Study Shows How U.S. And European Media Parrot Hamas Propaganda, Present It As Truth

A new study reveals how media in the United States and Europe simply parroted inaccurate information from the terrorist group Hamas and represented it as truthful.

The Network Contagion and Research Institute released their comprehensive report, titled, “The 4th Estate Sale: How American and European Media Became an Uncritical Mouthpiece for a Designated Foreign Terror Organization.”

The report started by illuminating how the media virtually unanimously purveyed a uniform narrative in which they lied about the efforts of the U.S. Department of State’s aid initiative, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was delivering meals and direct food assistance to Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

“Within days of GHF’s first meal deliveries, it became the target of a deliberate narrative assault, driven less by verifiable facts than by the demands of a competing narrative,” the report states. “Reports and evidence of violence at aid sites began to surface, and international and U.S. media outlets, social media influencers, and NGOs started publishing articles that ascribed blame to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) or GHF for intentional violence against civilians, war crimes, and complicity in the crime of genocide. The reports quickly condensed into viral headlines, but the claim that the IDF was systematically murdering civilians was usually sourced from Hamas-run ministries or anonymous accounts, and often unverified. Moreover, evidence that Hamas could be responsible for violence around aid sites – evidence provided by non-Hamas Palestinian sources, by Hamas’s online communications, and by video that in some cases shows Hamas operatives deliberately firing on Palestinian civilians– was almost never suggested.”

“A core failure of media coverage is the routine elevation of the Gaza Health Ministry, a Hamas-run agency, as a trusted source on culpability for violence. … many mainstream media outlets remain willing to rely on figures and ‘facts’ taken from the Gaza Health Ministry,” the report continues. “The media framed a narrative sourced unreflexively from Hamas affiliates – a narrative which aims to uproot any challenge that undermines the terrorist-designated entity’s governance over aid distribution in the Gaza Strip. This effort transformed reporting into narrative laundering: the process of circulating unverified or unreliable information and framing it as a legitimate window into truth.”

“Our results suggest that the GHF was targeted and undermined by a collection of adversarial actors and institutional amplifiers acting synchronously and convergently,” the report continues. “Major media headlines cited Hamas-linked officials more than any other source – making a foreign terrorist organization one of the leading voices shaping news about GHF. Of the high-engagement news articles NCRI analyzed, Hamas-linked officials and organizations, such as the Gaza Health Ministry, were directly cited in headlines more than any other named source. In nearly three-quarters of those cases, it was not disclosed in the headline that the source was a Hamas affiliate.”

One example from the report: “The Washington Post retracted early versions of a report that explicitly stated Israeli troops killed over 30 Palestinians near a U.S. aid site in Gaza. The original headline attributed to ‘health officials’ the claims about Israeli troops being responsible for the deaths, but the journalists failed to clarify that this attribution solely reflected a claim from the Gaza Health Ministry. This consequently gave readers a false impression that Israeli responsibility had been independently confirmed.”

Another: “CNN corrected its report of a shooting near a Gaza aid site in which at least 31 Palestinians were allegedly killed. The original article uncritically reported the Gaza Health Ministry’s claim that the Israeli military was responsible without making clear that this accusation had not been independently verified.”

“A particularly salient example of this occurred when Gazan pharmacist Omar Hamad introduced the conspiratorial narrative that the GHF intentionally laced bags of flour with the narcotic Oxycodone. This claim went viral on X, racking up over 25.7M views across just 21 posts,” the report noted.

“While originating from traditional sources (NGOs, UN bodies, humanitarian advocates), these narratives are rapidly absorbed by future assassins like Elias Rodriguez or online networks that reframe them through radically different lenses on both the right and left,” the report opines.

“The belief that Israel is intentionally starving children or deliberately targeting hospitals under the pretense of counterterrorism is not grounded in verifiable fact. These are not legitimate policy critiques; they are fabricated atrocity narratives that reframe Israel’s actions as genocidal, regardless of evidence to the contrary. What’s most alarming is the shift from political disagreement to dehumanizing conviction. The experimental results show that exposure to these narratives moves individuals to endorse conspiracy-level accusations and adopt a moral framework in which Israel is no longer a flawed actor, but a fundamentally evil one,” the report concludes.