By Becket Adams
Sunday, September 13, 2026
Jews have long been blamed for the world’s great evils,
from catastrophic weather to the Black Death to the kaiser’s commitment of some
13 million men to stagnant trench warfare.
Yet, of all the outlandish charges, the accounts
surrounding the war in Gaza take the cake.
There’s a reason the allegations run the gamut from the
simply unbelievable to the outright laughable. There’s a reason they draw
hundreds of thousands of views.
It’s simple: Demand for stories about Jewish malevolence
far outstrips any impulse toward nuance or diligence. As they said on The
X-Files: I want to believe.
Just last week, Al Jazeera accused Israel not only of
destroying the shade in Gaza but of “decreasing the amount of oxygen” in the
region. The charge appeared during a so-called news report on Palestinian
Arabs’ complaints about the summer weather.
“The heat we’re experiencing is not natural,” AJ+’s Bisan
Owda reported from a seaside refugee camp.
“I can’t find a little bit of shade,” she said, standing
against a tent in a tent city. “No shade at all. No shade at all. That’s the
most, like, the most horrific thing that can turn this heat into hell on
earth.”
The August daily highs in Gaza this year were between 89
and 91 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Owda. For context, the August daily highs ran about 86 to 90 degrees in 2020,
88 to 93 in 2021, 87 to 93 in 2022, and 86 to 92 in 2023 — the year of the
October 7 terrorist attacks.
For additional context, that 89-to-91-degree range is a
typical August high in Miami.
“Actually,” Owda continued, “[the heat is] one of the
catastrophic consequences of the equivalent of eight atomic bombs that Israel
has dropped [during] the past three years on Gaza that destroyed buildings and
trees, exceeding the [number] of sun exposure hours, decreasing the amount of
oxygen and sources of shade, and increasing the amount of dust as well.”
The segment ends with her standing before a building that
livestock use for shade.
More fantastical than characterizing 90-degree summer
weather as “hell on earth” is the claim that Israeli bombs have depleted the
region’s oxygen. This is not World War II, and these are not RAF or USAAF
firestorms, whose consumption of oxygen lasted hours, not days, weeks, and
months. Also, referring to nonnuclear strikes as the “equivalent of eight
atomic bombs” is a choice.
More shameful than AJ+’s propaganda is the Western
appetite for it, the two being closely linked. The wartime propagandists can
say basically what they want, knowing full well that gullible Western audiences
predisposed against Israel will embrace it uncritically.
Recall last year’s rash of viral videos that purported to show starving Gazans
withering in blizzard conditions: Arab women crawling through snowbanks and
begging for food, children with frostbitten faces, snow-covered tents. Never
mind that Gaza lies on the Mediterranean, where blizzards are virtually
unknown. Never mind, too, that five seconds of inquiry showed the videos to be
obvious fabrications.
There’s a reason these videos exist; there’s a reason
they racked up hundreds of thousands of views.
The “frozen Gazans” trend comes from the same place as
U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s claim that the Gaza death toll
should be thought of as about 680,000, of which 380,000 were “infants
under five.” The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics does not even put
Gaza’s under-five population at 380,000 — its most generous estimate is
about 341,790 — let alone assert a death toll of that size. Albanese later
admitted she had overinflated the figure for effect: “The largest
figure I deliberately mentioned in a provocative way had the effect I wanted —
it made people nod their heads and say, ‘What’s going on?’ These numbers are
highly disputed.”
No one should have expected better from the official who
once said, “Israel commits crimes like it breathes.”
There is also U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths,
who called the situation in Gaza the “worst
ever,” worse even than the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields. For context, the
Khmer Rouge murdered an estimated 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians. Not even Hamas
has produced an estimated body count that high. Griffiths said this in November
2023, not even a full month after Israel sent ground forces into Gaza.
His straight-faced hyperbole comes from the same place as
U.N. official Lisa Doughten’s claim, in October 2024, that “10 children are losing one or both of their legs” every day
in Gaza. She added, “Gaza is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in
modern history.”
Her proof was the say-so of UNRWA, the U.N. agency later
found to have staffers tied to the holding of Israeli hostages.
Doughten’s accusation was nearly as shameless as CNN’s
Christiane Amanpour claiming that the Israeli hostages were “probably treated better than the average Gazan,” which was
almost as shameless as U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher warning in May 2025
that 14,000
babies in Gaza would die in the ensuing 48 hours unless the United Nations
could reach them. This claim proved inaccurate.
Remember when UN Women asserted that more than 38,000 women and girls had been killed in Gaza by the end
of 2025 — a figure far larger than Hamas’s already inflated and unverified
count of female deaths?
In some cases, charges of “genocide” came before Israel
had even sent in ground forces.
On October 10, the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, announced that it would
close its doors on October 20 in protest of Israel’s “genocidal attack on Gaza.” Days later, Stockton University
professor Raz Segal called the conflict “a
textbook case of genocide.”
Once again, for emphasis: Israel’s ground invasion did
not begin until October 27, 2023.
Perhaps you recall the claims about the “Hannibal
Directive”: that Israel, not Hamas, had killed most of the Jews on October
7.
Perhaps you’ve seen photographs of children with genetic
defects passed off as “proof” of an Israeli-engineered famine. Perhaps you’ve
seen footage from Libya and Syria that activists have relabeled as evidence of
Israeli war crimes.
Don’t forget the accusations of organ harvesting, air-dropped poison candy, and the deliberate infection of Palestinian children with HIV.
Nor can we forget Israel’s alleged war menagerie: dogs trained to rape humans; spy dolphins, vultures, and eagles; weaponized boars
and sharks; plague rats and other rodents genetically engineered to
attack Palestinian children and diabetics.
No matter how ludicrous the charge, no matter how silly
the allegation, there’s an audience for it somewhere in the Western world.
There’s an audience even when the allegations run up
against a basic question: With a people so unrelentingly malicious and cunning,
why hasn’t the war already ended?
Pursuing that question might lead one to conclude that
most of the claims against Israel are wartime propaganda untethered to the
truth, and that Israel is waging a relatively standard war against an
entrenched, fanatical death cult that uses everything from civilians to
hospitals for tactical advantage. Such conflicts have long taken a painful
amount of time and ordnance. See: The war in the Pacific.
Or, perhaps the war’s duration is yet another ploy by
those perfidious Israelis. Someone get Al Jazeera on the case.
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