Israel’s main justification for its deadly blockade of Gaza was built on a lie. The New York Times repeated it for months.
The New York Times repeated Israel’s baseless claim that Hamas was stealing aid nearly two dozen times before its own sources contradicted that talking point, an Intercept analysis has found, as Palestinian people suffered mass starvation and risked their lives to find food amid Israel’s blockade.
During its near-total blockade of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, Israel has repeatedly claimed that Hamas steals aid and that restricting it will help the two parties achieve a ceasefire. The U.S. and Israel pointed to that argument in May when they handed aid operations over to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a contested American nonprofit that funnels Gazans to limited aid sites where the Israeli army has repeatedly opened fire on starving civilians. At each turn, the New York Times dutifully printed the official justifications.
Then the Times published an article on Saturday reporting that there was “no proof” that Hamas was stealing aid from the United Nations, citing four anonymous Israeli sources. The story noted that the U.N. aid system, which provided the bulk of the aid to Gaza, was “largely effective,” and there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the U.N., though the unnamed sources claimed that Hamas did steal from smaller organizations.
But in 61 articles related to Gaza’s hunger crisis the Times published since January, 23 included Israel’s accusations that Hamas was stealing aid. Nine of those stories did not include opposing statements refuting Israel’s claim. Twelve articles of the 61 analyzed by The Intercept cited concerns about Hamas diverting aid without an explicit accusation. At the time of publication, the Times had not added a correction or update to these stories to indicate that the claims were false.
None of the articles provided any evidence in support of the claims except for the comments of Israeli officials, who work for a government that has repeatedly spread disinformation, including in its record-breaking fatal attacks on journalists, aid workers, and children.
In a statement to The Intercept, New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said that the paper’s journalists have done “deep reporting on both Israel and Hamas’ actions and tactics during the war, and will continue to report hard and publish facts.”
“The Times has reported deeply, fairly and accurately on the war in Gaza since it began, including the hardships and food shortages faced by Gazans, and when government officials provide claims and accusations, our reporters put them in context,” Stadtlander said.
Even before the Times’s Saturday story, aid groups on the ground in Gaza had repeatedly refuted the Israeli government’s claims of aid theft.
The U.N. agency tasked with distributing aid in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, has maintained for months that it has received no specific evidence that Hamas or other armed groups were diverting its humanitarian aid in Gaza.
“These claims are used as a pretext to justify the aid distribution system supported by the Israeli authorities and the United States of America (so-called GHF), which falls far from abiding by the humanitarian principles and international humanitarian law,” an UNRWA spokesperson told The Intercept in a statement.
Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza has now subjected 500,000 people — nearly a quarter of the occupied territory’s population — to famine-like conditions, according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Alert. The rest of the population is facing emergency levels of hunger, and every child under the age of 5 is at risk of acute malnutrition.
The Israeli government’s blockade and ensuing starvation have killed over 100 Palestinians, UNICEF said. Eighty percent of them are children.
UNRWA says it has thousands of trucks waiting in Jordan and Egypt that could surge aid to Palestinians and prevent fatal hunger. But instead of resuming U.S. funding for UNRWA — which President Joe Biden ended last year — President Donald Trump has opted to support GHF even as Israeli soldiers have killed hundreds of aid-seekers at its food distribution sites since late May.
As the starvation catastrophe began to draw international condemnation, Israel said that it would allow aid airdrops in Gaza — a strategy human rights groups have rebuked as ineffective and dangerous. On Sunday, Al Jazeera reported that 11 Palestinians were injured after a pallet fell directly on the tents of displaced people.
Last month, the International Crisis Group published a report titled “The Gaza Starvation Experiment,” which found that while Hamas likely extracts some revenue, audits have shown less than 1 percent of assistance has been lost to theft. Aid officials and Gaza residents told the group that the Abu Shabab gang, armed by Israel, has been the “single most prolific looter” during the war on Gaza. Other reports challenging claims of Hamas diverting aid have come out in recent weeks from USAID, the EU Commission, and Israeli media.
Reuters reported last week that a USAID analysis found that out of 156 reported incidents of theft or loss of U.S.-funded supplies between October 2023 and May 2025, at least 44 were related to Israeli military actions.
Despite the mounting evidence, the Times continued to parrot Israel’s claims, including on July 10, June 26, and June 17 — after the ICG released its report. The Times also published an article on Monday that included statements by Trump claiming that Hamas was stealing aid. The article did not clarify that no evidence had been shown to prove this claim.
Past Intercept analyses and investigations have found that the New York Times and other mainstream outlets have demonstrated a bias against Palestinians.
In April 2024, The Intercept published a report on an internal Times memo that instructed journalists to restrict use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land. The memo also instructed against using the word “Palestine” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians, despite the fact that the United Nations recognizes the areas as refugee camps, and they house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.
A quantitative analysis of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times’s coverage of the first six weeks of the conflict showed a consistent bias against Palestinians, finding that major U.S. newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7. Pro-Palestinian activists have accused major publications of pro-Israel bias and protested at the Times headquarters in Manhattan for its coverage of Gaza.
The Times and other major mainstream media outlets have often minimized top Israeli officials’ genocidal remarks calling for collective punishment of Palestinians and failed to note that using starvation as a weapon of war is a violation of international law.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned as early as October 11, 2023, that the regime “will continue to tighten the siege until the Hamas threat to Israel and the world is removed.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said a week later that “the only thing that should enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of air force explosives, not a gram of humanitarian aid.”
“No one in the world will allow us to starve two million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said last year. And last week, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said in a radio interview that his government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” describing Palestinians as indoctrinated Nazis.
“There’s no hunger in Gaza,” Eliyahu said, dismissing reports of starvation as anti-Israel propaganda. “But we don’t need to be concerned with hunger in the Strip. Let the world worry about it.”
Minnah Arshad is a reporter and journalist for The Intercept.
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