.”

One UN official told the paper, “These guys are probably the only people in Gaza who can get 100 yards from an Israeli tank or Israeli soldiers without being shot”.

Justifying Child Murder.

The darkest and most disturbing part of Coleman Hughes’ article is when he attempts to justify Israel murdering children, writing, “Hamas uses children as lookouts, thereby turning them into combatants under the international laws of war”.

To back up this clearly fabricated Israeli claim, he linked to a New York Times article where the only proof for this absurd claim is IDF soldiers. In one passage, the article writes, “Five Israeli soldiers said those lookouts include children, who stand on roofs and relay information to commanders below,” but offers no proof other than that genocidal IDF soldiers who routinely shoot children in the head said so.

The two top authors of the New York Times article, Patrick Kingsley and Natan Odenheimer, were recently listed in a dossier from “writers against the war on Gaza” as two of the New York Times’ most Israel-connected reporters.

The dossier noted that Kingsley “regularly contributes reporting to the Times drawn from journalist embeds within the Israeli military in Gaza, a practice widely denounced for producing biased, inflammatory, and false reporting” and that Odenheimer, “was born and raised in occupied Jerusalem.” and “served in the IOF as a member of the ‘Maglan’ special forces commando unit for almost four years”.

Covering Up For Israel’s Genocidal Society.

In another part of the article, Coleman Hughes writes, “Yes, some far-right Israeli politicians have pledged to destroy Gaza. But they no more represent the will of most Israelis than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Marjorie Taylor Greene represent the most Americans.”

In fact, polls show that “far-right Israeli politicians” do indeed represent the views of most Jewish Israelis.

One poll from Penn State University found that 82 percent of Jewish Israelis “supported the forced expulsion of Gaza’s population to other countries”, 56 percent supported “the expulsion of Israel’s Arab citizens”, and 47 percent supported Israel “killing all of its inhabitants” when conquering a city.

Another poll reported on in Haaretz showed that 64 percent of Israelis believed that “there are no innocent people” in Gaza. As Mondoweiss noted, the poll included Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, a demographic breakdown shows that 75 percent of Jewish Israelis agree with the genocidal statement “there are no innocent people in Gaza”.

Coleman Hughes’s string of genocide denial lies is just one example of the type of Zionist propaganda put out by the so-called “free press” daily.

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