A Gaza-born, pro-Palestinian analyst exposing Hamas’s manipulation of a hunger crisis is not the source one normally expects behind a post sounding as if it were written by a pro-Israel Internet warrior. Yet that is precisely what Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib did this week, shattering one of the most enduring narratives of the war.
Alkhatib is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council whose X bio reads: “Proud American, Gaza native, pro-Palestine, pro-Peace, anti-Hamas & milit-occupation.” He posted a short clip showing cats scurrying over boxes of infant formula in a Gaza warehouse. An anguished voice is heard saying in Arabic, “Oh God, these are thieves and criminals. Our children are dying of hunger while aid is being stockpiled. They stored it away instead of distributing it.”
In explaining the footage, Alkhatib wrote: “During the worst of the days of the hunger crisis in Gaza in the past six months, Hamas deliberately hid literal tons of infant formula and nutritional shakes for children by storing them in clandestine warehouses belonging to the Gaza Ministry of Health.”
This stands in stark contrast to the media narrative that dominated global coverage for months in the spring and summer.
Accusations of deliberate starvation by Israel
Consider this sampling of headlines:Le Monde on July 1: “Israel limits entry of baby formula in Gaza as infants die of hunger.”
Turkey’s viciously hostile, state-run news agency, Anadolu Agency, on July 28: “Over 40,000 infants at risk of death in Gaza due to Israeli ban on baby formula, authorities warn.”
The BBC in May: “‘No food when I gave birth’: Malnutrition rises in Gaza as Israeli blockade enters third month.”
The common theme is unmistakable: Israel is deliberately starving Gaza’s children. But Alkhatib’s post tells a very different story – one that many newsrooms preferred not to hear. According to him, the purpose of hiding the formula was “to worsen the hunger crisis and initiate a disaster as part of the terror group’s famine narrative.”
When Alkhatib and others made these claims in July, at the height of the “starvation” crisis, he said they were “villainized, attacked, threatened, and made into pariahs by the ‘pro-Palestine’ industrial complex and activist mafias, even though for Gazans, the evidence was so clearly apparent before our eyes.”
His most searing lines, however, were these: “What those in the West continue to fail to understand is that there is no being pro-Palestine without also having a serious vigilance against Hamas’s continued manipulation of international public opinion to hide behind the Strip’s civilian population’s suffering, something that the terrorist organization’s own actions have led to and created. Never allow yourself to be a useful idiot in Hamas’s propaganda.”
This episode is not an aberration. It is a continuation of a decades-long pattern: a near-total refusal to assign responsibility to the Arab side for its own actions.
The Palestinian refugee crisis? Israel’s fault – never mind that it was Arab leaders who rejected partition and then launched a war to destroy the Jewish state.
Hunger in Gaza? Not because Hamas brutally attacked Israel and triggered a war. Not because it hides infant formula to inflame a crisis. Instead, blame defaults to Israel, the cruel party in a narrative shaped long before this war began.
For centuries, people were conditioned to believe in Jewish cruelty – the grotesque libels of killing children and using their blood for matzot. Old habits die hard. The vocabulary changes, but the instinct remains: Accuse the Jews first, believe the worst about them, and then investigate later, if at all.
Once in a long while, however, someone from within Arab society, such as Alkhatib, who has lost 31 family members in Gaza since the October 7 massacre, dares to speak up.
He exposed a truth many in the West find inconvenient: Hamas manipulates public opinion while showing utter indifference to the suffering of its own people. If that suffering helps advance its ultimate goal of Israel’s disappearance – and if Western “useful idiots” assist along the way – then so be it.
One final point deserves attention. Alkhatib said the hidden baby formula was stored in warehouses belonging to the Gaza Ministry of Health, the same ministry whose casualty figures are treated as indisputable fact by much of the international media. If that ministry conceals life-saving supplies to manufacture famine, why should anyone unquestioningly trust its numbers or its claims?
The answer should be obvious. The tragedy is that, for many, it still isn’t.