Israel Update 31.7.25

HAMAS DECEPTION FOOLS THE WORLD

In the past 2 weeks, Hamas has stepped up its disinformation campaign against Israel, using photographs of children it claims are suffering from malnutrition.

However, several of these photos are not of “starving” children but of victims of serious genetic illnesses.

Investigations reveal normal well-fed adults and sometimes siblings at the scene.

Among the worst cases are:

On July 23, 2025, the Daily Express ran the image of Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq on its front page as a child victim of the Gazan “famine.”
Within hours, Sky News, CNN, The Guardian, Daily Mail, New York Times, and The Times ran the image.
Yet the uncropped photo also shows both Muhammad’s mother and his older brother looking healthy and not suffering from starvation. Like previous examples of the media using “starving children,” the image is of a child suffering underlying and hidden health issues. A medical report issued in May 2025 by the Basma Association for Relief in Gaza states that Muhammad has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and hypoxemia (low oxygen in the blood), possibly linked to a suspected genetic disorder.Report here

The New York Times (NYT) subsequently issued a clarification on an auxiliary NYT X account and not on its main X platform, notimg, more than two days after an investigation into the image, that the child, Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, suffered from pre-existing health issues, not extreme starvation as implied, but rather rare genetic conditions. Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett wrote: “This is simply unbelievable. After generating a tsunami of hate towards Israel with that terrifying picture, the NYT now quietly admits that the boy has preexisting conditions.
“NYT, you knew that Hamas uses babies with preexisting illnesses. We’ve been saying this for months now. You knew exactly what this picture would cause. This is a blood libel in 2025. Have you no shame?” Report here

The image of 14-year-old Abad Qader al-Fayoumi was circulated online in recent days. Israeli officials said medical records show that Abad was treated in Israel in 2018 for a genetic neurological condition.” Abad was one of hundreds of Gazan children treated in Israeli hospitals in recent years.”Report here

5 year old Osama al-Rakab, whose photo recently went viral, was evacuated, with Israeli co-ordination, to Italy on June 12^th, where he has been receiving treatment for a serious genetic disorder and has since improved. Israel’s Co-ordinator of Government Activities in the Territories wrote: “Don’t let compassion be exploited for propaganda. Check the facts before parroting blame”. X post here Report here

NOTE: Consanguineous marriage (between relatives- usually first or second cousins) is a common prectice in Gaza causing serious congenital disorders for many unfortunate children.Research here

GAZA AID

The UN itself reported that 87% of its 2,010 food trucks in Gaza from May 19-July 29 were “intercepted” – either peacefully by crowds or forcefully by armed actors.X post here

The IDF on Sunday announced a daily “tactical pause” in combat operations in select areas of Gaza to facilitate the delivery and distribution of humanitarian aid. The pause, in effect from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., will apply to areas where Israeli troops are not currently operating. In addition, designated secure routes will be open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. to allow for the safe movement of aid convoys transporting food and medicine throughout Gaza.On Saturday night, the Israeli Air Force conducted its first aid airdrop – delivering 7 pallets of flour, sugar and canned food provided by international organizations. The IDF also connected a power line to Gaza’s southern desalination plant, increasing daily water production from 2,000 to 20,000 cubic meters, serving roughly 900,000 residents. Report here

The IDF on Tuesday released a video of Hamas terrorists looting humanitarian aid filmed earlier this week. “Contrary to Hamas’s false claims that the individuals in the video are security personnel, they are in fact Hamas terrorists who arrived to seize the aid from Gaza’s residents,” the military stated. “Even when aid is delivered into Gaza – Hamas loots it for its own use, blatantly disregarding the needs of the population.” Report here

A senior Israeli defence official said Wednesday that the volume of humanitarian aid entering Gaza has greatly increased, citing both the need to reach vulnerable populations and to counter “false famine narratives” circulating globally. The official said Hamas’s campaign accusing Israel of starving the Gaza population has impacted political decision-making and shaped aid policies aimed at calming the situation and signalling responsiveness.
Since May 19, 5,000 aid trucks have entered Gaza, the official said, including 1.5 million weekly food packages distributed by an American company and 3,000 tons of baby food. Three water pipelines into Gaza remain operational, and a power line was recently reactivated to the central UNICEF desalination plant. Currently, about 200 aid trucks enter Gaza daily.
Israeli officials believe Hamas is not genuinely interested in reaching a ceasefire agreement, operating instead under the assumption that international pressure will force Israel’s hand. They argue that the influx of humanitarian aid into Gaza, following Israel’s “strategic concession,” has only emboldened Hamas, which continues to present far-reaching demands. Report here

Much of the food aid entering Gaza is being hoarded by gangs and merchants and sold at exorbitant prices. Bags of flour in markets often bear UN logos, while other packaging indicates it came from the Israeli and US backed GHF- all originally handed out for free. A man in his 30s said he had visited GHF sites 40 times since they opened and nearly always came back with food. He sold most of it to merchants or others in order to buy other necessities for his family. Report here

An Israeli military official explained the role of the Co-ordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) and gave a detailed briefing to journalists setting out Israel’s extensive humanitarian infrastructure in Gaza. Report here

CLAIMS MADE ON BBC REFUTED

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has refuted claims aired on BBC on Friday by a former GHF aid worker.. The GHF said “Upon hearing (the) claims, we immediately launched an investigation. The findings, based on cross-checking the timelines with video clips and on sources on the ground, indicate that these are false claims with no basis in reality.”
“It should be emphasized that Mr. Aguilar was employed as a subcontractor and was fired over a month ago for inappropriate behaviour. Following the dismissal, we received threats that unless he was reinstated, action would be taken against us, raising questions regarding the motivation behind his interviews.”Report here

CEASEFIRE TALKS STALLED

The U.S. is pulling out of talks for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, as it believes Hamas isn’t negotiating seriously. “Hamas does not appear to be coordinated or acting in good faith” special envoy Witkoff said recently.Report here

When Hamas presented new demands in the final day of the Gaza ceasefire discussions in Qatar for the release of live terrorists serving life sentences or lengthy terms for murdering Israelis in exchange for the remains of hostages, Egyptian officials erupted in anger, accusing Hamas representatives of callous disregard for their own population in Gaza
with a shouting match that lasted several minutes. A senior Palestinian official also slammed key Hamas leaders, saying, “They are prepared to fight to the last drop of Gaza’s children’s blood while they themselves sit in villas in Qatar and Turkey.”Report here

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Tuesday said that “more than one European foreign minister” has told him that signing the letter condemning Israel’s war in Gaza was a mistake, and it allowed Hamas to embolden its stance in ceasefire talks. Report here

GAZA WAR

Two Israeli soldiers Cpt. Amir Saad, 22 and Sgt. Inon Nuriel Vana, 20, were killed and an officer was moderately wounded by an explosive device in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday.Report here

Two combat engineers were seriously wounded in a roadside bomb attack last week and one of them, Sgt. Maj. (res.) Betzalel Yehoshua Mosbacher, 32, succumbed to his wounds on Saturday.Report here

An Israeli reservist, between rounds of duty after completing more than 300 days of service since Oct 7, challenges accusations against the IDF at aid distribution points in Gaza with his eyewitness account. Report here

HOUTHI ATTACKS CONTINUED

A ballistic missile was launched at Israel Friday night, which triggering sirens in several settlements in the southern West Bank and communities near the Dead Sea.

On Tuesday, another ballistic missile attack set off sirens across central Israel and the Jerusalem area.

Both were successfully intercepted by the IDF.Reports here & here

HAMAS CONDEMNED

Arab and Muslim countries, the entire Arab League, and including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, signed a declaration Tuesday condemning for the first time Hamas’s onslaught of October 7, 2023, and calling on the Palestinian terror group to release all the hostages it is holding, disarm and end its rule of Gaza, in a bid to end the devastating war in the Strip. Report here

FRANCE

PM Netanyahu “strongly condemns President Macron’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state next to Tel Aviv in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre. Such a move rewards terror and risks creating another Iranian proxy, just as Gaza became. A Palestinian state in these conditions would be a launch pad to annihilate Israel – not to live in peace beside it. Let’s be clear: the Palestinians do not seek a state alongside Israel; they seek a state instead of Israel.” Report here

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said: “The French President’s pretension to create by mere words an illusionary arrangement in our land is ridiculous and not serious. His statement this evening shows that all the conditions that he himself set a few weeks ago – have evaporated…A Palestinian state will be a Hamas state, just as the withdrawal from Gaza twenty years ago led to Hamas taking control of it.” “Israel’s attempt to base its security on Palestinian promises to fight terror completely failed in the Oslo process. Israel will no longer gamble on its security and its future.” Report here

THE UK

The Chief Rabbi has described the government’s decision to unilaterally recognise a Palestinian state as an “unfathomable misstep” which “fundamentally undermines the cause of peace and security for Palestinians and Israelis alike” – joining a wide range of Jewish organisations who have criticised the foreign policy shift. Report here

40 members of the House of Lords, including some of Britain’s leading legal authorities, have written to the Attorney General warning him that UK recognition of a Palestinian state risks breaking international law. Report here

BRITISH-ISRAELI FORMER HOSTAGE EMILY DAMARI

For almost four months of her 471 days in captivity, Emily was incarcerated in the Hamas terror tunnels under where the stench of human waste permeated the foetid wet air and the floor crawled with cockroaches. Throughout it all she was in constant, searing pain after gunmen shot off two of her fingers on Oct 7, while the remains of another bullet was lodged in her right leg. Describing for the first time the inhumane practice in which hostages were held in cages, Emily said: ‘Sometimes there would be up to six of us at a time, squeezed in a tiny cage just two metres by two metres.’ Article here

This week Emily wrote:

“I am deeply saddened by PM Starmer’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state. This move does not advance peace—it risks rewarding terror. It sends a dangerous message: that violence earns legitimacy…By legitimizing a state entity while Hamas still controls Gaza and continues its campaign of terror, Starmer is not promoting a solution—he is prolonging the conflict. Recognition under these conditions emboldens extremists and undermines any hope for genuine peace. Shame on him!” Report here

IRAN WAR AFTERMATH

An 85-year-old man who was wounded when his home was hit by an Iranian missile in Rehovot during last month’s 12-day war died Monday of his wounds bringing the number of fatalities in Israel to 30. Report here

Amnesty International recently accused Iran of firing cluster munitions at residential areas in Israel during last month’s war calling it a blatant violation of international humanitarian law.The report backs up an Israeli assessment that Iran fired at least one cluster bomb warhead at central Israel as well as another at Beersheba.Report here

Reportedly, US and Israeli strikes in Iran last month hampered the Islamic Republic’s development of two types of nuclear warheads and an “electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon that could cripple Israel electronically”.Report here

CYPRUS

Last week, Israel sent Air Force jets to Cyprus to assist in fighting huge wildfires.Report here

DEFENCE

Israeli defence electronics company Elbit Systems announced Monday it was awarded a $260 million contract to supply DIRCM self-protection systems to protect Germany’s A400M transport aircraft fleet against infrared guided missiles. Elbit’s DIRCM solutions are in operational use in Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Brazil. Report here

BUSINESS

In the second biggest acquisition ever of an Israeli company, cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks has confirmed that it is acquiring Israeli cybersecurity company CyberArk Software in a deal with an equity value of $25 billion. Report here

SPORT

Former hostage Ofer Calderon, an experienced cyclist, joined as a special guest of Israel-Premier Tech, the country’s professional cycling team, for the final stage of the 2025 Tour de France along the Champs-Elysees in Paris. He had been released in February 2025.

He said “I’m so emotional to be here with the team. But I’m also torn: this joy can’t be complete because, alongside all these emotions, it’s very hard to deal with what’s happening to me and to all the people of Israel — that we still have hostages in Gaza, our soldiers are there, and some are being killed. So nothing will be complete until they’re all back home.” Report here

COMMENT & OPINION

Hamas Propaganda

David Collier: What we can see from the wider and unpublished pictures is that both Mohammed’s mother and his older brother, look healthy and are not suffering from any type of starvation that would be necessary to cause the thinness suffered by Mohammed… This revelation (of the child’s underlying health issues) raises serious issues of media integrity.

The Daily Express picked up a viral image circulating online and published it without verification or context – a textbook example of clickbait journalism, where emotional impact is prioritised over everything else… The BBC – as per usual went a step further. The BBC “spoke” to his mother and produced a 64 second interview that somehow failed to disclose that Mohammed was a child born with genetic problems and complex medical dependencies. This is not journalism. This is the UK’s state media deliberately pushing a deceptive narrative that only serves to benefit Hamas and create fake news. Full article here

Seth Mandel: Where Gaza is different is in the desire by global information institutions to lie and for otherwise intelligent people to embrace those lies, because it’s less stressful and less lonely to live in an online world where the Israelis are always monsters and the truth is treated as a distraction.
The truth is that Hamas has engineered real suffering in Gaza, and the lie – that Israel is intentionally starving children – enables Hamas to engineer more suffering by creating global pressure on Israel to let Hamas control the aid again.
It matters who is at fault because pro-Palestinian advocates read stories like this and then take it upon themselves to avenge the injustice with violence against Jews pretty much everywhere in the past year.
Why was the photo of the Palestinian child published and shared everywhere in the first place? And why will the next one be shared, and the one after that?
Pointing to a suffering child and saying “the Jews did this” when in fact the Jews did no such thing is an intentional act. Full article here

UK threatens ‘Palestine’ recognition

Juliet Samuel: Proving ourselves the world leaders in self-sabotaging legal-diplomatic posturing, the UK has issued its own, singularly incoherent statement of an intention to “recognise” Palestine as a state in September if there is no ceasefire — which means that insofar as Hamas gives two hoots about what Sir Keir Starmer says, which it doesn’t, it is directly incentivised to prolong the war and hold on to the hostages for at least another month or so. Could anything demonstrate better the futility, cynicism and incompetence of Starmer’s attempts to get pro-Palestine backbenchers off his case? Full article here (paywall)

Brendan O’Neill: Today (Tuesday) the PM said Britain will recognise Palestine unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza. This, truly, is a new low for this government. It is moral blackmail masquerading as diplomacy. It is a barely veiled threat against a supposed ally. Starmer is essentially telling Israel that unless it lays down its arms, Britain will reward its enemies

(warning: article contains an offensive word) Full article here

Richard Kemp: We saw what happened when a two-state solution was tried in Gaza. The whole place was turned by Islamic jihadists into an engine of war and resulted in the horrors of Oct. 7. Is it reasonable to expect Jerusalem to repeat such a devastatingly failed experiment and extend it into the West Bank where the risks are far greater? When so many lives are at stake and Israel’s very existence is under threat, hoping for the best is not going to cut it.
The Israel-Palestinian conflict is not about land or Arab self-determination, it’s a religious war to annihilate the Jewish state and always has been. British PM Starmer’s proposal to recognize a non-existent state will harden Palestinian resolve against Israel and encourage Hamas to keep fighting. Following Starmer’s proposal, a senior Hamas official wrote: “International support for Palestinian self-determination shows we are moving in the right direction….Victory and liberation are closer than we expected.” Full article here (paywall)

Melanie Phillips: Starmer is now threatening the Israeli victims of Hamas…he says that unless Israel stops the war by September he’ll recognise “Palestine”. He imposes no conditions, however, on Hamas. Israel alone gets the treatment.Full article here

Gaza war

Brendan O’Neill : Gaza has been engulfed by war for nearly two years. Why are there still women and children in Gaza? Have we become blind to what a grotesque and preposterous situation this is? …Almost eight million souls have fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, most of them women and children. Around seven million Syrians fled fighting over the past decade.
This is the first war in my lifetime where women and children leaving the warzone has been actively discouraged by the West’s opinion-setters.
In most wars, humankind fervently does everything it can to facilitate the fleeing of the innocent… When Israeli officials propose the temporary displacement of civilians from Gaza as the war rages, they are instantly condemned for “genocidal” thinking, for lusting after “ethnic cleansing.” Why is it “seeking refuge” when Ukrainians are forced to flee their homeland by Russia, but “ethnic cleansing” if Gazans were to flee as a consequence of this infernal war Hamas started? Full article here

Eitan Fischberger: Over the weekend, I embedded with the IDF in Gaza, where I saw the enormous quantities of humanitarian aid the UN has been refusing to distribute.
What struck me were the thousands of pounds of baby food, baking under the Middle Eastern sun – jar after jar of mashed carrots, pureed potatoes and fruit blends that could have gone to children.
In Gaza, I stood surrounded by nearly 600 trucks worth of food, water and diapers, all ready to be delivered.
The UN refused to do the job, saying it couldn’t operate safely with Israeli protection. Instead it asked that security be provided by the “Gaza Blue Police” – a euphemism for Hamas’s internal security forces.
In addition, the UN has declined to cooperate with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, despite its backing by the U.S. The result is that food meant for children is left to rot.Full article here (paywall)

Herb Keinon : How international condemnation of Israel gives Hamas hope and a reason to keep dragging its feet.

Today, with negotiations at another critical juncture, history repeats itself: as soon as diplomatic progress seems possible, a wave of external pressure targets Israel, Hamas publicly celebrates, and the incentive for it to compromise disappears. International actors, whether intentionally or not, are providing Hamas both political cover and motivation to prolong the conflict. Full article here

France

Jake Wallis Simons:Hamas has warmly welcomed French President Macron’s announcement that France was planning to recognize a state of Palestine… Well done, Mr. Macron. These are the people who are slapping you on the back. Unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state stands out as the most myopic, destructive and treacherous foreign policy to have been dreamed up by our elites in recent memory.
Granting statehood to one of the most corrupt, brutal, inept and intransigent regimes on Earth – which has something of a taste for terrorism, given that it hands out financial rewards to those convicted of it – in order to pressure a democratic ally out of winning against the jihadis, makes no sense either for stability in the Middle East or our own national security. Full article here (paywall)

The BBC

Jonathan Sacerdoti: A leaked internal email from a BBC executive editor reveals that the Corporation has issued prescriptive instructions to staff on how to cover the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The memo, titled ‘Covering the food crisis in Gaza’, amounts to a top-down editorial diktat that discards impartiality, elevates one side of a deeply contested narrative, and imposes a specific anti-Israel legal-political framing as settled fact. The existence of this email is a telling sign of how the Corporation works to ensure its journalists stick to its own ideological angles.

The email, which was sent to BBC staff on Friday, begins by declaring that “the argument over how much aid has crossed into Gaza is irrelevant” and instructs staff that “we should say” the current distribution system “doesn’t work”. It explicitly favours a particular explanation of suffering in Gaza: one that blames the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a relatively new aid body established with US and Israeli cooperation, while glossing over the role of Hamas, the rulers of Gaza and a proscribed terrorist organisation under British law.

But the quantity of aid entering Gaza is not irrelevant. If Hamas is hijacking, obstructing or reselling aid, as Israeli and independent reports suggest, and as documented footage and testimony have supported, then the location, handling and efficacy of aid delivery become vital indicators of where the problem lies. Blaming Israel alone for the humanitarian breakdown while exonerating or ignoring Hamas is not responsible or fair journalism.Full article here (paywall)