Zohran Mamdani's Gaza Narrative Is More Dangerous Than It Looks

Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of New York, recently released a video explaining why he cannot fulfil one of his campaign promises: arresting Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli Prime Minister ever set foot in New York.

He was, of course, informed that the Mayor of New York has no authority to dictate American foreign policy.

But while the promise itself was always political theatre, the video served another purpose entirely. It became a carefully crafted piece of propaganda, capitalising on the attention surrounding the controversy to present a deeply distorted account of the war in Gaza.

That should concern everyone.

When elected officials use the authority of their office to repeat misinformation about one of the world’s most scrutinised conflicts, they do more than mislead the public. They erase the context that explains why this war exists in the first place, obscure the atrocities committed against Israelis on October 7th, and provide political cover for a terrorist organisation that openly celebrates the murder of Jews.

Mamdani’s video is a textbook example.

He calls Netanyahu a “war criminal.” He claims Israel has killed 73,000 people. He declares the war a “genocide”—a legal conclusion that has not been reached by the International Court of Justice. Throughout the video, responsibility for civilian suffering is placed entirely on Israel, as though the war began because Israel simply decided to invade Gaza for sport.

If someone knew nothing about this conflict, they would come away believing exactly that.

What they would not learn is just as important.

Mamdani never tells his audience that the widely cited figure of 73,000 comes from the Hamas-run health authorities, whose casualty figures do not distinguish between civilians, combatants, or those who died from natural causes. They do not account for Palestinians killed by Hamas itself—a documented occurrence—or by the countless rockets fired by Palestinian terrorist groups that fall short and land inside Gaza.

That lack of distinction is not an accident.

Hamas has every incentive to blur the line between civilian and combatant. The less the world understands who was killed and how they died, the easier it becomes for activists, journalists and politicians to repeat inflated or misleading narratives that portray Israel as uniquely barbaric while shielding Hamas from scrutiny.

Reality looks rather different.

John Spencer, one of the world’s leading experts on urban warfare, has described Israel’s campaign in Gaza as having one of the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios in the history of modern urban warfare. Whether one agrees with every Israeli decision or not, that assessment alone should make anyone hesitate before casually throwing around words like genocide.

The Context Mamdani Left Out

To understand why, we first need to understand what urban warfare actually looks like.

Urban warfare is among the most brutal forms of combat. Civilians and fighters are packed into the same dense environment, making it extraordinarily difficult to strike legitimate military targets while minimising civilian casualties. Innocent people are, tragically, often caught in the crossfire. That is the horrific reality of war, and it becomes even more acute when the battlefield is a city.

Gaza, however, presents an even greater challenge.

For more than two decades, Hamas transformed a strip of land just 25 miles (40 kilometres) long into a military fortress. Beneath it lies a vast underground tunnel network—roughly half the length of New York City’s subway system—with entrances hidden inside homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and civilian buildings. Any opening in the ground could conceal a tunnel from which armed terrorists emerge to attack Israeli forces.

The billions of dollars that poured into Gaza from around the world were not spent building a thriving society. Much of that investment was instead diverted towards military infrastructure designed for a single purpose: preparing for war with Israel.

That underground network is only part of the strategy.

Hamas has deliberately embedded its military operations within civilian areas because civilian casualties are not merely tolerated—they are strategically valuable. When Israeli forces respond to attacks launched from neighbourhoods, schools or hospitals, Hamas knows much of the international media will focus on the resulting destruction rather than asking why military operations were being conducted from protected civilian sites in the first place.

The battlefield itself becomes a weapon.

The deception goes further still.

Hamas fighters routinely operate without uniforms, blending into the civilian population. The Hamas-run health authorities classify anyone under the age of eighteen as a “child”, even though Hamas has a documented history of recruiting teenagers aged fifteen, sixteen and seventeen into its ranks. Casualty figures are then presented without distinguishing between civilians and combatants, creating statistics that generate maximum outrage while revealing remarkably little about who was actually killed.

Each of these practices violates the very principles of international humanitarian law that critics accuse Israel of breaking.

Mamdani’s audience hears none of this.

Nor does he mention that more than 200 hostages—including women, children and the elderly—were dragged into Gaza on October 7th to be used as bargaining chips. He says nothing about the systematic murders, the rapes, the torture, the mutilation of bodies, or the fact that Hamas proudly filmed and celebrated these atrocities themselves.

Instead, his version of events begins after Israel responded.

That omission changes everything.

The Rules of War—and How Hamas Exploits Them

So how should we think about a war like this?

It helps to begin with something much closer to home.

When we live in a functioning society, we rarely think about the immense machinery that keeps it functioning. If someone breaks into your house, assaults your family or robs your business, you don’t take justice into your own hands. You call the police.

The police are entrusted with a monopoly on force. They are authorised by the state to use violence when necessary, but that authority is constrained by law. They cannot act however they please. Their power exists to preserve order, protect innocent people and deter those who would do them harm.

That is the social contract.

National defence operates according to the same principle, but on an international scale.

The crucial difference is that there is no global police force.

When conflict breaks out between states, there is no higher authority capable of stepping in, arresting the aggressor and restoring peace. Nations ultimately defend themselves. However uncomfortable that reality may be, it has been the story of human civilisation since the beginning.

The world we wish existed is not always the world we inhabit.

That is precisely why, after the Second World War, nations sought to establish rules governing how wars are fought.

This is where many people misunderstand international law.

International humanitarian law was never designed to make war impossible. Wars themselves are not illegal. In many cases, they are unavoidable. Instead, these laws attempt to make war less barbaric by regulating how military force may be used.

One of the most fundamental principles is distinction. Civilians may not be deliberately targeted. Combatants may. If a legitimate military target is located near civilians, military action may still be lawful, provided commanders weigh the anticipated military advantage against the expected civilian harm and take reasonable precautions to minimise that harm.

These rules were written on an important assumption: that both sides would at least attempt to respect them.

Groups like Hamas shattered that assumption.

Rather than separating themselves from civilians, they deliberately embed themselves among them. Rather than wearing uniforms, they disguise themselves as civilians. Rather than moving military assets away from protected sites, they place them inside hospitals, schools, apartment buildings and mosques. Rather than helping civilians leave dangerous areas, they have repeatedly encouraged them to remain where fighting is expected.

In other words, Hamas exploits the very laws designed to make war more humane.

The protections afforded to civilians become military assets. Civilian deaths become strategic victories. International law, intended to restrain violence, is transformed into another battlefield.

That is why reducing this war to casualty figures alone is so deeply misleading.

Those numbers tell us how many people died.

They tell us almost nothing about why they died, where they died, who put them in harm’s way, or how either side conducted itself during the fighting.

And that is exactly the gap propaganda exploits.

Despite fighting an enemy that systematically violates almost every principle of international humanitarian law, Israel has still taken extraordinary measures that few militaries in history have attempted at this scale: dropping leaflets, making phone calls, sending text messages, issuing evacuation orders and, in many cases, delaying or cancelling strikes altogether.

None of this suggests Israel has conducted a flawless campaign. No war is flawless.

But it does explain why respected military analysts such as John Spencer have concluded that Israel’s civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio is remarkably low by the standards of modern urban warfare—particularly given the unprecedented challenges Hamas deliberately created.

Why This Lie Matters

This is why Mamdani’s video matters.

At first glance, it looks like another political disagreement over the Middle East. It isn’t.

It is an attempt to reshape how Americans understand one of the defining geopolitical conflicts of our time.

Words like genocide are not political slogans. They are among the gravest accusations that can be levelled against a nation. They invoke the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia and the deliberate extermination of entire peoples. To deploy that language while stripping away the context that produced the war is not simply misleading. It fundamentally alters the moral picture presented to millions of people.

More importantly, it rewards Hamas’ entire strategy.

Hamas cannot defeat Israel militarily. It never could.

Its greatest weapon has always been the suffering of its own civilians. Every tunnel beneath a hospital. Every rocket launched from a residential neighbourhood. Every fighter disguised as a civilian. Every casualty reported without distinction. Every hostage hidden beneath the streets of Gaza. Every one of these tactics serves the same objective: ensuring that international outrage is directed not at the terrorists who engineered the battlefield, but at the democracy forced to fight on it.

When influential public figures repeat that narrative, they are not merely criticising Israel.

They are validating Hamas’ strategy.

But the implications extend far beyond Israel.

Israel is America’s closest ally in the Middle East. To accuse Israel of committing genocide is also to accuse the United States of financing, arming and diplomatically shielding a genocidal state. It is an attack not only on Israel’s legitimacy, but on the moral legitimacy of American foreign policy itself.

That is no small accusation.

It encourages Americans to view their own country not as a force that, however imperfectly, has helped preserve the post-war international order, but as the patron of one of history’s greatest crimes. It teaches distrust not only of Israel, but of the broader Western alliance that has underpinned liberal democracies for generations.

That is precisely the objective of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas and every other movement that seeks to weaken the West. They understand they cannot defeat the United States on the battlefield. Their best hope is to convince Western societies that their own civilisation is fundamentally illegitimate.

Mamdani’s video advances that narrative.

Not accidentally.

Deliberately.

Because omissions of this magnitude do not happen by chance. When you remove October 7th from the story. When you erase Hamas’ tactics. When you ignore the hostages. When you present casualty figures without explaining what they measure—or what they omit—you are not giving your audience an incomplete picture.

You are constructing a false one.

That is why this deserves to be called out.

Not because Mamdani criticised Israel.

But because he used the credibility of public office to persuade millions of people to judge one of the world’s most complicated wars without first telling them the truth.