It would not have taken much investigative work for The New York Times to accurately report on Israel’s explicit intent to produce a famine in Gaza. For almost two years, Israeli politicians, military commanders and soldiers have left little ambiguity about their plans.
On October 7, 2023, Major General Giora Eiland, former head of the Israeli National Security Council and advisor to the Defense Minister said: “The people should be told that they have two choices; to stay and to starve, or to leave.” Two days later, on October 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege,” declaring that there would be “no electricity, no food, no fuel.” That he considered starvation a technique of genocide was also obvious: “[We] are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly,” he added. On November 6, 2023, Eiland articulated the strategy even more clearly: “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”
In the nearly two years since, the Zionist army has razed Gaza’s agricultural land; bombed bakeries and community kitchens; assassinated the leaders of mutual aid efforts; and murdered the highest number of aid U.N. workers in U.N. history. Palestinian journalists, eyewitnesses, and human rights groups have meticulously documented every stage of this starvation regime — an extension of the 17-year Zionist blockade which began in 2007 and crippled Gaza’s economy, rendering its residents reliant on international aid to survive. A senior Israeli official once described the blockade as “putting Palestinians on a diet.”
Through it all, The New York Times has consistently whitewashed Israel’s crimes, not only by using passive voice refusing to name the perpetrator characterizing forced starvation as a natural disaster in order to further obscure the genocidal intentions of the criminal entity. The paper has failed to report on Israel’s past occupation, current blockade, and genocidal intent that has produced the necessity for aid and engineered the current scale of desperation.
Normalizing Genocidal Logic
A January 2024 edition of reporter David Leonhardt’s Morning newsletter, titled “Gaza’s Food Crisis,” offers a prime example of how the Times tries to normalize sadistic vengeance as tactical and outright barbarism as strategic.
“After the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terrorist attacks,” Leonhardt wrote, “Israel ordered what its defense minister called a ‘complete siege’ of Gaza. The goal was both to weaken Hamas fighters and to ensure that no military supplies could enter.” Leonhardt failed to include Gallant’s characterization of Palestinians as “human animals,” instead repackaging Israel’s justification for the siege in his own words: “For years, Israel has limited the flow of goods into Gaza, largely to prevent Hamas from gaining access to military supplies.”
Leonhardt’s newsletter has a readership of over 17 million.
Israel announced a full blockade of Gaza on March 2, 2025, disrupting all aid for almost two months. During that period, Times journalists dutifully repeated the Israeli narrative that the siege was a strategy to “pressure Hamas.” The New York War Crimes collective found that the paper’s reporters used the phrase “pressure Hamas” over 25 times between March 2, 2025, and August 11, 2025, when referring to Israel’s starvation policy.
The Times repeatedly implies that Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population is a legitimate and lawful negotiating strategy. In truth, it is a war crime.
Producing Conditions for Famine
The Times also helped create the conditions for famine in Gaza. In January 2024, just hours after the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel was plausibly committing a genocide, Israel began a renewed assault on the the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the longest standing aid organization in Palestine, responsible for nearly $1 billion in education, health, and food aid per year. Israel claimed that up to ten percent of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees were Hamas operatives, providing the impetus for the U.S. to pull funding from the organization.
During this period, the Times amplified this unsubstantiated claim across several articles. (It failed to mention that Israel, long dedicated to dismantling the agency, has murdered hundreds of its employees.)
The Times called the Israeli accusations “shocking intelligence about UNRWA” and elaborated “specific, ‘horrific’ details” of the dossier. In an above-the-fold front page story published on February 11, 2024 — co-written by Ronen Bergman, a former Israeli soldier who has toured the U.S. with AIPAC — the paper tacitly accepted the Israeli premise that UNRWA had been “infiltrated” by Hamas, writing “Hamas Presence in U.N. Gaza Unit Is Longtime Issue.”
Of course, there is no evidence that Hamas and UNRWA are systemically linked. The charge has been rejected, even by Israel’s allies, including American intelligence agencies and a U.S. senator. But the Times’ legitimation of Israel’s propaganda served its purpose: UNRWA was defunded, and Israel tightened its siege.
Spreading Israeli Lies
In nearly two dozen articles published since the beginning of 2025, the Times uncritically amplified Israel’s lie that Hamas systematically diverts aid from the population of Gaza. As The Intercept recently reported, none of those Times pieces provided evidence, besides quotes from Israeli officials.
Only in late July 2025 — after nearly two years of giving oxygen to this claim — did the Times finally investigate its veracity and admit it was baseless. The paper only reported the story once Israeli military officials were openly willing to admit that it was a lie, but again, the lie served its purpose: to delegitimize UNRWA and to justify a new, militarized aid system run by Israel and the US.
Whitewashing Israel’s Crimes
Over nearly two years, the Times has largely obscured Israel’s culpability for turning aid sites into death traps. “As Hungry Gazans Crowd a Convoy, a Crush of Bodies, Israeli Gunshots and a Deadly Toll” read the Times headline on February 29, 2024, the day of the first “flour massacre,” when Israeli forces slaughtered 112 Palestinian aid-seekers. A follow-up article by Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley described the massacre as “convoy chaos.”
The paper has taken a similar tone while reporting on massacres committed at “aid sites” run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF. The GHF, staffed by former CIA and U.S. military veterans, was established in May 2025 to replace the supposedly “compromised” UNRWA and “circumvent” Hamas’s diversion of aid — two false narratives the Times itself helped spread.
Israeli soldiers and GHF contractors have since lured starving Palestinians to distribution sites, then indiscriminately fired bullets, grenades, and artillery shells into crowds. As of mid-August 2025, the Israeli military and GHF contractors have murdered almost 2,000 Palestinians waiting for aid, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The Times reporting repeatedly obscures the murderer, instead using agentless descriptors: “chaos and casualties” at sites, “violence” which has “engulfed aid sites,” or most absurdly, “the lethal risk of seeking food.”
The paper finally began reporting that Israeli soldiers were intentionally firing into crowds of aid-seekers, after two months of massacres. But they continued to contort their language in Israel’s defense. One piece co-bylined by Jerusalem Bureau reporter–researcher Johnathan Reiss, a former Israeli soldier, reported that the mass murder of Palestinians queuing for food represented a “crude form of crowd control.”
Turning Famine into a Force of Nature
The Times has sought repeatedly to erase Israel as the perpetrator of famine in Gaza, often casting starvation as a natural disaster. In its pages, famine is not deliberately engineered but is “spreading” of its own accord. Hunger itself is given more agency than Israel: “Famine Stalks Gaza” and “Starvation Haunts Gaza’s Hospitals,” while children die due to “aid snarls.” Palestinians murdered by Israeli forces and US army veterans at so-called “aid sites” are simply “dying.”
While apocalyptic conditions of starvation become increasingly impossible to ignore, the Times has offered more column inches to famine coverage while hewing to the Zionist line. Most egregiously, after pressure from the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Zionist groups, including Honest Reporting and CAMERA, the Times issued a sadistic correction which explained that a starved Palestinian child whose picture they’d published had “preexisting health problems.” An interview with the child’s mother revealed that he had in fact developed health issues “caused by nutritional deficiencies during pregnancy due to the Israeli war.”
Zionist Complicity
With each genocidal confession, each tightened blockade, and each aid site massacre, the Times has normalized Israel’s genocidal logic, repeated Israeli lies, and sanitized Israel’s war crimes. The paper of record and its roster of Israeli soldiers-turned-reporters effectively collaborated with Israel to undermine and eventually expel UNRWA from Gaza, helping create the fatal conditions they now describe in distant,
On July 30, 2025, the editorial board published an op-ed called “Gaza’s Hunger is a Moral Crisis.” The Times’ top brass used this piece of chicanery not to correct the record, but to paper over Israel’s, America’s, and the Western media’s overlapping roles in producing the very problem they now belatedly, inadequately name: “How the situation has come to this is a matter of intense dispute,” the editors write before going on to describe the GHF aid massacres as “frantic melees.” They blame Israel’s collective punishment of Gazans on Hamas, thus reinforcing its logic: “Hamas’s leaders could end the [hunger] crisis by releasing the hostages,” they write, “and surrendering in a war they started and are losing.” And they frame Israel’s genocide not as the final solution of the Zionist project, but a consequence of “far-right” control of Israel.
Starvation is a strategy, and Israel is its architect. But nearly two years into Israel’s genocide, the editorial board of the most powerful news media institution in the world cannot be trusted to trace the “crisis” in Gaza to its source. Besides Israel, the Times would have to implicate itself.