Key Takeaways:
- Hamas’s winter claims reached global audiences through media outlets and charities, often without the source of information being identified.
- Public figures amplified the claims, escalating accusations into allegations of deliberate Israeli harm.
- Coverage largely omitted Hamas’s responsibility and Israel’s published updates on winter aid.
On November 1, five days before the first winter storm had even reached Gaza, a Hamas-government body had already set out how that storm would be reported.
The Gaza Winter Emergency Committee is made up of Hamas-government ministries, the Civil Defense and the Hamas-run Government Media Office. In a statement posted to the Media Office’s Telegram channel, it launched a national campaign, “Together Towards a Safe Winter,” predicting a harsh and early winter and holding Israel responsible in advance. The statement included a set of figures: 200,000 tents needed, a million tarps, 7,800 tents in dangerous locations, 2,000 cracked buildings at risk of collapse, and a $37 million emergency budget. These figures were later repeated by human rights organizations, charities and news agencies. In most cases, Hamas was not mentioned at all.
A new HonestReporting research report tracks how this happened, following the story post by post from November 1 to 10. Its central finding is that the problem lies less in any one false claim than in a sequence of steps, each of which moved Hamas material further from its source and closer to accepted fact.
From Hamas to Human Rights
On November 5, before any rain had fallen, Euro-Med Monitor published a press release headlined “Israel weaponizes cold weather against Palestinians in Gaza for fourth year.” Its figures closely matched the committee’s, and it described the lack of shelter as part of “the ongoing genocide.”
By repeating the claim without identifying its source was actually a branch of a terrorist administration, Euro-Med laundered information from a Hamas government body. The release itself reached relatively few people. Euro-Med’s posts of it on X drew around a hundred views. Its framing, however, spread widely.
The rain came on November 6, and within hours, Roya News, Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera Arabic were posting edited videos with captions and voiceovers. On the morning of November 7, about twelve hours after the storm began, the Government Media Office issued a statement saying that 70,000 tents had been flooded and that losses stood at $3 million. It held Israel “fully responsible”.
Within hours, Reuters, the BBC and NBC News had all reported the figure. Of the three, only Reuters described the office as Hamas-run. Al Jazeera also carried it, describing the conflict in its own words as “Israel’s genocidal war.”
None of these outlets appears to have asked how 70,000 tents could be counted within twelve hours, during a storm, by a government that had said six days earlier that 90% of its Civil Defense equipment was destroyed.
From Blockade to Intent
Over the following two days, the figure was picked up by high-profile accounts with very large followings. As it spread, the accusation changed. The claim was no longer only that Israel was restricting supplies, but that Israel was causing the suffering deliberately.
Greta Thunberg posted the 70,000 figure alongside the words “ISRAEL IS FULLY RESPONSIBLE. END THE GENOCIDE.” The post was shared more than four thousand times.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur, wrote that the images of children in floodwater made her “SICK” and attached a screenshot from Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, his account of Auschwitz. Using the Holocaust to describe Israeli conduct is Holocaust inversion, and it is something Albanese has done before.
Ms. Rachel, whose audience is largely parents of young children, posted a flood reel that passed half a million likes in around fifteen hours. In it, she said: “There’s a government, the Israeli government, that won’t let the warm supplies through, so more kids are gonna die.”
Several of the headlines shown on screen were from previous winters. Her central claim is also contradicted by the public record. COGAT, the Israeli body that coordinates aid into Gaza, had been posting updates on its winter aid work for weeks, both before the storm and during it. None of the accounts above referred to this.
Other posts went further. A Palestinian Youth Movement reel described the flood as “not a natural disaster.” Drop Site News called it “deliberate and systematic cruelty” intended to drive Palestinians out of Gaza. The academic Nicola Perugini wrote of a “plan to expel” the Palestinian population.
One account belonging to Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan, blamed “the Jewish occupation,” shifting the accusation from Israel to Jews as a group. This follows a familiar pattern, in which Jew-hatred adopts the moral language a society values most, today the language of human rights and genocide, and uses it against Jews.
The Yellow Line
A smaller group of accounts went further still. One widely shared post overlaid the ceasefire’s Yellow Line on a topographic map of Gaza and claimed that Israel was deliberately pushing Palestinians into low-lying areas so that they would be flooded. It said the policy was “intended to kill.”
There is no basis for this. The Yellow Line is a military ceasefire boundary that reflects the course of the war, not a plan to flood civilians.
The idea was nonetheless taken up officially. When a sand embankment collapsed onto tents in Deir al-Balah on November 8, the Gaza Ministry of Social Development reported five deaths and described the collapse as a “direct result” of Israel moving the Yellow Line. Al Jazeera English reported the deaths, and by November 10 so had the Washington Post on X.
The report also looks at claims of deaths from cold. The first report of a child dying from cold came from a single Telegram channel, and no medical source has independently confirmed it. Within hours, posts on X claimed five children had died, and another said UNICEF had announced twenty deaths. The primary source confirming either figure is unclear.
Institutions and governments
On November 8, Save the Children issued a release headlined “Israel’s restrictions leave over half a million children without safe shelter.” It used the 70,000 tents figure without giving a source. Its regional director described the situation as “heartbreaking and foreseeable, not just bad weather.”
Governments and religious bodies followed. Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, condemned Israel’s “illegal acts.” The Arab Parliament issued an appeal, as did Al-Azhar, a leading institution of Sunni Islam. Many of the most widely shared posts described conditions as freezing. Ms. Rachel spoke of babies freezing in tents, and Albanese of children in “freezing floodwater.”
According to the report, temperatures in Gaza during the storm were between 17 and 20°C. That is cold and wet for the region, but it is not freezing. As the genuine footage from November 6 to 8 dropped out of people’s feeds, it was increasingly replaced by AI-generated flood scenes and footage from previous winters, some of it shared by prominent figures including Jeremy Corbyn. At this stage, the coverage included material that was demonstrably false. By November 9, The Independent had published the 70,000 figure without attributing it to Hamas.
What as Left out
The report’s most important finding concerns what was missing from the coverage. Hamas’s role as the government of Gaza was largely absent. A government demanding 200,000 tents was not asked about the tents it already had, or how its ministries planned to use the emergency budget it was requesting.
The war was also largely absent. The amplifiers did not mention that Hamas began it on October 7, 2023, or that its refusal to end the war affects conditions on the ground. COGAT’s public updates on winter aid were not mentioned, and nor were supplies donated by the UAE and other states. The mainstream coverage the report examined did not quote any Israeli official or COGAT spokesperson.
Euro-Med’s own posts illustrate the gap. On November 6, a day after saying Israel continued “to ban shelter supplies,” it posted that “Allowing some tents into #Gaza does not absolve Israel of responsibility.” In other words, tents were indeed entering.
It is hard to imagine a newsroom printing a damage figure from the press office of any other armed group, during a war it was fighting, without identifying the source, or reporting a story about one side of a conflict without asking the other side for comment.
A small number of people offered a fuller picture. Ihab Hassan wrote that Israel was blocking caravans, but also that “Hamas blames everyone but itself.” His post drew 234 views, compared with more than fifteen thousand likes for Greta Thunberg’s. Loay Alshareef and Ahmed AlKhatib also addressed both the suffering in Gaza and Hamas’s responsibility, with far smaller audiences than the accounts above.
The report shows how a set of claims issued by Hamas before the storm reached mainstream outlets, charities, and governments within ten days, and how, at each stage, information about the source and the wider context was lost.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
