WASHINGTON — The Israeli government is defending a top military officer who dismissed images of starving Palestinians as “fake” over the weekend, despite President Trump stating Monday that he believes the pictures are real.
The rupture comes amid growing international pressure on Israel over dire circumstances in the Palestinian enclave, and as two Israeli human rights groups, in a first, characterized the Israeli operation in Gaza as a genocide.
In recent days, photographs and videos of desperate Palestinians crowding aid stations and of emaciated children have spread across the globe. Even so, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Sunday that “there is no starvation in Gaza.”
And on Sunday, during a press tour of a small area of the Gaza Strip, Effie Defrin, a commanding officer and Israel Defense Forces spokesman, told reporters that visuals emerging from Gaza were “breaking our hearts.”
“But most of it is fake, fake distributed by Hamas,” Defrin said. “It’s a campaign. Unfortunately, some of the Israeli media, including some of the international media, is distributing this information and those false pictures, and creating an image of starvation which doesn’t exist.”
Palestinians struggle to access food as a charity distributes meals in Gaza City, amid Israel’s blockade and ongoing attacks, on Monday.
(Khames Alrefi / Anadolu / Getty Images)
Trump rejected that explanation on Monday, telling reporters during a visit to Scotland that the United States would increase its efforts to get food into the territory. “That’s real starvation,” he said. “I see it, and you can’t fake that.”
“Israel can do a lot,” he added, replying to a question on whether the state could help end the hunger crisis.
An Israeli official told The Times that the Israeli government stands by Defrin’s remarks.
Israel opened additional corridors for humanitarian aid and began its own air drops of food on Sunday. The Israeli official said that, while aid is getting into Gaza, the United Nations and its affiliate organizations are failing to properly distribute it. Humanitarian workers have argued that conditions on the ground, with combat ongoing, have made it impossible for them to operate.
Netanyahu’s office has argued that Hamas is diverting food and aid away from civilians as a war tactic. But assessments by USAID and the Israeli military found no evidence that Hamas is doing so on a wide scale.
In late May, Israel halted relief work by the United Nations and other humanitarian aid groups and handed those efforts to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Critics say the foundation’s efforts have been insufficient and haphazard.
Palestinians carry humanitarian aid they received at the Rafah corridor as they walk in the Mawasi area of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Monday.
(AFP/Getty Images)
Last week, the World Health Organization said it has documented 21 children under 5 that had died of causes related to malnutrition since the beginning of the year, and the U.N. humanitarian office, OCHA, said that at least 13 children’s deaths were reported just this month.
The crisis comes as two Israeli rights groups long critical of the current Israeli government — B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel — issued assessments that the Israeli campaign amounts to a genocide against Palestinians.
“An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip,” the B’Tselem report stated. “In other words: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Israel began striking Hamas in Gaza after the organization launched a devastating attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing nearly 1,200 Israeli civilians and security forces, and taking 251 others hostage.
The Israeli response has leveled entire Palestinian cities and displaced nearly all 2 million Palestinian inhabitants of the territory, killing nearly 60,000 Palestinian civilians and militants. On Monday, another series of strikes killed at least 78 Palestinians in Gaza, according to Hamas’ health ministry.
Genocide — a word that weighs heavily in Israel, a state founded as a Jewish homeland after the Nazi Holocaust — is an international legal term with a specific definition: “Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Debate over whether Israel’s operation amounts to a genocide has raged since its earliest days.
Israel’s government says that the war has continued because Hamas has refused to release approximately 50 hostages that remain in its custody throughout Gaza.
Negotiations over an end to the war, which would see Israel end hostilities in exchange for Hamas releasing the hostages, have seen fits and starts since the Biden administration.
Humanitarian aid is airdropped to Palestinians over Gaza City on Monday.
(Jehad Alshrafi / Associated Press)
Trump has alternately tried to broker a peace between Hamas and Israel, and at other times said that Hamas will face greater punishment unless it capitulates.
In Scotland, Trump pivoted away from the more aggressive approach. The president said he had told Netanyahu that Israel may have to find a “different way” to end the war, given the extent of the devastation on the ground.
“I’m speaking to Bibi Netanyahu, and we’re coming up with various plans,” Trump said, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname. “We’re going to see. It’s a very difficult situation.”
Trump added, “If they didn’t have the hostages, things would go very quickly. But they do, and we know where they have them, in some cases, and you don’t want to go riding roughshod over that area, because that means those hostages will be killed.”
“Now, there are some people that would say, that’s the price you pay,” he said. “But we don’t like to say that. We don’t want to say that.”