Key Takeaways:
- The claim that Israel is removing Gaza rubble to hide ‘war crimes’ traces back to an August 2026 Euro-Med Human Rights Organization report offering no concrete evidence, only speculation.
- Once UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese echoed Euro-Med’s absurd claim, media, including Reuters, France24, and Al Jazeera, reported it as a legitimate story.
- By submitting to Albanese’s authority and blindly regurgitating her claims, these outlets failed in their journalistic due diligence and effectively became anti-Israel propaganda organs.
Is Israel carting away tons of rubble from Gaza to hide its “war crimes”?
That’s the claim now appearing in several reputable news outlets.
The problem? They have no evidence. Instead, their reports rely on an unsubstantiated allegation from a Hamas-affiliated organization, later sanitized for mainstream consumption by an official with a long history of anti-Israel bias and flirtations with antisemitism.
It’s a classic example of the anti-Israel propaganda pipeline: a dubious claim begins with a disreputable source, gains legitimacy through a supposedly authoritative intermediary and ends up in mainstream news coverage.
Euro-Med Human Rights Organization: A Non-Credible Source
This latest anti-Israel narrative began in early August 2026, when the Euro-Med Human Rights Organization published a report claiming that Israel was removing millions of tons of rubble from Gaza to conceal evidence of alleged “war crimes” before international investigators could collect it.
Euro-Med offered no concrete evidence for this serious accusation, only speculation presented as fact.
That should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the organization.
Despite its neutral-sounding name, Euro-Med is no impartial human rights watchdog. It is a Hamas affiliate with a long history of producing anti-Israel propaganda.
Ramy Abdu, Euro-Med’s current chairman, as well as the organization’s former chair, have both been named by Israel as top Hamas assets in Europe since 2013. Abdu is also suspected of helping his brother funnel funds from Italy to Hamas.
Throughout the war between Israel and Hamas, Euro-Med has been at the forefront of spreading anti-Israel libels. These include claims that Israel harvests organs from Palestinian prisoners, that mass graves in Gaza contain children whose hands were bound before they were killed, and that Israel is committing “scholasticide.”
Remember the far-fetched claim that Israel was training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, which later found its way into a Nicholas Kristof article in The New York Times? That came from Euro-Med too.
Given that record, Euro-Med’s latest accusation should have been treated with extreme skepticism. Instead, it moved to the next stage of the propaganda pipeline, where a more “reputable” source gave it a veneer of legitimacy.
Enter Francesca Albanese.
Francesca Albanese: The Media’s “Reputable” Source
One would be forgiven for laughing at the idea that Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, qualifies as a “reputable” source.
After all, Albanese has justified the October 7 massacre as a response to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, downplayed the rapes of Israelis during the attack, accused the “Jewish lobby” of controlling the United States, and claimed that Europe is becoming more authoritarian through a process of “Israelization.”
She has also presented herself as a lawyer despite never having taken the bar exam.
Yet Albanese’s UN title allows her to present inflammatory claims as the findings of an international “expert.” The allegation that Israel is removing rubble from Gaza to conceal evidence is only the latest example.
When Euro-Med made the claim, it largely remained confined to the organization’s own press release and some of the more extreme accounts on social media.
But once Albanese echoed it, suddenly it became a legitimate news story for the likes of Reuters, France24, and Al Jazeera.
And just like that, a baseless allegation from a disreputable source had traveled through the anti-Israel propaganda pipeline and emerged as mainstream news.
The Story’s Underlying Contradictions
Even setting aside the dubious pipeline that delivered this story to the media, the allegation itself begins to fall apart under scrutiny.
Months ago, Al Jazeera was claiming that thousands of Palestinians had been vaporized by Israel. Now it is reporting claims that Israel is removing thousands of bodies hidden in rubble to cover up its “crimes.”
Which is it? Were Palestinians vaporized, or are their bodies supposedly being hidden by removing the rubble?
More fundamentally, Gaza has suffered enormous destruction, in no small part because Hamas entrenched itself throughout the civilian environment.
The enclave needs to be rebuilt. Roads need to be cleared. According to the United Nations, Gaza contains some 61 million tons of debris that will have to be removed before reconstruction can properly begin.
So what makes more sense? That Israel is removing rubble to hide its “crimes,” or that rubble is being cleared because Gaza cannot be rebuilt while buried beneath tens of millions of tons of debris?
Media organizations should not ignore allegations against Israel. They should investigate them.
But investigation means scrutinizing the evidence, the source and the credibility of those making the accusation. It does not mean blindly repeating an absurd allegation simply because the person amplifying it has the words “United Nations” in her title.
When news organizations abandon that basic due diligence, they stop informing their audiences and start serving as propaganda organs for anti-Israel libels.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
