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‘The IDF is Worse Than Hamas’: Jessica Burbank’s Anti-Israel Disinformation Campaign
An aerial view shows the bodies of victims of an attack following a mass infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip lying on the ground in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, Oct. 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ilan Rosenberg
“Rising” is a popular online news program produced by The Hill, which features hosts and commentators from across the political spectrum discussing current events at home and around the world.
Since Hamas’ brutal invasion of Israel on October 7, and the subsequent Israeli war against the Gaza-based terrorist organization, the Middle East has been a consistent topic of discussion on Rising, with some defending the Jewish State and others opposing its military activities.
One of the most vocal anti-Israel commentators on Rising over the past few months has been Jessica Burbank, one of the program’s co-hosts.
In various segments, Burbank has spread a litany of falsehoods and misrepresentations of Israel, the IDF, and Hamas, that are based on unfounded statistics, misleading statements, and absurd analyses.
In a recent Rising piece about a New York Times article that chronicled the use of sexual violence by Hamas during the October 7 attack, Jessica Burbank quipped that the report “feels like intentional propaganda,” as the Times amplifies these claims against Hamas but doesn’t do the same for “very well-documented accounts of sexual abuse and violence by Israelis on Palestinians.”
According to Burbank, “One in 10 women in Gaza have experienced some kind of abuse from Israeli soldiers. And it’s even higher in younger age women, where it’s as high as 23 percent [who] have experienced sexual abuse from Israeli soldiers in the occupied territory.”
While Burbank presents these statistics as established fact, a Google search for the source of these numbers was unable to turn up any reference to these specific claims at all.
What did turn up were several articles on the rarity of sexual violence between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian women.
This is not the only time that Jessica Burbank has represented unfounded statistics as fact.
Later in that same segment, she claimed that “43 babies died in the [Al Shifa Hospital] NICU when Israeli forces decided to raid and attack that hospital.”
This seems to be based on mid-November reports that 39 premature babies were at risk as the IDF prepared to enter Shifa hospital in order to rout the Hamas fighters who were using it as a base. However, only days later, it was announced that 31 of these babies had successfully been moved from Gaza City to a safe hospital in the southern city of Rafah, with 12 being further moved to Egypt for treatment.
Not only did the vast majority of these babies not die, as Burbank claims, but the precise number of 43 seems to be entirely made up.
In another segment, Jessica Burbank repeatedly made the outlandish claim that Israel killed “31,000 civilians” during the Great March of Return in 2018. At one point, she even referred to those partaking in the March as “peaceful protesters who were protesting their land being stolen by Israel.”
In fact, according to the UN’s high estimate, between March 2018 and April 2019, 279 Palestinians had been killed. And, despite Burbank’s presentation of these Palestinians as “peaceful protesters,” it is believed that between 50% to 80% of those killed were members of Hamas or another Gaza-based terror organization.
However, it’s not surprising that Burbank might consider a Hamas member to be a “peaceful protester.”
After all, in her analysis, Burbank is dismissive of Hamas’ genocidal intent, preferring to view Israel and the IDF as the much greater enemy of peace in the region.
In one segment, Burbank put it as bluntly as saying that, “The current Israeli government is a terrorist organization. If you want to call Hamas a terrorist organization, the Israeli government is that times 10.” Further in the piece, she doubled down by claiming that “The IDF is far worse as a terrorist organization [than Hamas].”
In another segment, Burbank echoed former US President Jimmy Carter’s false assertion from 2015 that Hamas leaders were more in favor of peace than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It should be clear to any viewer that any opinion by Jessica Burbank on the issue of Hamas should be taken with heaps of salt, as she is dismissive of the brutality of Hamas’ terrorism and rationalizes the October 7 atrocities.
In reference to October 7, Burbank remarked, “Yes, they have killed 1,400 innocent people. Violence is always bad. But we have to understand it in the context of the Israeli government committing acts of terrorism.”
In another piece, she expanded on this, claiming that “What we have now is the culmination of many years of an apartheid state, of an occupation, and of peace not being present.”
Alongside her rationalization of Hamas’ terrorist activities, she has also shamelessly diminished the weight of this terrorism, claiming that, in contrast to Hamas, Israel is holding the “entire population of Gaza hostage.” To put it in Burbank’s cruelly simplistic words, “You want to talk about the 50 hostages that Hamas took versus the 1.1 million people living in Gaza right now…”
Burbank’s general understanding of Hamas and Israel seems to be so flawed that she once claimed that “Hamas doesn’t even operate” in the West Bank, something that any amateur analyst of the region could tell you is factually incorrect.
And Hamas is not the only organization whose violence Jessica Burbank prefers to whitewash.
Regarding harassment of international shipping in the Red Sea by the Yemen-based Houthi movement, Burbank remarked, “When I think about what the rebels are doing, I mean, Israel has the support of the US military. You know, Palestine does not. And so, Yemen seems to be one of the only countries that is actually supporting Palestine on this side of the war.”
She then went on to compare the Houthis to anti-Israel protesters who attempted to block Israel-bound ships in US docks, finishing with “I can see anyone interested in peace wanting to prevent weapons from getting in the hands of the people who are using them the most.”
Aside from her soapbox on Rising, Jessica Burbank also spreads her misinformation and derogatory view of the Jewish state on social media.
Two days after the October 7 attack, Burbank tweeted, “US propaganda machine doing a hell of a job convincing people it’s justified to condemn Russian expansion and support Ukrainian resistance while simultaneously supporting Israeli expansion and condemning Palestinian resistance,” falsely comparing Israel to Russia.
A few weeks later, she tweeted that the sole purpose of putting up posters of Israeli hostages around the world is for “drama” and to record people tearing them down.
For Jessica Burbank, it is unreasonable to assume that the posters are for awareness purposes, and there must be some nefarious reason behind it.
Burbank uncritically shared a now-discredited piece by the Middle East Eye that claimed that Israel was going to “flood Hamas tunnels with nerve gas under US navy supervision.”
A week later, she tweeted that Israel was committing a “genocide” in Gaza and that she was “sick of hearing ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ while not affording that same moral permission to Palestinians,” grossly equating a state army with an internationally-recognized terrorist organization.
I’m sick of hearing “Israel has a right to defend itself” while not affording that same moral permission to Palestinians. Thousands of people dying and leaders call for a pause. Not an end. A pause in a genocide. This statement is not brave nor just. It’s sad. And it’s complicit. https://t.co/wp0OUBTGGO
— Jessica (Ka) Burbank (@JessicaLBurbank) November 4, 2023
In late December, Burbank also retweeted a post which spread the unsubstantiated claim that Israel was engaging in organ harvesting of Palestinians in Gaza.
On TikTok and in her substack, Jessica Burbank has also perpetuated a conspiracy theory tying the 1956 Suez War (which Israel fought in order to erase the threat of Egyptian-backed Palestinian terrorists crossing over and killing Israeli civilians — a fact that Burbank ignores), and the current Gaza conflict to a 1960s US plan to build a canal through Israel, connecting the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
As Fathom Journal has pointed out, the plan was rejected in the 1960s and this notion of Israel acting on behalf of a 60-odd-year US imperialist scheme has sprung up recently as just another anti-Israel conspiracy. This has not stopped Burbank from spreading it as fact online.
There is nothing wrong with a news program sharing multiple points of view on a topic as contentious as the current war between Israel and Hamas.
However, by providing a platform to Burbank, The Hill is legitimizing the spread of her disinformation, which is propped up by blatantly false statistics and misleading analysis.
As her popularity on Rising grows and she becomes more influential, Burbank’s alternative view of reality becomes all the more dangerous.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
The post ‘The IDF is Worse Than Hamas’: Jessica Burbank’s Anti-Israel Disinformation Campaign first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Security Warning to Israelis Vacationing Abroad Ahead of holidays

A passenger arrives to a terminal at Ben Gurion international airport before Israel bans international flights, January 25, 2021. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – Ahead of the Jewish High Holidays, Israel’s National Security Council (NSC) published the latest threat assessment to Israelis abroad from terrorist groups to the public on Sunday, in order to increase the Israeli public’s awareness of the existing terrorist threats around the world and encourage individuals to take preventive action accordingly.
The NSC specified that the warning is an up-to-date reflection of the main trends in the activities of terrorist groups around the world and their impact on the level of threat posed to Israelis abroad during these times, but the travel warnings and restrictions themselves are not new.
“As the Gaza war continues and in parallel with the increasing threat of terrorism, the National Security Headquarters stated it has recognized a trend of worsening and increasing violent antisemitic incidents and escalating steps by anti-Israel groups, to the point of physically harming Israelis and Jews abroad. This is in light of, among other things, the anti-Israel narrative and the negative media campaign by pro-Palestinian elements — a trend that may encourage and motivate extremist elements to carry out terrorist activities against Israelis or Jews abroad,” the statement read.
“Therefore, the National Security Bureau is reinforcing its recommendation to the Israeli public to act with responsibility during this time when traveling abroad, to check the status of the National Security Bureau’s travel warnings (before purchasing tickets to the destination,) and to act in accordance with the travel warning recommendations and the level of risk in the country they are visiting,” it listed, adding that, as illustrated in the past year, these warnings are well-founded and reflect a tangible and valid threat potential.
The statement also emphasized the risk of sharing content on social media networks indicating current or past service in the Israeli security forces, as these posts increase the risk of being marked by various parties as a target. “Therefore, the National Security Council recommends that you do not upload to social networks, in any way, content that indicates service in the security forces, operational activity, or similar content, as well as real-time locations.”
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Israel Intensifies Gaza City Bombing as Rubio Arrives

Displaced Palestinians, fleeing northern Gaza due to an Israeli military operation, move southward after Israeli forces ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate to the south, in the central Gaza Strip September 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Israeli forces destroyed at least 30 residential buildings in Gaza City and forced thousands of people from their homes, Palestinian officials said, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived on Sunday to discuss the future of the conflict.
Israel has said it plans to seize the city, where about a million Palestinians have been sheltering, as part of its declared aim of eliminating the terrorist group Hamas, and has intensified attacks on what it has called Hamas’ last bastion.
The group’s political leadership, which has engaged in on-and-off negotiations on a possible ceasefire and hostage release deal, was targeted by Israel in an airstrike in Doha on Tuesday in an attack that drew widespread condemnation.
Qatar will host an emergency Arab-Islamic summit on Monday to discuss the next moves. Rubio said Washington wanted to talk about how to free the 48 hostages – of whom 20 are believed to be still alive – still held by Hamas in Gaza and rebuild the coastal strip.
“What’s happened, has happened,” he said. “We’re gonna meet with them (the Israeli leadership). We’re gonna talk about what the future holds,” Rubio said before heading to Israel where he will stay until Tuesday.
ABRAHAM ACCORDS AT RISK
He was expected to visit the Western Wall Jewish prayer site in Jerusalem on Sunday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold talks with him during the visit.
US officials described Tuesday’s strike on the territory of a close US ally as a unilateral escalation that did not serve American or Israeli interests. Rubio and US President Donald Trump both met Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani on Friday.
Netanyahu signed an agreement on Thursday to push ahead with a settlement expansion plan that would cut across West Bank land that the Palestinians seek for a state – a move the United Arab Emirates warned would undermine the US-brokered Abraham accords that normalized UAE relations with Israel.
Israel, which blocked all food from entering Gaza for 11 weeks earlier this year, has been allowing more aid into the enclave since late July to prevent further food shortages, though the United Nations says far more is needed.
It says it wants civilians to leave Gaza City before it sends more ground forces in. Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have left but hundreds of thousands remain in the area. Hamas has called on people not to leave.
Israeli army forces have been operating inside at least four eastern suburbs for weeks, turning most of at least three of them into wastelands. It is closing in on the center and the western areas of the territory, where most of the displaced people are taking shelter.
Many are reluctant to leave, saying there is not enough space or safety in the south, where Israel has told them to go to what it has designated as a humanitarian zone.
Some say they cannot afford to leave while others say they were hoping the Arab leaders meeting on Monday in Qatar would pressure Israel to scrap its planned offensive.
“The bombardment intensified everywhere and we took down the tents, more than twenty families, we do not know where to go,” said Musbah Al-Kafarna, displaced in Gaza City.
Israel said it had completed five waves of air strikes on Gaza City over the past week, targeting more than 500 sites, including Hamas reconnaissance and sniper sites, buildings containing tunnel openings and weapons depots.
Local officials, who do not distinguish between militant and civilian casualties, say at least 40 people were killed by Israeli fire across the enclave, a least 28 in Gaza City alone.
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Turkey Warns of Escalation as Israel Expands Strikes Beyond Gaza

Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a press conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis (not seen) at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey, May 13, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas
i24 News – An Israeli strike targeting Hamas officials in Qatar has sparked unease among several Middle Eastern countries that host leaders of the group, with Turkey among the most alarmed.
Officials in Ankara are increasingly worried about how far Israel might go in pursuing those it holds responsible for the October 7 attacks.
Israel’s prime minister effectively acknowledged that the Qatar operation failed to eliminate the Hamas leadership, while stressing the broader point the strike was meant to make: “They enjoy no immunity,” the government said.
On X, Prime Minister Netanyahu went further, writing that “the elimination of Hamas leaders would put an end to the war.”
A senior Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity, summed up Ankara’s reaction: “The attack in Qatar showed that the Israeli government is ready to do anything.”
Legally and diplomatically, Turkey occupies a delicate position. As a NATO member, any military operation or targeted killing on its soil could inflame tensions within the alliance and challenge mutual security commitments.
Analysts caution, however, that Israel could opt for covert measures, operations carried out without public acknowledgement, a prospect that has increased anxiety in governments across the region.
Israeli officials remain defiant. In an interview with Ynet, Minister Ze’ev Elkin said: “As long as we have not stopped them, we will pursue them everywhere in the world and settle our accounts with them.” The episode underscores growing fears that efforts to hunt Hamas figures beyond Gaza could widen regional friction and complicate diplomatic relationships.