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Source: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-866253
Israel Winning in Gaza, Losing Global Narrative War, Genocide Study Shows
(Jerusalem Post) Herb Keinon - Israel is fighting two wars against Hamas. The first is the grinding military campaign in Gaza. The other is the battle over narrative and legitimacy. On the first front, Israel is winning resoundingly. On the second front, Israel is taking a beating. As President Trump said on Friday, Israel "may be winning the war, but they're not winning the world of public relations." A new 311-page study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University highlights just how distorted the conversation has become. The report systematically dismantles some of the most frequently leveled charges against Israel - genocide, deliberate starvation, indiscriminate killing - by reexamining casualty figures, food-truck deliveries, and UN reports. The report provides Israel with the kind of factual ammunition needed to demonstrate clearly that the sweeping allegation of genocide is without foundation. But the damage has been done. During long stretches of the war, more food entered Gaza than before the Oct. 7 massacre. But the claim of an Israeli-induced famine has already hardened into conventional wisdom. For Hamas, propaganda is a doctrine and a weapon of war. It invested in narrative warfare as systematically as it invested in rockets. As former prime minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser and spokesperson Raanan Gissin put it: "The Palestinians want the world to treat a war zone as a crime scene." Increasingly, that is exactly what is happening: Israel's war of survival is recast as a crime, with the Jewish state treated as the criminal.