Former U.S. ambassador to Israel rips false media portrayal of Israel

Jack Lew said Hamas deliberately placed children at military targets.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

In a wide-ranging interview Tuesday on the war in Gaza, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told The New Yorker that the media often unfairly blamed Israel for military actions that were legitimate under international law.

Lew took the post less than a month before thousands of Hamas-led terrorists massacred 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and took 251 people, both alive and dead, back into Gaza as hostages on Oct. 7, 2023, triggering the ongoing war.

He said reports that reached the Biden administration quickly painted Israel as a wrongdoer even though the IDF was following the rules of war, but that false narrative was the one accepted by global audiences.

“The general pattern,” he said, “was that in-the-moment stories were inaccurate and that the Israeli military and government establishment were not in a position to fully explain yet.”

“We could almost never get answers that explained what happened before the story was fully framed in international media,” he continued, “and then when the facts were fully developed, it turned out that the casualties were much lower, the number of civilians was much lower, and, in many cases, the children were children of Hamas fighters, not children taking cover in places.”

When asked to explain, Lew answered, “A military target flows from the population that’s there,” and minors killed in an Israeli attack “were often the children of the fighters themselves.”

“If you’re in a command-and-control center, that’s different than if it’s a school that’s emptied out and innocent civilians are taking shelter there,” he noted. “If you’re the commander of a Hamas unit and you bring your family to a military site, that’s different.”

“It is not the simple question that it originally appears to be when the initial report makes it sound like the target was just an empty school that families took cover in,” he added, clarifying that “I’m not saying everything fits into that, and I’m not saying it’s not a tragedy.”

On humanitarian aid in Gaza, Lew said the Biden administration had considered the matter of utmost importance and had pressed Israel hard to keep it flowing, while acknowledging Israel’s legitimate concern that much of it went to Hamas instead of to ordinary Gazans.

“The risk of strengthening Hamas, if Hamas got hold of the fuel or the food, was a serious question. It wasn’t a made-up concern,” he said.

“We never saw it going directly from what the United States was providing. So I want to be clear on that. But they undoubtedly were trying to control the administration of aid because it was a way of holding on to governance.”

He also noted the complexity of the issue, which has bedeviled Israel since the start of the war.

“The environment in October and November of 2023 was how do you sustain an enemy that just slaughtered 1,200 of your citizens?” he said. “You had to create a way for the aid to get in without it having the effect of making your enemy succeed. It is pretty unusual.”

Lew also made clear that he did not believe Hamas’ repeated claims of famine in Gaza.

“I’m not saying that we achieved the goal of getting enough food in to meet all needs,” he said. “But that’s a very, very different reality than mass malnutrition and famine. And every time there were reports of famine that were not accurate, it made it harder to do the job of getting more aid in.”

“I can tell you that we did not see evidence of mass starvation leading to death,” he said.