The Facts vs. Hamas’ Lies | Citizen Sleuth Exposes the Truth
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And Hamas definitely reverse engineered the laws of war and said, OK, let's look at let's look at what Geneva says and let's force Israel to have to figure out a way to hit us in Gaza because we use civilian shields everywhere. Hello and welcome to State of a Nation. I'm Elon Levy.

Did you know that while the UN and NGOs were accusing Israel of restricting aid into Gaza, even trying to deliberately starve the population, twice as much food was entering the Gaza Strip compared with before the war?

twice as much food. It's crazy. I didn't know it. But that's what you find when you go and actually look at the figures. Figures the journalists aren't looking at. Figures that the NGOs aren't looking at. Figures that citizen sleuths dedicated to exposing the truth are looking at.

My guest today on the podcast is Salo Eisenberg. He is a member of the Board of Honest Reporting and the author of two books, Hate Mail, Antisemitism on Picture Postcards, and Postcards from the Holy Land, A Pictorial History of the Ottoman Era.

His Twitter feed has been an indispensable resource for me in the course of the war, doing the hard work that journalists should be doing, crunching the numbers, exposing the myths that Hamas is pumping out that are becoming common knowledge as part of the PSYOPs campaign, the war of disinformation that is being fought against Israel.

For me, both as a government spokesman and thereafter, his work was invaluable. And I want to bring it to you now to help you understand the myth factory in the Gaza Strip, the lies that Hamas has been pumping out and why they seem to stick so successfully. It reaches some disturbing conclusions in this episode, and I hope you enjoy it. Please join us, me and Salo Eisenberg, between the lines and beyond the headlines.

Breaking news out of Israel this morning. Shocking hostages. Hundreds of Israelis are dead. I want to bring in Israeli government spokesman Elon. What happened with the four-day court? Have you resolved this? Where does this go now? I think that's a big deal. Salah Weisenberg, welcome to State of a Nation. Thank you so much, Elon. I understand this is a world exclusive. You've never done an on-camera interview before. I've never done anything on camera. I've always been a writer, doing things behind the scenes, writing.

never on camera. So thank you so much for having me. And you've had such a great guest list on your show. And I'm thrilled to be included in that. A great guest list. And so many of them have learned what they know because of you. You say you focus mainly behind the scenes. That explains how I first came across your name only a year ago. It was in, I'm looking through my messages now. It was in March, 2024. Right. And I'm writing in the

WhatsApp group we have in the Prime Minister's office coordinating interviews. I send a tweet of yours and I ask, anyone know who runs this account? Right. Because your Twitter is Eisenberg55. Right. There's no first name. And I see that in the first months of the war, you are tweeting...

very high quality analysis busting through Hamas's myths going through the numbers and I want to know you know is this Samalona writing out of his basement or is this a serious guy you tweeted a headline from the New York Times famine is imminent for northern Gaza experts say this was March 2024

And you began a thread saying starvation and famine in Gaza is a lie. UN NGO even admitted it yesterday. After months of claiming Israel is starving Gaza on purpose and months of calling famine imminent, it is now only supposedly happening end of May and July. Here is the Gaza starvation lie exposed. Salah Weisenberg, who are you? And how did you come to be tweeting the information that was guiding the prime minister's office comms to help us explain why we were not in fact war criminals? Right.

So I call myself an independent scholar. I don't have any formal credentials or a degree or anything like this. But I've been following the conflict closely since I was a teenager in the 1980s, obsessively reading and studying and reading hundreds of books online.

and following every article and joining groups that are debunking. I'm on the board of Honest Reporting right now. I've written articles in some journals, Fathom Journal, Talbot Magazine. I've written a couple of books on anti-Semitism and the history of Ottoman Palestine.

Something of an autodidact who taught himself. Yeah, something like that. Wrote some two long-form reports for NGO Monitor, debunking the Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch so-called apartheid reports, these long-form reports. So as I said, kind of behind the scenes, scholarly writing, long-form. I'm not an influencer. I'm not on Instagram, etc.

But that's sort of how I came about it. And, you know, I found ex-Twitter to be a really great medium. Amazingly, I write an article in a journal and maybe a few thousand people read it. I wrote a thread in December 2023, debugging the Hamas numbers. I think one of the first ones kind of saying, wait a second, this just doesn't make any sense. And it got six million views. And that's really...

a little bit how I built the Twitter following and continue to do it from there. So it's been a good medium to get the word out. It's an extraordinary medium. I mean, as Elon Musk says, you are the media now. This is a platform that gives ordinary individuals the ability to reach

extraordinary influence. You say not an influencer in the classic sense, but definitely having an influence. Right, correct. And really to be doing the work that the media should be doing, to be breaking down through the Hamas propaganda, through the claims that are being made by international institutions and NGOs, not taking them for gospel. But actually, you know, I heard once the best definition of journalism is if

You know, one side says it's raining and the other side says it's not raining. You don't say one side says it's raining, the other says it isn't. You stick your head out the window and you check what's happening. Yeah, I mean, the media has been negligent beyond belief, right? I mean, we just saw what the BBC did with having children of Hamas ministers not disclosing that in their documentary. Which is extraordinary because...

You know, we've been saying for months since the beginning of the war, Hamas is an authoritarian regime. It tightly controls all the information coming out of the Gaza Strip. No images, no materials come out that this regime doesn't want to come out. And the journalists who are operating there are either Hamas journalists, Hamas content creators, or they're cowed or intimidated by Hamas because they can't speak freely. And if you speak out against Hamas, then you get brutally oppressed and executed.

And so everything coming out of the Gaza Strip has been tightly controlled by the Hamas regime for the cameras, media at the same time saying journalists aren't allowed in Gaza, but at the same time saying that the Palestinian journalists in Gaza are independent and free and credible. And of course, it's impossible to square that circle. But what I found especially useful about your Twitter feed and the threads that you have written debunking the lies is that, to me, it seems at least,

Hamas, UNRWA, the NGOs supporting them, have been running an extremely sophisticated media campaign that has produced an Orwellian reality. It's been able to convince people that Israel is deliberately starving the people of Gaza even as far more food enters the Gaza Strip than before the war. Claiming that Israel is committing genocide or targeting civilians even as Israel uses weapons

greater efforts and more precision than any military in the history of urban warfare in an incredibly complicated, fiendishly difficult battlefield. It is as if we are living in an Orwellian reality where the word of a terrorist organization is taken as gospel. Anything that Hamas says, the presumption is to believe it. Anything that Israel says, the presumption is to disbelieve it. And I'm wondering when October 7th happens and you start busting through the myths,

How soon does it become clear to you that what we're experiencing now, perhaps the long game, is this major psyops campaign that is being waged by Hamas and its supporters to construct a reality that is divorced from what is actually happening on the ground?

I'm Imogen Folks, the host of Inside Geneva, a podcast where we tackle the big questions facing our planet. Can UN investigations bring more criminals to justice? Does the world need a pandemic treaty? What about climate change or refugees? Should we ban autonomous weapons? Some call them killer robots.

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I mean, what happened with the media after 10/7 is no different than what happened in the prior Gaza wars, 2021. It's exactly the same thing, the same narrative. Everyone who has been following it knew the same thing was going to happen. There was just a small window of sympathy for Israel right after 10/7.

Which was not universal, right? The governments of Qatar and South Africa condemning Israel while the death squads are still rampaging. But let's just say the European and American media, even the ones that are generally not sympathetic...

But it didn't take long, and I kind of view the Al-Ali so-called hospital explosion that ended up being a PIJ rocket that fell, that they said killed 471 people, but ended up maybe being 10 or 20. Okay, let's take a step back. Yeah.

What was the Al-Akhir Hospital incident? Where did this meet you? At what point did you understand that something extremely fishy was happening? And this would, in fact, set the tone for what's going to happen for the rest of the war. I mean, I think it was October 18th and there was a headline that the hospital was bombed, 500 people dead. The New York Times and all the other media sources immediately pumped out this story. Hospital bombed, 500 Palestinians killed.

And then very quickly, it started to come out and I give some credit to the spokespeople on IDF that kind of quickly came out, no, that wasn't us.

And the headlines started to change. 500 allegedly, maybe, I don't remember exactly the details, but it ended up being, wait a second, no, it was an internal rocket from PIJ that fell on this parking lot. It didn't even destroy the hospital. And then there were images of the hospital being fully standing. No, the hospital wasn't bombed. And wait, it's a small little crater in the parking lot. And wait a second, intelligence says maybe 10 or 20 people. Their psyops campaign was so effective.

That when I went on TV the following day explaining that it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that had misfired, shot from inside or next to a cemetery, by the way, I was still under the mistaken impression that the hospital had been flattened.

Well, you believe the major media, but... Fool me once. Right. And I think that was, in a sense, that was a turning point, because the media and the world narrative that really wants to place Israel as the villain and the Palestinians as the victim, that's the narrative that has to be adhered to, was looking for an opportunity to shift what happened on 10-7, where Israel was the victim.

And that was sort of the turning point where, wait a second, now they bombed the hospital. They're back to being the evil. Israel is the villain. And we can now – the Palestinians are now the victim. And we can shift the entire narrative of this war back to our comfort zone. Hang on. This is very disturbing what you're saying. And I do want to unpack with you in this episode. We'll look at a few examples of Hamas myths. And I want to understand –

how they end up becoming common knowledge or accepted around the world. But you say here something very disturbing, which is that the media wants to revert to a narrative in which Israel is the villain, the Palestinians are the victims,

10-7 almost disrupted this cosmic order because suddenly the Israelis were the victims. And you frame the Al-Ahli hospital incident as if now the media had an opportunity to set things straight. So why do you think there is this desire to see Israel as the aggressor, the Palestinians, or the victim in a way that they leapt at this opportunity because it

what they wanted to believe. That's a big statement. Right, I mean, it's a bit of a deeper question, and I would point people to, you know, Marty Friedman. That's why we're on a podcast. We have a chance to have a long-form discussion. Correct. I mean, Marty Friedman wrote what I consider a seminal article in 2014 talking about exactly this. It really is a classic. It's a classic piece, how, you know, we can go back to the history of anti-Semitism, a malicious obsession with Jews in the world media, you know,

all kinds of narratives from... It's deeper. Why Israel and Jews... It was an extraordinary essay. It was in Tablet Magazine, An Insider's Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth by Matty Freeman, and we'll put this in the podcast notes as well for people who want to delve deeper. So everyone should read that article, and I think that still instructs the narrative and how this conflict is being covered.

where Israel is sort of the oppressor, the evil, the powerful, the Palestinians are the weaker, this morality play that the media likes, a lot of people like, ignorant people will kind of gravitate to this powerful, weak, oppressor, oppressed mentality.

And it kind of maybe goes back to a thousand years of anti-Semitism. Do you want to go there? Do we want to go there? I mean, it's there. I mean, we know it's there. We know that there is a thousand year history of anti-Semitism. And while not everyone is an anti-Semite thinking it, it sort of permeates our societies more so in Europe than in the United States, in my opinion. But that sort of informs some of the media narrative.

Do you think that Hamas's disinformation campaign in this war has been successful? Or rather, let me take a step back. What do you think Hamas is trying to achieve with its comms operation? Because I get asked this question so often. Why is Hamas's comms so good and Israel's comms are so bad? So what...

What do you think Hamas has been trying to do in the way that it deliberately rigged the battlefield with those 350 miles of tunnels underneath civilian areas, the tunnel openings inside hospitals, the rockets underneath children's beds? Gaza seemed, I use the word rigged because there's like word play with the theater world, right? Rigged, stage managed to produce a spectacle for the cameras that would exist.

generate international sympathy and force Israel to back off. How do you think on before October 7th, Hamas had set the stage, so to speak, for a battle for global consciousness? I mean, I think there are two parts to your question or what you talked about. So there is Hamas PR psyops that good.

And is Israel's that bad? I think the answer is that Hamas is it's not that good. I think we give it too much credit sometimes that there are these brilliant, you know, PR masters and know how to manipulate everything and that Israel's so terrible and can't do anything.

I think the media landscape is rigged against Israel and it's rigged for Hamas. So it's kind of like a UN resolution against Israel. It's an automatic win at the General Assembly against Israel. So for Hamas, it's an automatic win for them. They don't have to really do anything.

they can do what they did to the, to the Beboss children and the media downplays it. They can have satanic displays on the hostage releases and the media downplays it. They don't have to do anything. They can put GoPro cameras of what they did on 10 seven and the media downplays it. So they can do the worst things ever and,

and the media covers for them. So they have an automatic win. And I think on the opposite, Israeli PR and spokespeople are sometimes vilified for not doing a great job. They can do more. Why aren't they doing this? And I don't want to say they can't do a lot better.

But sometimes it's rigged against. The battlefield is rigged on the media landscape as well. And now we can talk about the physical battlefield in Gaza. But I don't really give Hamas that much credit for their PR. It's terrible. What they did with the hostage releases, that's not good PR. That's just the world trying to cover for them.

I think it makes them look terrible. And frankly, I don't think it's helped them. The needle has maybe moved a little bit where people are, huh, maybe they are really that evil.

So I don't think that was a good job, what they did with... I don't think it helped them. No, not... I mean, the dead baby parades and the hostage parades are horrific. I get asked by Israelis, doesn't the reality speak for itself? And I say, no, you really need to help people connect the dots and put those images out there because otherwise they won't see them. And perhaps Hamas does not have the most sophisticated media campaign and it helps that...

you know, what do Hamas and Al Jazeera have in common? They're both cuttery assets, okay, and often working hand in glove. And probably the BBC too. But let's, before we look at why Hamas is, if it doesn't have a sophisticated media campaign, why its lies end up sticking, help me explain how Hamas prepared, booby-trapped, rigged the Gaza Strip on the eve of October 7th

to wage this war for global public opinion. That this is really, and we discussed this on the podcast in a different episode with Saul Sadko, who's another one of these people who's managed to build big Twitter followings by digging into this stuff online, that the long game is this psyops campaign in which they are using the war in Gaza to try to poison global public opinion against Israel. Right.

So I'm actually working on a report, I think I mentioned to you, with Andrew Fox and the Henry Jackson Society on the Hamas human shield strategy. So we've kind of broken down the human shield strategy to 10 components. And Hamas definitely reverse engineered the laws of war and said, OK, let's look at what Geneva says and let's force Israel to have to

figure out a way to hit us in Gaza because we use civilian shields everywhere. So... Hang on. Reverse engineer the laws of war. That's an interesting phrase. Let's linger on that a second. I want to understand what you mean. Right. So it'll say in Geneva that, you know, you can't use hospitals. It'll say that hospitals can't be used. They're sacred. So they use hospitals. That's at the simplest levels. Let's force...

Israel to attack us in hospitals. Israel often gets accused of violating the rules of war. Correct. It's fighting in a context in which the enemy systematically violates the laws of war in order to place Israel in an impossible position. Right. If you are hiding in a tunnel underneath a house, then Hamas leaves Israel with three options. Either you bomb it and people get killed, which is terrible.

or you let Hamas off the hook, in which case they gain immunity because they violated the rules of law, or you ask people to evacuate for their own safety and get accused of forcible displacement. And then it gives Israel no options. And one of the lines I kept using over and over again is you don't get immunity just by hiding in the basement of a hospital. But it's even worse than that. It's that bystanders,

By violating international law, they secure for themselves a military advantage because they know that they're not going to be condemned for violating international law. There's going to be a demand that they get off the hook, right? Right.

There are many examples. So, for example, it clearly says that combatants must dress in combatant clothing and uniforms. They do for dead baby parades, not when they're actually fighting. So they don't. And they know that it forces Israel to look at every person as a possible combatant, but they don't know. They're civilians. So, of course, they're going to be civilians that are killed by accident.

So that's reverse engineering. Okay, what does Geneva say? You got to wear uniforms. We're not going to wear uniforms. And the reason Geneva says that is because they know that if you don't wear a uniform, you're putting civilians at risk. Using hospitals. It very clearly says don't use hospitals. Okay, we're going to use hospitals.

They hide weapons in apartment buildings. They pre-position them. That says Geneva don't use civilian locations for weapons. So systematically reverse engineering and enforcing Israel to say, OK, either the terrorists get permanent immunity...

And that's kind of effectively what happened in the prior wars. Israel said, "Okay, we have to stop. We can't go that far." In the 2021 war, going back to 2009 in Gaza, Israel eventually stopped because the collateral damage was just too high. And they got permanent immunity and they were able— Hamas was able to build 17 years of this battlefield because they were granted permanent immunity. But after 10/7, the equation changed.

And I think even one of the Hamas leaders said yesterday, and some people contradicted him, that if they would have known how bad things would have been in Gaza, they might not have done 10-7. Not because it was wrong. This was Moussa Abu Mazouk, the head of Hamas. I mean, Hamas's foreign minister, basically. And he didn't say it was a bad idea because killing, raping, and kidnapping is a bad idea. It's because of what? Of course not. The consequence. Waging a war was a bad idea because they're losing it.

So Hamas's strategy is Hamas's media strategy is not particularly sophisticated. It's based on massively violating, systematically violating the laws of war in a way that leaves Israel with no good options. But what is particularly evil here is

It's not that a barbaric jihadi death cult is systematically violating the rules of war. The reason Hamas' strategy works is because it has an entire chorus and network of NGOs and international institutions that are willing to give it the win instead of holding it to account. Correct.

A whole network of institutions that launder information for it, like UNRWA. I remember watching the preliminary ruling of the ICJ in the outrageous Orwellian genocide case, holding my head in my hands, not believing that the president of the ICJ is quoting UNRWA, a Hamas front, and giving it evidentiary basis in the rulings. But it's not just UNRWA. It's a whole network of NGOs. So tell me, why does Hamas think that this strategy of

systematically weaponizing international law will be successful. Who are the actors who are then laundering that for global public consumption? I mean, there is a whole NGO industrial complex, let's call it, um, that, uh,

you know, most prominently includes Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and then groups like Oxfam. And then, you know, some of the Israeli groups are problematic as well, like B'Tselem, Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence, which

form some of these ideas. So the whole apartheid canard that came out a few years ago in 2021 that I wrote extensively about was really, the idea was generated in some ways by Yesh Din that came out with this legal opinion that Israel is guilty of apartheid and kind of changed the definition of racism, of racial, to include the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Right, and now with Ireland...

famously going to the ICJ and saying, we want you to change the definition of genocide so that we can make it stick to the Jews. Right. And Annabelle admitting that the definition was of intent, uh, was too cramped. They use that word. The definition is too cramped. Uh,

The definition is too cramped, so we'll change it. We'll change it or just kind of shed the whole idea of intent. So it's more than just writing reports. I think the NGOs have really protected – they've never said a word about what Hamas has done in Gaza. So Gaza – they've been able to build this military complex in Gaza for 17 years.

And the NGOs let them do it. They never write a report. They've never written a report critical of Hamas using the money to build tunnels. They've never written a critical report of the use of hospitals. So in a sense, this NGO industrial complex has protected Hamas for 17 years. These NGOs are then quoted by the UN. If you look at some of the UN reports, if you look at the ICC reports, they all quote Hamas.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, and then it gets all recycled in these different—the media then recycles it. So I do look at these NGOs as critical players that need to be attacked, identified further.

And I know you had Dr. Gerald Steinberg here from NGO Monitor as well, who's talked about some of these things. And Hillel Neuer from UN Watch, as I know, has also talked about trying to create a new... I mean, it's just staggering. Just staggering how these organizations let Hamas off the hook. You mentioned Cement. I came across recently an old tweet by Peter Lerner, who was one of the IDF spokespeople during the war. He tweeted back in 2018. Okay, this is only four years later.

less than four years after the 2014 war, big reconstruction process after the war of the summer of 2014. And he noted that the Burj Al Khalifa, the world's tallest building in the UAE, more than 160 stories, was built with 330,000 cubic meters of concrete.

Since 2014, Israel has facilitated access of 16 times that amount of concrete into Gaza. Where are Gaza's skyscrapers? In just four years, Israel facilitated...

16 Burj Al Khalifa's worth of concrete into the Gaza Strip. And the answer to Peter's question, where are Gaza's skyscrapers are? It's the necropolis of 350 miles of tunnels underneath civilian areas in Gaza.

And no one has a word to say about the massive diversion of humanitarian aid. And one of the lies that kept getting repeated in the New York Times everywhere was that pre-war, you've seen this statistic, there were 500 trucks of aid coming into Gaza every day. Okay, this is something I want to understand. There was a myth that before the war, 500 trucks of aid were entering Gaza every day. Now, in reality...

I went and I looked at the numbers myself. Before the war, there were only 73 food trucks on average per day going into the Gaza Strip.

Over half of what was going into the Gaza Strip was concrete. Right, exactly. Reconstruction supplies. Nothing to do with food. And I remember at one point, I'll try to find the queen. I mean, I got into a little bit of trouble for going after David Cameron on Twitter. But he was...

someone was misleading David Cameron. Someone was misleading David Cameron in a way that meant that he was placing entirely unrealistic expectations on the state of Israel because he was calling for 500 trucks to be brought into... I'm trying to find the tweet here. Calling for 500 trucks to be brought into the Gaza Strip every single day in order to prevent a famine, which I calculated was something like 500

five kilos of food per person because they weren't eating concrete. They weren't eating concrete before the war. Where did this myth that there were 500 trucks a day come from? I've never been able to track out where it came from. Yeah, so this is actually UN data. So the UN publishes on their website...

I think it's the OCHA website, the trucks, they have historical for year after year, the number of trucks and they publish it. And actually the number of trucks, it's not 500, it's 500 per working day. So the crossing with Egypt is only open about 240 days a year. So it wasn't even, so the 500 trucks a day was 500 per working day. So if you actually take

the total number of trucks and divided by 365 days a year, it's something like 360 trucks, uh, a day. And only 73 were food. And only 73 were food. And then with aid and things like that, uh, there were other materials, but only 73 per calendar day were food and aid. Uh,

But, you know, again, if you the media, if they say 73 a day and then you're looking at how many are going in after 10-7 and it's well over 100, then you have to admit that Israel is allowing in more food than pre-war. I thought I was going crazy, but I thought I was going crazy. I thought I was going crazy when I was looking through the numbers and I'm like,

Israel is letting in more food now than went in before the war. But the world is telling us that we're restricting aid and deliberately starving the people of Gaza. How is this possible? So explain to me how I end up living in this alternate reality. It's Orwellian. And you've used the word and it's accurate. And it's the same thing. There is this narrative that has to be maintained, right?

And it's not Hamas psyops. It's not Hamas PR. That's changing the narratives on the number of trucks that's coming in. It's a deliberate campaign of misinformation. The NGOs are writing this. They're saying 500 trucks a day.

And the media is just kind of parroting it. No one's really going to the UN website doing the calculation that you and I are doing and saying, wait a second, it's only 73 trucks of food. Why don't they do that? Because you're on the board of Honest Reporting. Honest Reporting is meant to hold the media to account on this. Correct. Why don't they do this? I think a large part of it is laziness.

They see the number from Human Rights Watch. What, are they going to start doing the research? They should, but they're not. So there is a measure of laziness, and I think there is a measure of we don't want to tell the story. This is a more convenient story for the narrative that we want to tell, which is that Israel is the villain, the Palestinians are the victim, and we're going to— Which is incredibly lazy because the interesting question, the interesting question from a journalist's perspective is,

is how all these organizations ended up going along with a lie that at some point became so deeply entrenched that it became impossible to budge. Right. Let's look specifically about the question of humanitarian aid. One of the stickiest lies has been Israel is restricting the amount of humanitarian aid. Israel is deliberately starving the people of Gaza. There is famine. There is going to be famine soon. There is almost going to be nearly famine.

Which never came while Israel was allowing more food into the Gaza Strip than went in before the war. Bust apart this myth for me.

Yeah, so they've been talking about famine since the first two weeks of October. You can look at news articles and statements by NGOs and other groups that famine is imminent. Before there was even food running out from the stores, they were already saying there's famine. Not just, hey, we need more food. But this has been perpetrated, pushed from the very beginning. Then

Later on, you start seeing these IPC reports, some of these UN agencies that are supposed to study the situation on the ground. And they kept saying famine was imminent. Famine was imminent. And then North Gaza, it's already happening. And it just didn't jive with the reality from what you saw. I mean, most, the easiest way to debunk it is that famine means that

two out of 10,000 people experiencing famine are dying daily, um, which should have meant that if famine was really taking hold in Gaza, we should have been seeing hundreds, a hundred deaths a day or more. But the claim was always that it's imminent. It's imminent. It's imminent. Uh,

But they were saying it is there. It's imminent. It's not there. And then you would not see any information, any photos. I mean, even now, I think I tweeted, I haven't seen a single photo if there was really famine for 15 months.

We should see images of Gazans emaciated. We should see that. And the images we did see, and there were some really nasty images, but they always turned out to be, I mean, it sounds horrible, really, really horrible to be so blunt.

We saw images of people with pre-existing conditions, muscular dystrophy, whatever, always sitting next to... Right, right. A fairly plump-looking mother. Right, and even Hamas said, okay, maybe 30 people and there were these children with pre-existing conditions. That was the point at which those people who were claiming famine just stopped counting. Right, and even...

Right. And even the New York Times had published this photo of this child, terrible situation, but it's not for a lack of food. It's a preexisting condition. And then you looked at number of trucks that came in and they kept undercounting the number of trucks from the private sources. So they were just literally lying about the number of trucks. This, this, this, this, this. How is it possible?

that the media consistently reported the wrong number of trucks because Israel was providing the data and set Kogat, the defense ministry unit responsible for this, said, look, we're the only ones who have a bird's eye view of all the trucks going in. UNRWA's dashboard has a disclaimer on it saying,

These numbers are not conclusive. We don't purport to be. And yet the media will report just the wrong number of trucks. How does that happen? Systematically underreporting the amount of trucks. Right. The number. And they're listening to the NGOs who are pushing this famine lie. You had Cindy McCain from the World Food Program saying the same thing. And she has credibility. She was John McCain's wife. How does Cindy McCain get it so wrong?

I think she's... Who's whispering in her ear that she... Even she comes along and says, Anra is the only aid organization that can deliver food at scale, but your agency is delivering more food than Anra. You're clearly misinformed about what your own people are doing. Her people don't want to tell her the truth. Right.

And the NGOs, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and some of these other groups want to push this lie. And they're fudging the numbers on purpose. And the media isn't really doing their due diligence. They're under tight deadlines. They don't really care that much to find it. If they hear it from Human Rights Watch, that's good enough. If the UN and Cindy McCain says it's famine, it's famine. What should we...

do about that? And I mean, we as one Israeli civil society, I'm not in any official capacity, but I think that I have a role in fighting for the truth and fighting for the facts. But also Israel, if you are building a national PR strategy...

Based on an understanding that Hamas is given a free ride because of organizations that support its agenda, that are willing to give it a free pass for hiding in the basement of a hospital, that these NGOs, international institutions, have their deliberate biases, that the media is going along with it because you think they actually want to believe the worst about Jews. And if that's the reason that...

our media isn't great, then that's really scary. If we're fighting this uphill battle.

How do you think that Israel as a country should approach this reality and make sure that people are reporting the right numbers of trucks? Because, I mean, from our perspective, I mean, one of the crazy things from a comms perspective is sometimes there's a mismatch between what Israel wants the domestic public to hear and what it wants the international audience to hear. Domestically, the images of trucks going into Gaza are deeply unpopular.

They're deeply unpopular because Israelis have very little sympathy for the people who celebrated the October 7th massacre. They have little sympathy for the idea that we are refueling Hamas because humanitarian aid is Hamas's main source of revenue at the moment, while the hostages are being starved. And we saw some of them looking like they were hobbling out of Auschwitz.

Internationally, Israel has an interest in saying, look at what suckers we are. We have been attacked and we're the only country that has ever, you know, resupplied an enemy during a wartime. Look how noble we are. It looks terrible domestically. Internationally, you want to say, look what suckers we are. Look how generous we are. Right.

First, I want to say that I do think the efforts to debunk do make a difference. So what you're doing, what Honest Reporting is doing, what countless other groups are doing and people on X are doing does make the difference. The facts and information getting out there does impact, does make a difference, does change things. Have you seen examples of that?

Yeah, I mean, we saw the BBC just pull their documentary. I mean, the damage, I guess, is done. But they were called out for using the children of Hamas ministers in a documentary, and it got pulled. So I do think... Coming up next, life inside... Life in Kabul, narrated by bin Laden Jr. And, you know, we have seen...

the newspapers change and issue corrections. Now, is it enough? And it's not enough. But if you don't do anything, I think it'll be much worse. So I do think it makes a difference. I do think when Israel goes to the ICJ for their, you know, the so-called genocide kangaroo court, and they're going to do it, I think all this information is going to make a difference. The ICJ, another example of how we're living in a Norwelean reality. The president of the ICJ

is a former, was a former Lebanese diplomat who had repeatedly denounced Israel in that political diplomatic capacity. He's now the prime minister of Lebanon. And it turns out that the whole time that he was sitting in judgment over Israel, he was running for political office in an enemy state. Yeah.

And no one, no one, literally no one outside the pro-Israel echo chamber has said, this is a travesty of justice. The case should be thrown out. If you go to court and you find that the judge has written lots of op-eds denouncing you. Right. And it turns out mid-trial that actually he's been

running for like he's been competing for a position in which he's on the side of someone who is against you with which you are at war obviously the case would be thrown out as a miscarriage of justice and it's not for the ICJ and everyone treats it as normal which is surreal it's surreal

No, agreed. Obviously, I mean, from Khan at the ICC, it's all rigged. There's nothing—it's all kangaroo courts. But going back to the point, it does make a difference. I don't think it's—

We should continue to do it. In terms of you asked, you know, what Israel or spokespeople can do better, sometimes there are cross currents on, you know, we don't want to talk about food for some of the Israeli public, but we do want to talk about food for the international. So there needs to be a strategy. There needs to be a strategy in how to communicate better with international media, right?

and international bodies about what's happening on food. Do you think that a briefing that takes the numbers and invites journalists for like a TED Talk kind presentation and breaks down the numbers makes a difference? Yeah, I think it would. I think absolutely. I mean, I think there should be sort of a, you know, I know people have a lot of ideas, but there should be a person assigned to

in Israel to work only with the New York Times and a couple of New York newspapers and constantly be in contact, the liaison with someone at the New York Times to constantly review what they're saying and have a dialogue with their journalists and say, hey, you know, when you publish that Hamas, that Hamas Ministry of Health killed 40, that...

47,000 people have died in Gaza and you're not mentioning that the IDF killed 20,000. You never mention it. Someone needs to keep pressing the New York Times and saying, why aren't you publishing that we say that we killed 20,000 combatants? Why are you never saying that? You know, it's funny you talk about this media landscape. I was thinking back to

quotes that I managed to get in the New York Times when I was a government spokesman. I'm looking here at something from January 2021. The headline was, Half of Gazans are at risk of starving, UN warns. Of course, that starvation never happens because Israel at the time was facilitating more food going into the Gaza Strip than came in before. And they quoted me as follows. Elon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, contended that Israel did not stand in the way of humanitarian assistance and blamed Hamas, the Palestinian group that rules Hamas, for any shortages. He accused Hamas of seizing some of the aid for its own uses.

He did not provide evidence, but Western and Arab officials have said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this...

I grabbed my head in my hands because I'm going, wow, one, great, I managed to get a quote in the New York Times, but two, you asked me for a quote. Why didn't you say, do you have some supporting evidence? I would have said, sure, here's something I tweeted yesterday. Like, why frame it in such a way that you asked me for a statement, I gave you a statement, and then you're claiming that I haven't given you the evidence. Like, ask for it, and I'll provide it for you. And he did not provide evidence, so they'll quote Hamas numbers, and they'll never say, well, where's the evidence? They just sort of quote it,

I mean, I think something that we've alluded to, there is just a general notion that Hamas is believable. Israel is not believable. That's a general sort of theme that runs across most of the media. I mean, even the fact that Hamas is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officially, and EU-designated.

You will never see that written in the media. So they'll never say Hamas, which is even in the U.S. press, Hamas, a U.S. designated terrorist organization, says they omit that with the same kind of idea that, hey, they're equal parties, the Palestinians are oppressed.

Right. Is the evil party. And whenever you say Hamas says, it's the same organization that said Israel bombed the Al-Ahli hospital, which never happened. The same organization that said that it never targeted civilians, even though they literally sent their Einsatzgruppen with GoPros to do it. The same Hamas that said it sent back the body of Shiri Bibas and sent some random corpse of a poor, unnamed Gazan woman who no one seems to care about instead of Shiri Bibas. I mean, I'm looking at...

You know, some of my tweets specifically on the question of humanitarian aid. 1st of April 2024. New York Times keeps reporting this myth of a trickle of aid. Okay? A trickle of aid is going in. The UN itself reported that 264 trucks had entered the day before.

The same UN, its data showed that around 280 trucks had entered Gaza every day before the war. Okay. So 16 more trucks were going in before the war. But half of them were carrying commercial construction supplies.

Madness. Salo, one of the myths that has been very sticky has been the question that Israel is restricting humanitarian aid into Gaza, that famine is imminent. We've busted that. What are the other myths that you think have become really sticky and have basically become common knowledge, the baseline of general knowledge now?

I think the idea that Israel has killed too many civilians or targeted civilians in Gaza, I think, has become baseline, that Israel has gone too far in its war, that attacks have been disproportionate. Look, a lot of people are dead, so maybe explain.

Explain your statement. Yeah, I mean, I think there's just this common sense now that because just the fact that many civilians have died in Gaza, there's no doubt that many innocent children have, thousands of innocent children have been killed in Gaza in this war. There's no denying that. It's tragic. But there's sort of this notion that this is either done on purpose or just the fact that that has happened automatically means it's a war crime.

And I think that sort of infiltrated the thinking, this common knowledge. Oh, if there's a war and thousands of children have been killed in that war, it's a war crime. Just baseline. And it isn't? And it isn't, right? I mean, there are two concepts in Geneva. I'm not a military legal expert, but these are pretty well-known concepts of distinction and proportionality where it is legal to...

You can attack a Hamas target, and even if civilians are killed, that is not a war crime. You have to target... The horrible reality of international law, international law does not assume zero civilian casualties in war. International law, when countries come and say civilians must be protected, international law does not require that civilians

zero civilians be hurt. Civilians will get killed in war because war is hell. It's why you shouldn't start wars. It's why you shouldn't start wars. It's why Hamas should never be allowed to be in a position where it can wage jihad on us ever again. But international law, Geneva, assumes civilians will be hurt and it sets a framework to minimize and create the rules surrounding that. But what we hear from the human rights organizations, et cetera, is almost this expectation that

absolutely nobody is going to be killed in a war that the enemy started that the enemy is fighting from inside these civilian areas and they know that they get away with it talk to me specifically about the genocide myth I remember very very very early on in the war when it was just before the international day for the commemoration of genocide

And I heard for the first time that South Africa was taking Israel to court for genocide. I thought, this is obviously ridiculous because it was just so bizarre and so absurd because it was clear that we were fighting a just war against a barbaric terror organization that had committed an act of genocide.

And I filmed something from my living room of my own accord explaining that October 7th was an act of genocide. I had pushed back from inside the prime minister's office because I went, genocide? That's a bit far. 1,200 people were butchered. But I said, guys...

this matches the international definition. You already have a letter from dozens, if not hundreds of lawyers saying this meets the definition of genocide. The Palestinians are going to come after us and accuse us of it. And even within the PMO's comms, that seemed absurd because it was just so Orwellian. How could that possibly, how could that possibly hold? So tell me, how did this myth come to be

Where did it originate from? Why did it land on such fertile ground? Yeah, I mean, I think it was already in the works before 10-7. I think it's been sort of an escalation by NGOs. I think it's been in the works for decades. Say again? It's been in the works for decades. It's been in the works for decades. So it sort of started with this apartheid, sort of this slow burn, bringing apartheid into sort of the lexicon of accepted society.

words to describe Israel. And I think this genocide was kind of waiting in the wings. It's already been used, so you can find examples of it before. But this was really just an opportunity. Okay, here it is. We can now roll it out in full. We've had all the plans in place, and now we're going to roll out the genocide libel. And

This was an opportunity, and it all relies on – the big part of genocide is the intent. As you know, you have to prove the intent. And besides – To destroy a national ethnic religious group as such. Right. And –

And the only way they could even try to do that is by fabricating quotes. Go on. So it was remarkable to see, you know, for instance, there was this idea that President Herzog in some press conference said, oh, there are no innocents in Gaza or some kind of line like that. His words are usually fabricated words.

where he made clear in that same press conference as the before and after that we're distinguishing between civilians and combatants. We're going to follow the rules of war. President Herzog was accused by Israel's enemies of saying there are no innocents in Gaza. The quote was literally, I agree there are many, many innocent Palestinians. Correct.

And when he was asked whether civilians are legitimate targets, he said explicitly no. Right. And yet he still gets harangued. And he even noticed it and he even decried it. He even said, hey, my words were being twisted. Uh,

And that sort of underpins some of these ICJ, the South Africa ICJ case and other so-called reports on genocide. And the same thing with Netanyahu, where he said, remember Amalek, remember Amalek. Even the same tweet or press conference, he says, Hamas is the enemy. We're going to destroy Hamas. Remember Amalek.

And there was a Hart article where he's misquoted, says, "We got to destroy Amalek." It's like, no, he never said that. I mean, I went through Netanyahu's statements about Amalek, of course, reference to the biblical enemy that Israel was commanded to blot out. I went through this as part of the prep doc that you helped me with for the debate I did with Mehdi Hassan in New York.

Netanyahu's referred to Hamas as Amalek. The other side claimed that he was referring to the Palestinians as such, and this was that we need to destroy the Palestinians. And when you look on every single occasion, I have the document here in front of me. Every single occasion, it was clear that Netanyahu was talking about Hamas,

And when those trying to shield Hamas took it out of context, he always promptly clarified exactly what he meant. It was first used in a speech to the Knesset on October 12th, really a historic speech just after the massacre. He said, we will find these accursed murderers, these human beasts, and we will defeat them. We will wipe them off the face of the earth. It was clear that he was referring to

the murderers, right? The people who came in and committed murder. Came again in a second statement on October 28th. He said right at the start, this is the second stage of the war, the goals of which are clear. Destroying Hamas's military and governing capabilities and bringing the hostages back home. He says these are the goals of the war.

Israel's enemies and Hamas's accomplices, people like Mehdi Hassan, want to create this fantasy third objective as if there was an actual objective which is destroy the Palestinians. How did Netanyahu define the enemy? He says, "The cynicism of the enemy knows no bounds. He carries out war crimes by using civilians as human shields, by using hospitals as command centers." It's obvious he's referring to Hamas. Third occasion, a letter to soldiers on 3rd of November.

literally the sentence before he refers, before he speaks of Amalek, he refers to the current fight against the murderers of Hamas. And immediately after he says, we have gone to war, the purpose of which is to destroy the brutal and murderous Hamas-ISIS enemy, bring back our hostages and restore security to our country. This was obviously a reference to Hamas, not the Palestinian people. And when people accused him of making it in reference to the Palestinian people,

He put out a clarification saying that this is preposterous. And yet the lie sticks because, as you said, people are not just predisposed to believe the worst about Israel and the Jews. They want to. They want to. They want to believe the worst. I mean, the ICJ filing by South Africa has eight instances. They quote Netanyahu eight times.

I went through all eight of them in a Twitter post. All eight of them are fake or misrepresented, all eight of them. So I hope that the legal team that's going there is going to break down in detail all the lies in this report.

because it should be easy to do. And if you have a fair-minded court of judges, they should be able to say, hey, this is all lies. I'm not so confident it's going to work out that way, but it needs to be done. And that's why I think the debunking that we're doing and that I'm doing, other groups are doing, does matter, and it makes a difference, and it needs to be done.

How do you think that we should step up our game in terms of debunking these myths? Because there's only so much that it can be based on individuals tweeting from home and doing this on their own time, essentially. Right.

Yeah, I mean, it would be nice if there was more of a unified national strategy related to that, that it wasn't sort of subcontracted to the private sector as it is, which I'm a part of, you're a part of, Honest Reporting is a part of. It would be nice. I know there was a meeting with...

Gideon Saar and with some of these groups and there was some money allocated to try and step up the game on so-called Hasbara. So, you know, hopefully there'll be some fruits from that, some kind of unified strategy. I want to go back to something we said at the beginning of the conversation, that you think that Hamas's PR is not particularly sophisticated and

It has an inbuilt advantage in that many people want to believe the worst about Jews. It has an inbuilt advantage that many of these NGOs will amplify whatever makes Israel look bad because they share Hamas's goal of no more Israel. But you said that one of the reasons you think Hamas's PR is so bad is these hostage parades and the dead baby parades that I would hope are backfiring on them because they just look

evil. I mean, parading the coffins of Kfir and Ariel Bibas and Oded Lifshitz and another coffin that didn't even have Shiri Bibas in it against a backdrop of Netanyahu like a vampire where they labeled Kfir as Ariel and Ariel as Kfir sent them back in coffins that were locked and

reportedly with leaflets with threatening messages inside them against the backdrop of music and kids standing around like it's a family fun day. I mean, it's just so grotesque that I wonder, do you think that this is a turning point in the war in global opinion where people look at Hamas and say,

Wow, this is really villainous. Maybe Israel was right when it said that this is an evil jihadi death cult. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to really fully turn the tide. However...

I do think, I mean, the new Trump administration, I think, has been predisposed to support Israel. And I think with these hostage spectacles, it's actually you're hearing even more, I think, from U.S. officials, you know, Rubio and others that are saying Hamas is pure evil. They can't rule. They got to go.

And maybe they were thinking that beforehand, but I think these hostage spectacles even further pushed that thinking that they're pure evil. So I don't know if global world opinion is going to be shifted because of this. It should be. It should be. It should be. It should have been a long time ago. It should have happened on 10-7. Yeah.

I think some of these bumps are sort of temporary. There may be small surges, and then it kind of reverts to the lazy thinking. So unfortunately, I don't think this is going to be sort of a sea change, a turning point, a permanent turning point. But as I said, I think it has affected...

the leadership of the foreign leadership dealing with foreign relations of the U.S. I'm seeing some words, even the State Department, I think, had a Hamas is evil, they're pure evil. You might have seen that banner that was officially released. I don't know if they would have released that if that hostage spectacle did not happen. Hmm.

Well, there's nothing in this Orwellian reality that we're living in that we can ask for more than world leaders' statements to better reflect reality. I think that we as a country should be held to the same standards as everyone else. And in doing that, it has to be based on

the real facts and the real data and not made up stuff thrown out by Hamas and regurgitated by a whole ecosystem, ecosystem of NGOs that have an interest in propping it up.

Salah Weisenberg, this has been a fascinating conversation. How can people follow you and your work? Okay. So thank you very much. I really appreciate you having me here. It was interesting. And not bad for your first interview. Yes. So I am on Twitter, Eisenberg55.

uh, Eisenberg with a Z with a Z correct. Uh, you know, look up some of my articles on, uh, fathom journal and geo monitor, uh, honest reporting and, uh, and hopefully you'll see some, uh, more reports coming out for me soon. Okay. Eisenberg 55. You don't have an, a headshot there and you don't have your full name. As I said, I'm sort of behind the scenes. So, uh,

But listeners of the podcast will definitely be able to vouch. Salah Eisenberg is legit. And you can trust this source busting apart the myths that the Hamas propaganda machine is pumping out. Salah Eisenberg, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

And that brings us to the end of today's episode of State of a Nation with Salo Eisenberg. As always, if you enjoy these podcasts, please subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe, click on the banner, give us a like on whatever social media platform you are following on, share the link with friends and family you think will be educated and enlightened by these conversations between the lines and beyond the headlines. I'm Elon Levy, and thanks for joining us.