New York Times headquarters
New York Times headquartersiStock

The New York Times on Sunday published an Op Ed written by the Mayor of Gaza City, who was selected for the position by the Hamas terrorist organization.

The piece by Yahya R. Sarraj, titled 'I Am Gaza City’s Mayor. Our Lives and Culture Are in Rubble,' was published on Christmas Eve and blamed Israel for the destruction in Gaza since the Hamas massacre of October 7.

Sarraj, who was appointed by Hamas in 2019 rather than elected by the people, accused Israel of causing more than 20,000 deaths in Gaza, without specifying that this figure includes over 8,000 combatants and terrorists, and of damaging or destroying half of the buildings that stood in Gaza before October 7.

He did not condemn the massacre of 1,200 people and the taking of 240 hostages, merely calling it the "deadly attack by Hamas," nor did he acknowledge Hamas' role in the destruction and death in Gaza through its deliberate use of human shields, use of civilian site such as schools and hospitals for military purposes, stealing of humanitarian aid, or killing of its own people.

The Times' decision to publish a piece by a man appointed by the genocidal terrorist organization Hamas was strongly criticized on social media as giving a platform to spread antisemitism.

International Human Rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky wrote on X (formerly Twitter): "Oh, nothing to see here. Just @nytimes publishing an op-ed by Hamas appointed mayor of Gaza, Yahya Sarraj. I wonder, would NYT also publish an op-ed from Al-Qaeda justifying 9-11? Of course not, but there is no red line to this paper's Jew hatred."

Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy asked: "Is the first line of this, “and as the mayor who oversaw the biggest ever construction boom in Hamas terror infrastructure under schools, mosques, hospitals, homes & UN facilities, I take responsibility for the disaster this inflicted on my people and resign”?"

Other users pointed out that left-wing Times staffers forced the resignation of then-Opinion Editor James Bennet in 2020 after Bennet published an Op Ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton calling for the activation of the National Guard in response to mass riots in American cities following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Despite finding Senator Cotton's words so controversial, the paper's staff deemed it appropriate to publish the words of an official appointed by an organization dedicated to the annihilation of the Jewish people.

On Friday, the Times was criticized for publishing an article with the headline: 'Gaza deaths surpass any Arab war losses in 40 years.' Readers noted that in the Syrian Civil War, over 300,000 civilians have been killed, more than ten times the number of people killed in Gaza. About 500,000 people have been killed in total during the Syrian Civil War, according to most estimates.

Other Middle Eastern wars of the last 40 years that saw more deaths than the current war between Israel and Hamas include the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988 (500,000 deaths), the Iraq War that began in 2003 (460,000 deaths as of 2011), the Yemen Civil War, (377,000 deaths to date, the 2013-2017 war against ISIS in Iraq (150,000 deaths), and the First Gulf War (about 50,000 deaths).