Addressing the disorder in Los Angeles on social media, the Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz pushed the claim that the synagogue was hosting “a sale of Palestinian land,” and therefore what transpired should be understood as a political protest rather than an assault on a house of worship. This claim is true only if one considers every inch of Israel “Palestinian land.” Such misleading or mendacious statements about Israel have become de rigueur on the pages of the Washington Post, which has distinguished itself even among other America media outlets in its willingness to publish slanders of the Jewish state.

There are many reasons why this is so, but one points back to Qatar and its malign influence. Joseph Simonson writes:

At least six members of the Post’s foreign desk previously wrote for Al Jazeera, the Doha-based news outlet bankrolled in part by the government of Qatar, which is now sheltering Hamas’s top leaders. . . . They include the paper’s Middle East editor, Jesse Mesner-Hage, who spent more than a decade as an editor at the outlet’s English edition [and] the London correspondent Louisa Loveluck.

Just over a month after the October 7 terrorist attacks, the Post ran an A1 story titled, “Israel’s war with Hamas separates Palestinian babies from their mothers.” The story was rife with inaccuracies and misrepresentations. . . . A subsequent 230-word editor’s note attached to the piece said its reports “fell short of the Post’s standards for fairness.”

Loveluck’s is the lead byline on that report. Aside from her work with Al Jazeera, she previously worked as the Post’s Baghdad bureau chief. Loveluck’s work with Al Jazeera is omitted from her biography on the Post’s website.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.