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South African Anti-Israel NGOs Commemorate the Holocaust by Hijacking Its Memory
November 2023: An Israeli soldier helps to provide incubators to Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Photo: Screenshot
Anti-Israel groups commemorated the Holocaust by hijacking its memory. Gift of the Givers and other South African anti-Israel organizations marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day by screening a film that falsely portrays the descendants of Holocaust survivors as the reincarnation of the Nazis.
The South African government established itself as an anti-Israel trailblazer in late 2023 by bringing Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on false charges of genocide. Meanwhile, the South African government is hosting an array of groups that have been alleged by some to be part of a Hamas funding umbrella.
Gift of the Givers calls itself “the largest disaster response, non-governmental organisation of African origin on the African continent,” and claims to have distributed $320 million in 47 countries over 32 years. It was also part of the Union of Good — according to the Union’s website in the early 2000s — which the United States sanctioned in 2008 for funding Hamas.
In recent months, Gift of the Givers founder Imtiaz Sooliman has crossed the line into blatant antisemitism on at least two occasions. At a rally in honor of the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 2023 massacre, Sooliman declared that “Zionists … run the world with fear. They control the world with money.” At a gala in November 2024, Sooliman doubled down on his overt Jew-hatred, railing about “Zionists” using “fear” and “money,” according to the South African Jewish Report.
Sooliman’s recent remarks call into question his organization’s motivations for hosting a “Holocaust Memorial Day screening” of the film “Al-Shifa Hospital: The Crimes They Tried to Bury” on January 27.
That day marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, where the Nazis murdered over 1 million Jews during the Holocaust — via starvation, disease, shooting, and gas chambers.
Gift of the Givers played the movie — produced by Qatari state-owned media network Al Jazeera — at a hospital lecture hall. Apparently, this venue would help viewers relate to the supposed victims of Israel’s two-week, surprise raid on the Hamas-controlled health facility in late March 2024.
But Shifa isn’t just a hospital. There is evidence of Hamas operating out of Shifa Hospital since at least 2006. By 2014, the hospital had become a “de facto” command center for Hamas. Hamas’ control of Shifa Hospital was an open secret.
In February 2024, The New York Times wrote that evidence suggests that Hamas “used the hospital for cover, stored weapons inside it and maintained a hardened tunnel beneath the complex that was supplied with water, power and air-conditioning.”
During the raid that is the subject of the documentary, Israel killed top Hamas officials, while Hamas fired from the emergency room, maternity ward, and elsewhere. Over the course of the operation, according to the IDF, the Israelis detained up to 900 suspects, 513 of whom were confirmed to be Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad members, and killed around 200 terrorists in gun battles.
Despite the mountain of evidence, a hospital staffer interviewed in the film contends that the Israelis tried to push a false narrative about Hamas using the hospital. Instead, the documentary tries to frame the operation as a vindictive assault on one of the few places of refuge in Gaza.
Erasing the security context of Israeli actions has been central to the attempts to charge Israel with war crimes, including genocide. The film does not ask why hundreds of terrorists were operating in a hospital and endangering its patients and staff.
There are other reasons to doubt the Al Jazeera narrative. In October 2024, Israel published information indicating that six Al Jazeera journalists were members of Hamas.
In March 2024, Al Jazeera published a report featuring the testimony of a woman who claimed that the Israelis “raped a number of women” during the operation. The former managing director of Al Jazeera said that a Hamas investigation found the rape allegation to be fabricated, and that the woman lied to “arouse the nation’s zeal.” Nevertheless, the false rape allegation remains on Al Jazeera’s site.
Portraying Israel as the reincarnation of the Nazis both trivializes the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust, and seeks to cast Israel as a villain. It is also a prime example of how modern antisemitism is manifested, according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, the most widely accepted definition of Jew-hatred.
Holocaust Remembrance Day is a somber occasion to remember the victims of the Nazi genocide and to resolve to never allow it to happen again.
Alternatively, for Gift of the Givers, it is an opportunity to justify attacking, kidnapping, and killing Holocaust survivors and their descendants in their homes in southern Israel by claiming that Israelis are like the Nazis. The same backwards morality and distortion of reality that underpin a leading South African humanitarian organization’s descent into antisemitism, have also allowed Pretoria to establish itself as Hamas’ lawyer at the ICJ.
David May is a research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Follow David on X @DavidSamuelMay. Follow FDD on X @FDD.
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Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
i24 News – Iranian and Iran-affiliated media claimed on Saturday that the Islamic Republic had obtained a trove of “strategic and sensitive” Israeli intelligence materials related to Israel’s nuclear facilities and defense plans.
“Iran’s intelligence apparatus has obtained a vast quantity of strategic and sensitive information and documents belonging to the Zionist regime,” Iran’s state broadcaster said, referring to Israel in the manner accepted in those Muslim or Arab states that don’t recognize its legitimacy. The statement was also relayed by the Lebanese site Al-Mayadeen, affiliated with the Iran-backed jihadists of Hezbollah.
The reports did not include any details on the documents or how Iran had obtained them.
The intelligence reportedly included “thousands of documents related to that regime’s nuclear plans and facilities,” it added.
According to the reports, “the data haul was extracted during a covert operation and included a vast volume of materials including documents, images, and videos.”
The report comes amid high tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, over which it is in talks with the US administration of President Donald Trump.
Iranian-Israeli tensions reached an all-time high since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, including Iranian rocket fire on Israel and Israeli aerial raids in Iran that devastated much of the regime’s air defenses.
Israel, which regards the prospect of the antisemitic mullah regime obtaining a nuclear weapon as an existential threat, has indicated it could resort to a military strike against Iran’s installations should talks fail to curb uranium enrichment.
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Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
The Israeli military has retrieved the body of a Thai hostage who had been held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday.
Nattapong Pinta’s body was held by a Palestinian terrorist group called the Mujahedeen Brigades, and was recovered from the area of Rafah in southern Gaza, Katz said. His family in Thailand has been notified.
Pinta, an agricultural worker, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small Israeli community near the Gaza border where a quarter of the population was killed or taken hostage during the Hamas attack that triggered the devastating war in Gaza.
Israel’s military said Pinta had been abducted alive and killed by his captors, who had also killed and taken to Gaza the bodies of two more Israeli-American hostages that were retrieved earlier this week.
There was no immediate comment from the Mujahedeen Brigades, who have previously denied killing their captives, or from Hamas. The Israeli military said the Brigades were still holding the body of another foreign national. Only 20 of the 55 remaining hostages are believed to still be alive.
The Mujahedeen Brigades also held and killed Israeli hostage Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, according to Israeli authorities. Their bodies were returned during a two-month ceasefire, which collapsed in March after the two sides could not agree on terms for extending it to a second phase.
Israel has since expanded its offensive across the Gaza Strip as US, Qatari and Egyptian-led efforts to secure another ceasefire have faltered.
US-BACKED AID GROUP HALTS DISTRIBUTIONS
The United Nations has warned that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli blockade of the enclave, with the rate of young children suffering from acute malnutrition nearly tripling.
Aid distribution was halted on Friday after the US-and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said overcrowding had made it unsafe to continue operations. It was unclear whether aid had resumed on Saturday.
The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May, overseeing a new model of aid distribution which the United Nations says is neither impartial nor neutral. It says it has provided around 9 million meals so far.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that 350 trucks of humanitarian aid belonging to U.N. and other international relief groups were transferred this week via the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.
The war erupted after Hamas-led terrorists took 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the October 7, 2023 attack, Israel’s single deadliest day.
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US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say
Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo
The State Department is weighing giving $500 million to the new foundation providing aid to war-shattered Gaza, according to two knowledgeable sources and two former US officials, a move that would involve the US more deeply in a controversial aid effort that has been beset by violence and chaos.
The sources and former US officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that money for Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would come from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being folded into the US State Department.
The plan has met resistance from some US officials concerned with the deadly shootings of Palestinians near aid distribution sites and the competence of the GHF, the two sources said.
The GHF, which has been fiercely criticized by humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for an alleged lack of neutrality, began distributing aid last week amid warnings that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli aid blockade, which was lifted on May 19 when limited deliveries were allowed to resume.
The foundation has seen senior personnel quit and had to pause handouts twice this week after crowds overwhelmed its distribution hubs.
The State Department and GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reuters has been unable to establish who is currently funding the GHF operations, which began in Gaza last week. The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to transport aid into Gaza for distribution at so-called secure distribution sites.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, has an “economic interest” in the for-profit US contractor overseeing the logistics and security of GHF’s aid distribution hubs in the enclave.
While US President Donald Trump’s administration and Israel say they don’t finance the GHF operation, both have been pressing the United Nations and international aid groups to work with it.
The US and Israel argue that aid distributed by a long-established U.N. aid network was diverted to Hamas. Hamas has denied that.
USAID has been all but dismantled. Some 80 percent of its programs have been canceled and its staff face termination as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to align US foreign policy with his “America First” agenda.
One source with knowledge of the matter and one former senior official said the proposal to give the $500 million to GHF has been championed by acting deputy USAID Administrator Ken Jackson, who has helped oversee the agency’s dismemberment.
The source said that Israel requested the funds to underwrite GHF’s operations for 180 days.
The Israeli government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two sources said that some US officials have concerns with the plan because of the overcrowding that has affected the aid distribution hubs run by GHF’s contractor, and violence nearby.
Those officials also want well-established non-governmental organizations experienced in running aid operations in Gaza and elsewhere to be involved in the operation if the State Department approves the funds for GHF, a position that Israel likely will oppose, the sources said.
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