The war Hamas started in Gaza is providing an oversized canvas for a growing number of institutions eager to paint Israel in the darkest colors. Today’s specimen is an Israel Defense Force operation in northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital. Viral video footage of persons evacuated from there is horrifying souls across the world: How cruel can one be to drag patients out of their sickbeds and force them to leave a medical facility alongside their care-takers? 

With a closer look, though, one can see that the “victims” are all able men of fighting age. As an IDF statement makes clear, the intelligence-based operation is designed to clear “terrorist infrastructure and operatives” out of the hospital compound. Patients and doctors were evacuated, some in ambulances, to other Gaza hospitals. Yes, Kamal Adwan, including its administrator, Colonel Hussam Abu Safiya of Hamas, is a terrorist base. 

Feigned shock over Israel’s Gaza war is spread wider than social media. The UN provides a daily dose of Gaza horrors. The Strip is somehow always on the “verge” of famine, but never gets there. As our Novi Zhukovsky reports, the U.S. Agency for International Development, a UN Trojan horse inside the Biden administration, just withdrew a report blaming Israel for blocking food to Gaza, but only after America’s envoy to Israel, Jack Lew, refuted the claims.

Much of the global outrage is stoked by press reports that at best present the war as a “he says she says,” contrasting Hamas propaganda with Israel’s fact-based statements. A December 26 multi-byline New York Times piece contends that “many more” were killed in Gaza once Israel “loosened its rules” of protecting civilians. That coincided with the declaration by Israel of a state of war between it and Hamas.    

The Times’s account like an amicus brief for Hague courts accusing Israel of war crimes and genocide. It contends that Israel’s reaction to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust led to “one of the deadliest bombardments of the 21st century.” Since 2000, Russia has flattened eastern Ukraine, Sudan became a killing field, and President Assad gassed Syrians. Unlike America-led alliances and Israel, these war criminals have no rule books to loosen. 

It’s hard to credit the Times’s suggestion Israel violates rules designed to protect civilians in war, and that it’s alone in doing so. The Times portrays a country attacked by genocidal forces on several fronts as the bad guy. In reality, the piece proved that “Israel follows a targeting process that focuses on combatants,” which is “entirely in line with the Law on Armed Conflict,” a British combat veteran, Andrew Fox, writes on X.   

Most allegations against the IDF are derived from Hamas-provided data. An Israeli columnist, Ben-Dror Yemini, dives deep: The Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry’s casualty lists contain 34,346 named deaths and 10,000 missing persons. Among those of  combat-age, 20 to 39, he notes, the number of listed dead women is 3,989, while 9,260 are men. A similar gender disparity exists in named casualties aged 15 to 19, which Hamas considers draft-ready. 

These data show that rather than an indiscriminate, genocidal orgy of cruelty, the IDF mostly targets Hamas terrorists, rather than “women and children,” as the terror group contends. The global goal of Hamas is to maximize civilian deaths in Gaza to inflame anti-Israel outrage. Guess what, it’s working: The press, government officials, street protesters, aid agencies, and the weakest link — the UN — eat it up and amplify the significance of alleged Israeli war horrors.  

“If reports about 3 babies freezing to death in Gaza don’t move us then we don’t understand the birth in a manger in Bethlehem or the light of Hanukkah,” the German ambassador to Israel, Steffen Siebert, writes on X today. After the Israeli foreign ministry noted that the ambassador merely quoted Hamas propaganda, he acknowledged that his source was “Gaza doctors.” They claimed the babies died of hypothermia — even though Gaza’s coldest nights are 50 degrees. 

Minimizing civilian casualties in war is a necessity for countries claiming the moral high ground — and for anyone who has a heart. Israel’s enemies, like Hamas, aim to maximize civilian casualties, be they Israelis or their own people. Even under those circumstances the IDF is doing more than most armies to spare the innocents. The canard that it tries to starve Gazans or indiscriminately kill them is counterfactual. A German agitator coined a word for it.