Palestinians collect aid supplies from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, June 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hatem Khaled

There’s a chilling deliberateness to the timing of New York Magazine’s latest cover story, penned by Suzy Hansen.

As Iranian ballistic missiles rain down on Israeli cities and rescue teams pull bodies from the wreckage of flattened apartment blocks, the magazine accuses Israel of perpetrating one of the greatest crimes of our time — an evil so singular, so unprecedented, that even genocidal regimes like North Korea or the architects of ISIS’ reign of terror escape comparison.

Hansen’s piece, titled “Crimes of the Century: How Israel, with the help of the U.S., broke not only Gaza but the foundations of humanitarian law,” is not a call for accountability. It is an indictment without evidence, a sentence without trial.

In this telling, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism — the Islamic Republic of Iran, with its explicit goal of annihilating Israel and long record of arming Hamas and Hezbollah — is a footnote. The singular evil, Hansen insists, is Israel.

And no, it is not whataboutism to question the logic.

That @NYMag @suzyhans published an op-ed today about “Israel’s Crimes” as missiles literally slam into Israeli homes, sent by the regime that funded the terrorists behind Oct 7… is a choice.

🧵 pic.twitter.com/n2kNXFdPMN

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 16, 2025

The “facts” presented are not facts at all, but a patchwork of distortions. Hansen repeats the oft-debunked claim that genocide accusations began “one week into” Israel’s retaliatory campaign after the October 7 Hamas massacre. In truth, those accusations were already circulating while Hamas gunmen were still rampaging through Israeli communities — raping, murdering, and abducting civilians. The record is public. We have the receipts.

She also falsely claims that the International Court of Justice ruled there were “plausible” claims of genocide in Gaza. In fact, as ICJ President Joan Donoghue later clarified, the court made no such finding. The “plausibility” in question referred only to South Africa’s standing to bring the case — not to the merits of the accusation itself.

🧵Article in @NYMag claims war crimes in Gaza. FIRST example of strike presented as criminal does not disclose that it targeted a Hamas commander, tunnel network (NOT the buildings) with many secondary explosions. @suzyhans why did you omit this critical information? Sources: 1/ pic.twitter.com/F8fBRUYH5Q

— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) June 17, 2025

Then comes the claim that “newborns are dying of malnutrition” — part of a broader narrative that Israel is deliberately engineering famine. But had starvation been Israel’s intention from the outset, Gaza would be facing the unmistakable markers of famine: mass graves, skeletal children, corpses in the streets. That hasn’t happened — because even while fighting a war against Hamas, Israel has continued to facilitate the entry of humanitarian aid.

Hansen, unsurprisingly, has form. In a New York Times op-ed published two months after the October 7 atrocities, she described her thoughts on the day of the massacre. Not horror at the slaughter of civilians. Not anguish over the hostages dragged into Gaza. Not empathy for families watching the horror unfold in real time. Her concern, even as the attacks were still underway, was how Israel might respond.

She even invoked 9/11, lamenting what she called the “catastrophic” consequences for Arabs and Muslims. In Hansen’s world, the victims of terrorism are not the raped, the murdered, or the kidnapped — but the unnamed masses who might feel the political aftershock.

Now, she accuses Israel of the “crimes of the century.”

One wonders what the actual victims of genocide might say to that — the Yazidis, perhaps, or the survivors of Darfur.

But perhaps they don’t count in Hansen’s world. Because Israel wasn’t the one who hurt them.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.