It’s terrible enough when the New York Times inflicts biased, factually inaccurate coverage of Israel on its adult readers, who are presumably able to see the nonsense for what it is.

It’s a whole new — and worse — level of depravity for the Times to inflict that bias and inaccuracy on children, poisoning impressionable young minds with falsehoods.

Yet that is precisely what the New York Times did in its Sunday, Nov. 26 newspaper, which includes a full page in the “New York Times for Kids” section (“Editor’s Note: This Section Should Not Be Read by Grown-Ups”) offering a slanted and false account of what is happening in Israel and Gaza.

The one-sidedness is clear from the photo selection. The article is illustrated with a single large image of a Palestinian woman fleeing with a child in her arms and another alongside her, labeled “Palestinians fleeing after an Israeli attack in Gaza City on October 23.” The visual impression that “New York Times for Kids” readers will remember is not of armed-to-the-teeth Hamas terrorists kidnapping Israeli civilians, nor of Israeli civilians sheltering from Hamas missile attacks, but rather the one of “Palestinians fleeing after an Israeli attack.”

Under the headline “5 things to know about the Israel-Hamas War,” the Times tries to provide enough context to understand the conflict. But it fails miserably. It doesn’t mention the Bible or the Holocaust or antisemitism, all of which are essential to understanding the situation. It doesn’t mention Iran or Hezbollah, which are essential to understanding the situation. It doesn’t mention that Hamas is an Islamist extremist group that oppresses women and executes gays.

The Times blames Israel for Palestinian suffering. The paper tells its child readers, “Palestinian civilians are trapped in Gaza. Since Oct. 7, Israel has blocked most food, water, medicine and fuel from entering Gaza. Many experts have said that this is a crime.” The Times doesn’t explain that Hamas is using the fuel to shoot rockets at Israel. In fact, the Times article doesn’t mention the ongoing Hamas and Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel at all, falsely making it sound as if the Hamas violence against Israel ended on Oct. 7, when the Palestinian terror group led a deadly rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping across southern Israeli communities. The Times also doesn’t mention that Egypt has been blocking goods from entering Gaza, and refugees from leaving. It doesn’t mention that Hamas has prevented Palestinians civilians from fleeing southward.

While demonizing Israel, the Times sanitizes and whitewashes Hamas. It doesn’t mention the extraordinary brutality of Hamas’ onslaught, with its rapes, beheadings, and burning of people. You could say that’s just to protect the child readers from the gory details, but the Times displays no such reluctance when it comes to dwelling on the details of Palestinian suffering, for which the Times blames Israel: “Some people are drinking dirty water, which makes them very sick. Food supplies are running low. Some hospitals have had to close down, even though people are wounded and sick. And because Gaza’s borders are closed, people cannot escape.”

The article mischaracterizes Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Indeed, the Times writes that “Israel’s military began heavily bombing cities and towns in Gaza to try to destroy Hamas. Many buildings have been completely flattened. That also killed a lot of civilians. According to the Gaza Health Ministry in mid-November, more than 11,000 people had been killed, most of them women and children.”

The Times doesn’t say that in addition to the bombing campaign, Israel has sent ground troops into Gaza, exposing Israeli soldiers to deadly risks to go block by block and house by house rather than leveling the whole place. The Times doesn’t say that the Gaza health ministry is controlled by Hamas; or that it has a history of exaggerating casualties; or that it doesn’t distinguish between civilian deaths and those of terrorist combatants; or that Hamas is deliberately using the civilians as shields by hiding military installations within schools, mosques, and hospitals; or that many of the deaths are caused by misfires of Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets aimed at Israeli civilians.

Most astonishingly of all, the Times whitewashes Hamas’ war aims. Rather than telling the truth, which is that Hamas wants to kill all Jews, the Times tells the child readers, “For many years, Hamas called for Israel to be destroyed, but in 2017 it said it would accept a smaller, independent Palestinian country alongside it.”

This is unbelievable. No wonder the Times says the kids section “should not be read by grown-ups.” If any grown-up read it, they’d throw the paper down in disgust and cancel their subscription. The idea that Hamas merely wants a small Palestinian country “alongside” Israel is a lie. US Sen. Chuck Schumer, Democrat from New York, calls Hamas “a terrorist group that is not shy about their goal to eradicate the Jewish people, in Israel and around the globe.” Star New York Times columnist Tom Friedman writes on the opinion page for grownups that Hamas is “a militant Islamist organization dedicated to eradicating any Jewish state … the only maps it carried were not of a two-state solution but of how to find the most people in the Israeli kibbutzim and kill or kidnap as many of them as possible.”

Friedman writes, “Hamas argues that this is an ethnic-religious war between primarily Muslim Palestinians and Jews, and its goal is an Islamic state in all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. For Hamas, it’s winner take all.” In contrast, the Times kids’ section doesn’t describe Hamas as “Islamist” but simply as “a group that governs inside the Gaza strip.”

I took the kids section away to my office before anyone young could see it. Exposing children to this sort of thing — indoctrinating them in antisemitism, skewing their view of the world in a way that is biased against Israel, and giving them a warped, incomplete account of reality — is a kind of child abuse.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

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