Originally published in Israel National News

For two years, Motaz Azaiza was the West’s eyes in Gaza. TIME named him one of its 100 most influential people. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. CNN, The Guardian, and GQ Middle East all featured his work, as did UNRWA. Now, in an Arabic-language podcast called Taqarrab, Azaiza has told us what his eyes actually saw – and what he decided the rest of us should not.

He also admitted that every reference to the war in Gaza as a genocide, including his own in speeches across America, was a lie.

“I saw the vehicle of the Al-Qassam Brigades, and there were [Israeli captives] there,” he said. “People got out, watched, beat them, hit them, and I followed them and filmed. But I did not publish those videos.” Why not? “I understood that Israel would use those videos to identify every person who was there and eliminate them. I did not want to be responsible, even indirectly, for the deaths of those people.”

Read that carefully, because the coverage has mostly framed it as a mere lapse in journalistic ethics. Azaiza did not fail to obtain the evidence. He obtained it, and he weighed it. On one side of the scale were Israeli hostages being beaten by a mob; on the other, the safety of the men beating them. And he chose the mob.

Per journalistic norms, photographs are often withheld to protect victims from further harm. Azaiza hid his photos for precisely the opposite reason: he didn’t want Israel to arrest or neutralize the perpetrators. Innocent civilians had been kidnapped, already sexually abused, and his concern was with the people that beat them and rejoiced at Hamas’ crimes. Jewish suffering was the one category of footage he decided to withhold.

He also told us that he was not alone. “Photographers in Gaza have become accustomed to lowering their cameras the moment someone says something bad about Hamas,” he said, “because anyone who dares to show reality is persecuted relentlessly.” Every image that came out of Gaza for two years passed through that filter. What the world was shown, Azaiza told us, was what Hamas permitted it to see.

Every award and platform he was given rested on the notion that Azaiza was providing us with a “raw” and “unfiltered” account. And that was never true.

But the most important confession in that interview has gone almost entirely unnoticed.

Azaiza is angry at Hamas. Not, Heaven forbid, for October 7. “I support armed resistance,” he explained. Let us be clear about what “armed resistance” meant that morning: families murdered in their beds, women raped, a music festival turned into a killing field, babies carried into Gaza as hostages – soon to be murdered. Azaiza’s objection is not that Hamas slaughtered civilians. It’s that he wanted “results.”

And then he addressed the fact that Hamas didn’t lay down its weapons for two full years. “You could have agreed to that already on October 11, 2023. Why was it so important that tens of thousands would be killed?” “You brought us back to the Middle Ages,” he said.

Sit with that for a minute. Arguably the most celebrated Arab photographer of the entire war said that the war could have ended four days after it began, had Hamas accepted then what it ultimately accepted later. It was, for Hamas, a choice, and he condemned Hamas for choosing instead to let Gaza burn.

Which means, of course, that there was no genocide.

In no genocide in human history have the victims controlled the off switch. The Jews of Europe could not end the Holocaust by releasing hostages. The Tutsi could not stop the machetes by giving up arms. The Armenians, the Cambodians, the Yazidis – none of them could halt their own extermination by agreeing to terms. Genocide requires intent to destroy a people for who they are. In such cases, if the victims lay down what weapons they have, the killing accelerates.

There was no genocide in Gaza, but a war, and every day it continued was because Hamas made a decision. Azaiza knows this, because he lived it. He said so in his own language, to his own audience, with no Israeli spokesman anywhere in sight: Hamas, not Israel, was to blame for two years of death and destruction across Gaza. That is quite an admission, coming from a man who toured America decrying a “genocide” that, per his own statements, never was.

And that brings us back to Ms. Rachel, and to the entire chorus of celebrities, professors, U.N. rapporteurs and editorial boards who have spent the same two years hurling the same bogus charge of genocide against Israel. Just last week, pledging $1 million to Palestinian causes, Ms. Rachel invited “every wealthy White celebrity to match it and speak out against the genocide in Gaza.” Her “friend Motaz” has now told her that the deaths she laid at Israel’s feet were Hamas’s choice, made deliberately and prolonged needlessly. Put two and two together, and he called her a liar.

Do not expect a retraction, much less an end to their friendship. Azaiza called himself a liar as well, but don’t expect his reputation to suffer. The genocide libel was never built on reality; like every blood libel before it, it was built on the need to blame Jews for deaths caused by others.

The Talmud teaches a key principle: hoda’as ba’al din k’meah eidim dami – the admission of a party to the case is like the testimony of a hundred witnesses. Motaz Azaiza hid the footage because he was no impartial observer, but a propagandist on behalf of the terrorists. He still supports the senseless murder of Jews, for which reason he despises Israel. Yet he has admitted to the world that Hamas could have ended this war in October of 2023, and chose not to.

That is an admission worth a hundred witnesses. It is time the people who made him famous chose to listen.

Photo: Motaz Azaiza attends UNRWA USA’s Gaza 5k event in Dallas, 9-28-2024, by FeaturingDallas, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons