The servicemen and women of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are no strangers to the incessant haranguing they endure at the hands of the global media doing Hamas and Hezbollah's dirty propaganda work for them. One soldier decided to make his voice heard and hold the anti-Israel media to account.
A member of the newly created elite rapid response reserve Pereh (“Wild”) unit in the Golan Heights was one of four who talked with the recent Newsmax delegation to Israel, which included MRC staff. The highly trained unit made up of locals “was established as part of the process of improving the operational response in the Golan Heights, with an emphasis on creating a division-level force multiplier,” according to Jewish News Syndicate.
One of the questions posed to us by the servicemen was about the state of the information war against them, which we admitted was still decidedly hostile and vitriolic. I asked the servicemen if they had a message they wanted to share to the media continuing to falsely smear them as the antagonists in the ongoing war in both the North and the South.
The service member who answered — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his identity — was very blunt in pointing out the extent of the damage that the global media and international leaders are doing not just to the Jewish people, but to the Palestinians in Gaza they claim to care about. “Almost every move that you’re seeing — especially on an international level — of ‘We’re going to recognize a Palestinian state’ and stuff like that,” said the soldier, “That act emboldens Hamas to say, ‘Oh great, this is a win for us....Any opportunity that they have to twist the truth, change the truth — whatever it is — will be taken and people are eating it up.'
If the amount of times the leftist media have genuflected to Hamas propaganda is any indication, the terror group has certainly racked up plenty of victories for its “W” column in the information war against Israel.
The New York Times, for example, pushed a false story of an emaciated child supposedly starving in Gaza to lambast the Jewish State when it later came to light that the child had “cerebral palsy” that was the root cause of his diminished appearance.
In another infamous example in October 2023 — just days after the October 7th genocide committed by Hamas on the Jewish people — America’s supposed “newspaper of record” pushed a false story blaming Israel for allegedly bombing the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, based purely on the word of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Not only did the outlet run a glaringly false headline — “Israeli Airstrike Hits Gaza Hospital, Killing 500, Palestinian Health Ministry Says” — the outlet used a photo of the wreckage of a completely different structure. As The Dispatch’s Jeryl Bier pointed out in a piece excoriating the newspaper, “the accompanying photo was not even of the hospital, but rather of a building in a city some 15 miles to the south.”
With countries like France, the United Kingdom, and Canada foolishly blurting out their commitment to acknowledge a Palestinian state in the middle of ongoing warfare with Hamas -- and the global media walking lockstep -- the Israeli soldier asserted that this is only making matters worse by encouraging Hamas to pull “back from ending the war and pull “back from releasing hostages.”
“All the things that you’re hearing about the Gaza Humanitarian Fund and their giving out of food and how the United Nations wants to take control of giving over aid in Gaza and that there’s a starvation campaign going on. Where you’re seeing photo after photo that’s either AI-generated or even blatantly” false like what The Times did with the emaciated child with cerebral palsy, which the soldier directly called out.
The soldier even explicitly condemned the media-stoked notion that the IDF wants to completely occupy Gaza and make it some kind of Israeli vassal state. In fact, the overarching reason for why the IDF is still conducting operations in Gaza isn’t about retaliating for October 7 in as much as it is about destroying the massive underground military infrastructure Hamas built over the years:
We don’t want to be in Gaza. We’re not this like, ‘Yes, you know, we can set up outposts now. We can expand! We can start new colonies!’ We don’t want to be there. Everything that you’re seeing in Gaza — the whole leveling of the place — is not because we’re trying to retaliate for what happened on October 7. It’s because they created a network of tunnels. They turned their entire cities and their homes — I’m talking from personal experience — seeing missiles and a missile factory next to a kindergarten.
…These are people who turned their lives and their homes into weapons caches to serve the purpose of destroying Israel and fighting against the occupation. That is what’s there.
The soldier then echoed the words of late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who stated that the day of “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” This “will not change,” the soldier said, as long as Palestinians are “taught from the age of zero that we’re the enemy — that they must hate us.”
The Pereh service member concluded with a final admonishment for the world media: “If you really want to help the Palestinians, you have to help them understand that the way forward for them is not resistance. It’s not war. It’s not killing. It’s a real desire for peace.”
