Israeli Embassy Report Unravels How "Modern Blood Libel" Against Israel Was Manufactured
A detailed analysis reveals that genocide and famine claims relied on Hamas-controlled data, ignored massive aid flows, and transformed into international consensus despite contradicting evidence.
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The Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC recently released an important report systematically dismantling accusations that Israel carried out genocide or deliberately starved Gaza, arguing that those claims were built on manipulated Hamas casualty data, staged media imagery, aid-diversion realities, and coordinated disinformation.
The meticulously documented 80-page analysis, Manufacturing a Modern Blood Libel: Genocide, Starvation, and the Language of Dehumanization, marshals extensive evidence demonstrating that Hamas inflated death tolls and diverted up to 90% of humanitarian aid. The report documents how Hamas-origin casualty figures moved from Gaza’s Ministry of Health and Government Media Office into UN reporting, NGO statements, and global media coverage, giving militant-controlled data the appearance of neutral international consensus. It provides the most comprehensive counter-narrative to date against claims that have dominated international discourse since October 7, 2023.
Statistical Red Flags in Hamas Casualty Reports
The document details systematic problems with figures from the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH), which Western media outlets and UN agencies have widely cited as authoritative. According to the Embassy’s analysis of Gaza Ministry of Health data through November 10, 2025, approximately 32,000 men aged 18 to 59 were killed compared with roughly 10,000 women in the same age group, a 3-to-1 disparity that undermines claims of indiscriminate civilian slaughter and points instead to a casualty profile dominated by military-age males.
Professor Abraham Wyner of the University of Pennsylvania identified statistical patterns he said were incompatible with normal wartime casualty reporting, including implausibly uniform daily death counts of roughly 200 to 300 per day and a lack of correlation between reported male, female, and child fatalities. In mass-casualty urban warfare, the report notes, deaths among family members would normally rise and fall together when homes or shelters are struck. Internal Hamas documents recovered by Israeli forces instructed operatives to refer to anyone killed as an “innocent civilian” and avoid publishing images of dead combatants.
The report estimates that at least 11,000 to 12,000 natural deaths during the two-year period were folded into Israeli-caused fatality totals, further inflating the death count attributed to Israeli military action. In March 2025, the Gaza Ministry of Health updated its casualty list and removed 6,394 previously listed names, including duplicate entries, questionable records, and cases requiring further verification. The revision reinforced the Embassy’s central finding: Gaza casualty data had been treated as authoritative long before it was stable, verified, or internally consistent. The most revealing shift came in May 2024, when the UN stopped relying on Hamas’s Government Media Office and used Ministry of Health data instead. The reported share of women and children among the dead fell from 69% to 52% overnight, exposing how much of the global narrative had depended on inflated or unstable Hamas-supplied figures.
Starvation Imagery and Missing Medical Context
The Embassy report shows that some of the most widely circulated starvation images omitted critical medical context. A Free Press investigation found that 12 viral images used to symbolize Gaza starvation involved children with serious preexisting conditions, including cystic fibrosis, rickets, cerebral palsy, and genetic diseases.
The most prominent case was 18-month-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, whose image appeared on the front page of The New York Times on July 25, 2025. The report notes that the image was presented as evidence of Israeli-induced starvation while omitting that the child suffered from cerebral palsy and hypoxemia, and that his healthy three-year-old brother had been cropped out of the frame.
German outlets including Bild and Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that an Anadolu Agency photographer staged scenes of Gazans holding empty pots for the cameras, creating imagery that visually suggested famine conditions. Five-year-old Osama al-Raqab’s viral image, presented as evidence of starvation, actually depicted a child with a serious genetic disease; Israel later coordinated his evacuation to Italy for treatment.
Aid in Abundance and Hamas Control
According to official COGAT data cited in the report, approximately 2.2 million tons of aid entered Gaza between October 2023 and October 2025, including 1.7 million tons of food. The Embassy calculates that this amounted to roughly 3,000 kilocalories per person per day, above the 2,100 kcal/capita/day international minimum used for conflict zones. The report’s conclusion is blunt: the central problem was not the absence of food entering Gaza, but Hamas’s control, diversion, taxation, and manipulation of aid distribution. Israeli intelligence cited by the report estimates that Hamas diverted up to 90% of humanitarian supplies, generating approximately $500 million through taxation, smuggling, resale, and physical control of distribution networks.
The report alleges that the UN significantly underreported the number of aid trucks entering Gaza and that UN agencies distributed only about 30% of aid between May and September 2025, leaving thousands of trucks standing inside Gaza. Hamas operatives were found hoarding infant formula and nutritional supplements while placing operatives in senior positions at NGOs to control aid flows.
Unprecedented Civilian Protections
The Embassy report details an extensive civilian-warning system: tens of millions of geographically targeted text messages, tens of millions of phone calls before strikes, millions of air-dropped leaflets, evacuation corridors, nonlethal “roof-knocking” warnings, and color-coded digital maps updated in real time. John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, wrote that “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history.”
Before the Rafah operation, Israel relocated more than one million residents after issuing advance warnings. The report notes that Hamas’s own casualty data showed fatalities declined by 25% after the evacuation, evidence that Israel’s operational design reduced civilian deaths rather than maximizing them.
A Campaign With Consequences
Ambassador Yechiel “Michael” Leiter writes in the foreword that the genocide libel has not remained confined to diplomatic forums or newspaper pages. He cites the May 21, 2025 murders of Israeli Embassy staffers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, arguing that the alleged gunman was steeped in the same modern blood libel the report seeks to expose.
The report describes a three-stage propaganda pipeline: Hamas generates or manipulates casualty claims, UN agencies and NGOs launder those claims into institutional language, and international media outlets amplify them as verified fact. The document traces the ideological lineage of Hamas’s antisemitism through the Muslim Brotherhood to Nazi propaganda, noting Israeli forces recently recovered annotated Arabic translations of Mein Kampf among Hamas operatives’ belongings.