Award-Winning Gaza Journalist Admits That Hamas Controls the Media Narrative™

A Palestinian “journalist” who has been featured so favorably and often by Pravda media that he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as a truth-teller fighting a “genocide” openly discussed on an Arabic-language podcast how all the news coming out of Gaza is propaganda manipulated by Hamas, including his own work. 

Just checked media coverage of the damning revelations from the Motaz Azaiza interview:

CNN site: 0 mentions
NBC News: 0 mentions
Reuters: 0 mentions
AP: 0 mentions
NYT: 0 mentions
Washington Post: 0 mentions

All of these orgs have repeatedly promoted him in the past. https://t.co/WOe2A0741m

— AG (@AGHamilton29) September 20, 2026

Motaz Hilal Azaiza is a Gazan photographer from Deir al-Balah, a city in the Gaza Strip, and he is an open supporter of the Palestinian armed resistance, although he has soured on Hamas itself because he is angry that they are too brutal to Gaza civilians. Not that he expected that civilians wouldn’t be victims of the warfare — he just thinks Hamas is brutal itself. 

He’s become so famous that Time Magazine named him one of the top 100 most influential people in 2023, making him one of the prime propagandists against Israel — a job he had before the war as a content producer. He was GQ Middle East’s “Man of the Year.”

Coverage of Israel is the anomaly that breaks all normal media patterns— in duration, volume, and sentiment.

On US cable news, Sudan’s actual genocide (est. 400K deaths) topped 1% of airtime on only 8/390 days, as it grew worse. Israel, after Oct 7, exceeded 1% on 344/365 days. pic.twitter.com/0AAbPwfUjI

— Jeremy Musighi (@immutbl) September 16, 2026

In 9 of the last 10 years, Israel was the focus of more global media stories per capita than any other country, by far. 10M people — #95 in the world by population — but #6 in absolute volume of coverage over the decade. In 2024, 1 of every 26 articles on Earth was about Israel. pic.twitter.com/yY6q3u44Xk

— Jeremy Musighi (@immutbl) September 16, 2026

In September, he did a 3-plus hour-long podcast for a long Arabic-language episode of Taqarob / Taqarrab with Palestinian host Ahmed Biqawi, and he spilled an awful lot of beans, not that the so-called “Establishment Media” has covered any of those beans. After all, they relied on him as one of their top stringers in Gaza and presented his reporting as The Truth™, and Hilal Aziz makes quite clear that said “Truth” is a coordinated messaging campaign organized by Hamas, and deviation from it can be fatal. 

He eventually left Gaza under threat from Hamas because he made the mistake of filming a Palestinian who blamed Hamas for their suffering. He became a victim of the very group of which he was a part and had to flee to save his life due to his mistake. 

For years, apparently and unsurprisingly, “all” (I can’t verify whether he means literally all, or if he means “all significant/prominent”) journalists in Gaza participate in a secret WhatsApp group to coordinate propaganda and discipline those who deviate from the approved Narrative™. Screenshots of the discussions confirm the group’s existence. The group is even run by an organization with an official director. 

BOMBSHELL: Motaz Azaiza admits that he met with Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, but asked people to hide all photographs of it. pic.twitter.com/EIw7myXdsd

— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) September 18, 2026

BOMBSHELL: Motaz Azaiza admits he filmed Israeli hostages being beaten in the streets of Gaza on October 7, and deliberately never published it, to protect the identities of the people beating them.

He did post other October 7 footage that day, celebrating the attack. He quietly deleted it later.

Azaiza is an influential “photojournalist” from Ghazza. TIME named him to the TIME 100. He was nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. CNN, the Guardian and Sky all interviewed him.

Ms. Rachel Griffin-Accurso, who has 16 million subscribers, made a video for preschoolers introducing “my friend Motaz.” She deleted it later.

Two weeks ago, he did a 3 hour and 38 minute interview in Arabic.

He made a number of EXTRAORDINARY admissions.

Azaiza was a fully active participant in the deception campaign and an enthusiastic supporter of the violence against Israelis. He and everybody involved knew that Israel had no choice but to respond to the October 7th attacks and that a vicious war would break out; his only regret, it seems, is that he underestimated just how horrifically the war would turn out. 

Gaza “photojournalist” Motaz Azaiza admits that we all knew: Hamas knew exactly how harshly Israel would react to October 7 and did it anyway.

How does he know? Because he remembers how they reacted to the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, a single soldier.

“Anyone who tells you we… pic.twitter.com/qoyt01PjDC

— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) September 18, 2026

Gaza “photojournalist” Motaz Azaiza admits that we all knew: Hamas knew exactly how harshly Israel would react to October 7 and did it anyway.

How does he know? Because he remembers how they reacted to the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, a single soldier.

“Anyone who tells you we didn’t expect the reaction, tell him you’re lying. All of Gaza expected the reaction.”

“Hamas itself knew the Israeli reaction. So it went in on Saturday, the Jews’ Sabbath.”

For all the talk about how Gaza was an open-air prison before the war, Azaiza admits that things were actually getting pretty good. That fits with all those videos comparing Gaza pre-war and post-war that we have seen. 

🚨 Gaza “photojournalist” Motaz Azaiza admits:

Hamas’s weapons did not protect a single person in Gaza, and they could have handed over their weapons on October 11, 2023.

“Why is it so easy for you that 200,000 [sic] of us die?” pic.twitter.com/SYOGeAjJ2W

— Max 📟 (@MaxNordau) September 18, 2026

BOMBSHELL: Gaza “photojournalist” Motaz Azaiza admits how good things were in Gaza before Gazans invaded Israel on October 7.

The host puts it to him: people were under siege, but for two or three years they’d started to see hope, started building projects, opening cafes. Is that feeling real?

Azaiza: “Yes. The last two years, it wasn’t really a siege. Something eased.”

“The country’s standard improved. A lot of new projects opened. Travel got easier. Instead of paying 1,500 or 2,000 dollars for coordination, you’d pay 200.”

“Things eased a bit. The country moved a bit.”

Hamas and its supporters chose to throw it all away.

This was the media’s “man on the ground” who was so key to shaping The Narrative™ that he became a poster boy for the Palestinian cause and a celebrity who palled around with Miss Rachel and Zohran Mamdani, was flown from the Middle East to New York galas to be celebrated for his work, and who every major news source paraded around as their expert. 

And he admits that it was all propaganda designed to fool Westerners. He chose what to broadcast and what not to, and he helped plan it. He still would be, but he soured on Hamas, if not the idea of war itself. 

And, of course, no one in the media chose to disclose to the public that they were being spoon-fed reporting from Hamas

— Sarah Adams (@sarahadams) September 19, 2026

A few key revelations related to Gaza coverage in last few days:

– Almost all of the media in Gaza were in a Hamas-run WhatsApp group that dictated and coordinated coverage. Including contributors to major western news organizations.

– Al Jazeera fired 24 of their media members from Gaza for direct ties to terror groups

– Admission that anyone in Gaza who reported anything contrary to Hamas claims was likely to be killed by Hamas. 

Almost all of the information that came out of Gaza was part of a coordinated disinformation campaign by the very people who started the war.

Because the interview was in Arabic, it’s been easy for the media to ignore, and they have. No doubt the producers already knew they were pushing an agenda, and were happy to have such a skilled person help them do it. 

Report: Al Jazeera has fired 24 journalists and staff members who worked for the network in the Gaza Strip, amid a lawsuit filed in the US accusing the Qatari broadcaster of providing support to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).https://t.co/1dWMhWmfFt

— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) September 19, 2026

A number of academic studies are starting to trickle out about the coverage of the Gaza War, and they tell you exactly what you already knew about the media coverage. The New York Times was systematically biased against Israel, the entire media complex swallowed Hamas propaganda whole and amplified it, and the only media story with any staying power for the past several years has been that Israel is evil. 

A new peer-reviewed study by @Fifty_Global analyzed 1,378 articles containing the word “Gaza” from CNN, BBC, NYT, The Guardian, WaPo, ABC, Reuters, and AP. The findings are wild:

🔸 Hamas Health Ministry figures appeared in 100% of the outlets’ casualty reporting. Israeli… pic.twitter.com/q7qhOqpTKT

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) September 15, 2026

A new peer-reviewed study by @Fifty_Global analyzed 1,378 articles containing the word “Gaza” from CNN, BBC, NYT, The Guardian, WaPo, ABC, Reuters, and AP. The findings are wild:

🔸 Hamas Health Ministry figures appeared in 100% of the outlets’ casualty reporting. Israeli casualty estimates appeared in just 3%.

🔸 Israeli estimates of Hamas fighters killed were almost nonexistent. The New York Times never cited them. CNN and The Guardian did so in roughly 1% of articles. AP and ABC were highest at around 7–8%.

🔸 The Gaza Health Ministry’s headline death toll does not distinguish civilians from combatants. Yet only around 15% of articles actually told readers that.

🔸 AP and the Washington Post did better, noting this limitation in roughly 40–43% of relevant articles.

🔸 The skepticism was also wildly uneven. The BBC questioned Israeli figures in 43% of relevant cases, but Hamas Health Ministry figures in 0%.

🔸 The Washington Post questioned Israeli figures 71% of the time, compared with just 1% for Hamas Health Ministry figures.

We’re all well aware of the insane anti-Israel bias in the media. But it’s always nice to have empirical evidence backing it up

None of this should surprise anyone who’s been paying attention; unfortunately, most people’s attention is directed by volume and tone, not facts. They get a feeling of what is going on, and if something is repeated enough, however absurd or distorted, it becomes “common sense.”

“Everybody knows that!”

Azaiza was one of the cogs in that propaganda machine, and the machine thought he was so good at it that they paraded him around the world to spread the word. 

As is so often the case, he can say in Arabic what must not be said in English, and he did. 

Now you know. 

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