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by Dr. Rafael Medoff
“At least 100,000 Palestinians have left Gaza since the beginning of the war,” according to an article in the New York Times this week by the newspaper’s Jerusalem bureau chief, David Halbfinger, and senior Israel correspondent Aaron Boxerman.
This is the same Aaron Boxerman who reported in the Times less than two months ago—on December 4— that “Throughout the war, most Gazans have been unable to flee the Israeli military campaign for neighboring countries.”
Technically, Boxerman’s two articles don’t contradict each other, because even 100,000 is still not “most Gazans.” But 100,000 is hardly an insignificant number; it’s the equivalent of 17 million Americans suddenly leaving the country.
The two articles had different spins because each was promoting a particular narrative. In December, the Times piece created the impression that the cruel Israelis were holding the population of Gaza captive. By contrast, this week’s article pushed the idea that the cruel Israelis drove out large numbers of Gazans.
Critics of Israel, in the media and elsewhere, don’t seem to notice what this sort of news does to their arguments. If Israel was trying to commit genocide, why did it allow 100,000 of its intended victims to leave?
Israel controls Gaza’s borders. Those 100,000 Gazans didn’t sneak out. They left with the permission of the “genocidal” Israelis.
It should be noted that a portion of those who left did so for medical reasons. The Times of Israel reported in August 2025 that more than 500 Gazans were leaving the territory each month in order to receive medical treatment abroad.
Which is, by the way, quite different from the policy of the Allies in World War II. The German Red Cross repeatedly asked for permission to let it evacuate wounded soldiers or citizens from Germany; the Allies rejected those requests.
Israel’s leniency towards wounded Gazans is almost never mentioned by the major news media—perhaps because doing so would further undermine the libelous narrative of “genocidal Israel.”
Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is “The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews“, published by the Jewish Publication Society & University of Nebraska Press.
