Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It, is published by Wicked Son. Access her work at: melaniephillips.substack.com.
(JNS) Stone by stone, the wall of lies constructed in the West to defame, delegitimize and destroy Israel is crumbling away.
Protests by Israel’s defenders that these lies constitute an agenda of unique malevolence have all been batted away as partisan Zionist lobbying.
Not only are the perpetrators of this anti-Israel onslaught impervious to facts, truth and evidence. They also assume a position of moral superiority, on the preposterous assumption that singling out for destruction the world’s only Jewish state is an act of conscience.
Now, however, this noxious narrative is falling apart from within.
During the war following the Hamas-led attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Gaza’s Nasser Hospital was hit several times in bombing raids by the Israel Defense Forces. The IDF had identified numerous terrorist targets either there or in the immediate vicinity.
Despite insisting that it never targeted health facilities but only the terrorist infrastructure embedded in and around them, Israel was repeatedly accused of deliberately endangering health-care staff and patients.
In February 2024, Israeli special forces detained hundreds of terror operatives at Nasser, including some who were said to be disguised as medical staff. The IDF reported finding medication packages marked with the names of Israeli hostages abducted on Oct. 7 that were never given to them; Israeli cars stolen during that invasion; and large quantities of weapons, including rifles, mortars and grenades, within the hospital grounds.
The NGO Doctors Without Borders-known by its acronym MSF because of its French name Médecins Sans Frontières-played a prominent role in Nasser’s medical care and fed Western media outlets with repeated accusations that the IDF was causing carnage in a place of healing.
Yet earlier this month, MSF quietly revealed that in January, it had suspended all noncritical operations at Nasser after staff reported that armed men, some of them masked, had been seen in different parts of the hospital. It said that for some months, its medical teams had witnessed suspected movements of weapons, as well as intimidation and even arbitrary arrests of patients by armed terrorists.
This was the first time that MSF had acknowledged any terrorist activity in Gaza’s hospitals, instantly lending retrospective credence to Israel’s claims that they were all terrorist hubs. The use of health facilities for military purposes turns them into legitimate military targets and is itself a war crime.
MSF has now professed shock at the use of Nasser hospital by terrorists, piously emphasizing the “incompatibility of such violations with MSF’s medical mission."
Yet it seems to have a history of presiding over such incompatible violations.
When Fadi al-Wadiya, a member of its health-care team, was killed in an IDF airstrike in 2024, MSF furiously proclaimed that he was “just a physiotherapist." When Israel presented it with evidence of al-Wadiya’s terrorist activities, MSF doubled down on its denials.
Yet this week, Palestinian Islamic Jihad included al-Wadiya in a list of its high-ranking commanders who were killed during the Gaza war. It turns out that he was the deputy head of PIJ’s military manufacturing unit.
As the IDF reported, he had developed and advanced PIJ’s rocket array for 15 years, and played a central role in the organization’s knowledge of electronics and chemistry-hardly, therefore, “just a physiotherapist."
Others on the PIJ list turned out to have similar dual roles. Alaa Hassan Abdullah Asbihi was an assistant commander of the military manufacturing unit while doubling as a nurse at Gaza’s European hospital.
“Journalists" on the list included Mahdi Hassan Mohammed al-Mamlouk, deputy head of PIJ’s central communications unit, and Arafat Abdullah Mahmoud Abu Zayed, deputy head of PIJ’s central intelligence unit, who also wrote political analysis for the SHMS news agency and Palestine Today.
Yet repeated claims that Israel was killing innocent journalists and health-care workers have helped fuel murderous incitement against Jews around the world.
Other humanitarian NGOs have also been instrumental in fomenting this hysteria. One of these is Oxfam, but now the whistle has been blown on that organization from the inside.
The former CEO of Oxfam GB, Dr. Halima Begum, has accused the charity of a “toxic antisemitic culture" over its “disproportionate" focus on Gaza. Begum, who was voted out of Oxfam in December due to what she claimed was a “witch hunt," said on TV earlier this month that there was pressure within the charity to describe Israel’s war in Gaza as “genocide."
That “genocide" lie has now been revealed as a travesty by Hamas itself. In its latest revision of the number of deaths in Gaza during the war, it says that 68,800 died. As before, it provides no acknowledgement of the number of these casualties who were terrorist combatants, nor the number who were killed by misfired rockets from Gaza or execution by Hamas (of which there have been many), nor indeed the number of natural deaths.
Most of the dead were men aged 18 to 59. According to researcher Gabriel Epstein, who broke the numbers down for Haaretz, the Hamas statistics show a much higher share of adult men and older teenage boys - that is, terrorists - relative to their share of the population and a much lower share of women and children.
This totally refutes the mantra that those killed by Israel were “overwhelmingly" women and children. And, of course, it exposes the claim of genocide as utterly ludicrous.
Among those who have defamed Israel with these lies for the past 28 months, there is no admission of the terrible wrong they have done, even as their narrative collapses around them. Far from acknowledging that an unknown number of its staff have terrorist links, MSF is refusing to share a list of its Palestinian and international staff with Israeli authorities as part of the registration process to work in Gaza and the “West Bank."
What’s more, its admission about terrorists at Nasser Hospital was buried in a rarely referenced FAQ page on the MSF website, where it was spotted by the eagle-eyed analyst Salo Aizenberg.
There appears to be nothing about this MSF report, the PIJ “dual identity" revelations or the revised Hamas statistical breakdown on the websites of Israel’s chief media demonizers, the BBC and The New York Times.
As for Oxfam, the BBC website reports the industrial tribunal case Begum has brought against the charity by detailing claims against her of bullying and other leadership issues, while failing to mention her explosive charge that Oxfam has a “toxic antisemitic culture."
Nor is this the first time that MSF’s halo has been tarnished from within. In December 2023, Alain Destexhe, MSF’s former head, published a 47-page report based on tweets and posts by MSF staff on X and on Facebook.
This revealed that a significant proportion of MSF staff in Gaza supported Hamas, including its onslaught on Oct. 7. They never denounced on X the crimes committed by Hamas on that day, the taking of hostages, or the use of hospitals as barracks or human shields.
While MSF spared Hamas, said the report, the NGO accused Israel of “all the crimes," using terms such as “massacres," “annihilation," and “accepted and organized sacrifice."
“Is it possible," it asked, “that MSF and its employees knew nothing and saw nothing of the violations of humanitarian law in the hospital by Hamas?"
It’s a good question, which could usefully be repeated about others. Is it possible that the Western media and the rest of the liberal establishment that demonize and defame Israel know nothing and see nothing of the violations of truth and evidence by Hamas?
The answer, incredible as it seems, is yes-and no. Those who see it shut their eyes to it. Others don’t allow themselves to see it at all.
Nothing, including whistleblowing or revised information from within, can be allowed to challenge the Western liberal narrative of heartless Israeli colonizers and wretched displaced Palestinian Arabs. Which is why the entire media, humanitarian and human-rights complex, which has poisoned the mind of the West with this exterminatory propaganda, is itself an accomplice to an all-too-real genocidal program.