Hamas terrorists appear to shoot civilians who are lying on the ground in a video posted by Gaza Now, a Hamas-aligned news outlet based in Gaza. Photo: Screenshot

“Journalism,” George Orwell allegedly said, “is printing what someone else does not wanted printed: everything else is public relations.”

By this standard, The Washington Post’s coverage of the latest war between Israel and Iranian proxies is little more than PR. It can hardly be called journalism.

A recent article by the newspaper purported to provide readers with details about negotiations between Israel and Hamas. But instead of offering facts, the Post reprinted a litany of lies. 

The paper struck a false equivalency between hostages being held by Hamas, and Palestinian prisoners locked up by Israel for crimes including murder and terrorism.

But terrorists are not the same as their victims. Nor are they credible sources.

It took no fewer than four reporters to author the Jan. 26, 2025 story, “Who are the Palestinians released by Israel in exchange for hostages?” And not a single one saw a problem with treating a designated terror organization as a credible source.

The Post uncritically quoted claims by Samidoun, which the newspaper identified as merely “an activist network supporting Palestinian prisoners.”

This would be akin to referring to Al-Qaeda as “campaigners for an archaic version of Islam,” or describing the founder of ISIS as an “austere, religious scholar.”

A basic tenet of journalism is to identify the “who, what, when, where, and why” relating to a story. Another tenet is to fully vet your sources. And still another is to be as specific as possible. The Post failed at all three.

In fact, the newspaper’s trusted source is a designated terrorist group. Samidoun has been identified as such by the United States, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands, among others. 

On Oct. 15, 2024, the US Treasury Department noted that Samidoun was a “sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.” Treasury noted that Canada had listed Samidoun as a terrorist entity on October 11. The Acting Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Bradley Smith, observed that “organizations like Samidoun masquerade as charitable actors that claim to provide humanitarian support to those in need, yet in reality divert funds for much needed assistance to terrorist groups.”

Yet a mere three months after these public designations, The Washington Post, whose masthead proclaims that “democracy dies in darkness,” cited Samidoun as a credible source. But the group’s history of trafficking in hate and supporting terror has long been a matter of public record. 

Organizations like NGO Monitor, among others, have highlighted the PFLP’s extensive disinformation network in numerous reports. These too are open source and readily available. But they don’t serve the anti-Israel narrative that The Washington Post prefers — a narrative that groups like Samidoun pitch to their willing interlocutors in the legacy media. As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) has observed, a whole host of nonprofits exists for the sole purpose of pitching and placing anti-Israel articles, providing self-styled journalists with ready-made stories and ensuring that they don’t have to work too hard to file their reports.

The Post’s decision to trust a terrorist group sparked condemnation. CAMERA, Fox News reporter Joseph Wulfsohn, the Washington Free Beacon’s Lexi Boccuzzi, and others highlighted the Post’s transgression. In a widely quoted thread on X, the Middle East analyst Eitan Fischberger called it “one of the most egregious examples of journalistic malpractice I’ve seen in a while.” 

After the outcry, the Post belatedly amended the story to include what it called a “clarification note,” which still managed to whitewash Samidoun. The newspaper meekly admitted that it had “failed to note that the United States says the group is an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which Washington has placed under sanctions.” Suffice to say: this is not the behavior of an honest and truth-telling publication. Good journalism exposes coverups — it doesn’t execute them.

Indeed, as Fischberger pointed out, one of the “reporters” behind the Post article, Niha Masih, was accusing Israel of perpetrating a “genocide” more than a decade ago. In an Aug. 5, 2014 tweet, she claimed that the Jewish state was guilty of “genocide” — a libelous claim that meets the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. Masih’s clear bias, including her penchant for regurgitating claims made by the Hamas, should have disqualified her from writing on Israel. 

But The Washington Post is the nexus where sloppy journalism and lapsed ethics meet. In fact, trusting terrorist groups is part of the newspaper’s modus operandi. 

As CAMERA has documented, the Post takes Hamas claims at face value. The newspaper regurgitates casualty statistics supplied by the Gaza-based terrorist group. What is more, they’ve ignored top US officials, journalists, and recent studies — all of which have warned that the figures supplied by Hamas are unreliable. Curiously, the Post doesn’t uncritically parrot claims made by terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda — only those whose preeminent target is Israel seem to merit the distinction. The newspaper is so committed to trusting Hamas that it has published “fact checks” meant to show that its figures are dependable — “fact checks” that relied on data that the United Nations later revised and which also came from Hamas. 

“Political language,” Orwell famously said, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to the wind.” Orwell’s writings were influenced by the rise of totalitarianism, including Nazism and communism, that he witnessed. Both ideologies were underpinned by the sort of murderous antisemitism that The Washington Post enables.

Were he alive today, Orwell would have a field day with the Post, with all its pretensions and propaganda.

The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis