October 7th War in Gaza (2023-2025) - Lies & Half-Truths

The October 7 Catalyst

TYT's coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict has long favored the Palestinian narrative, but October 7 marked a turning point. That's when they went all in on the dishonesty, cranking up their anti-Israel bias to extreme levels. Now they're throwing around the word "genocide" dozens, sometimes a hundred times daily, describing the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran using the most inflammatory language possible. Conveniently, they never mention that these territories are controlled by and harbor terrorists who have launched thousands of attacks against Israel - all with the openly stated aim of commiting a genocide of Israelis. 

Who Started The Oct 7 Gaza War?

TYT almost never reminds their viewers about a basic fact: who actually started the 2023 Gaza war. Thousands of Hamas fighters and thousands of ordinary Palestinian civilians crossed into Israel and carried out the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust. They did it on orders from Yahya Sinwar, who commanded them to "kill the children of Israel." The Palestinian invaders did precisely that. Then they dragged 251 hostages back to Gaza, where they were mutilated, beaten, humiliated, and locked up in Hamas' tunnel network - in hospitals, medical facilities, and in the homes of ordinary Gazan civilians. 

For two excruciating years, the war continued because Palestinians refused to release those hostages. Meanwhile, Hamas fighters stayed safe underground while their families, friends, and neighbors stayed above ground - deliberately positioned as human shields to absorb Israeli military response and generate propaganda against Israel. It was a calculated strategy, and it worked. It convinced millions of people that the side that started and prolonged the war was actually the victim.  Cenk and Ana on TYT were among the key propagators of this lie. 

Throughout the conflict, Cenk and his TYT crew spent almost all their time attacking Israel for what it did and didn't do. They barely criticized Hamas, the radical Islamic terrorists who started and kept the war going.

What Could Israel Have Done After October 7?

When people ask Cenk and Ana what Israel should have done after October 7, they never give a straight answer. Early on they suggested "special forces operations" - which would have meant the IDF going into hostile territory for a decade-plus of brutal house-to-house fighting, losing thousands of soldiers, with virtually no chance of getting hostages back alive and little chance of achieving anything else given Hamas tactics.

Cenk's common refrain is that "yes, Hamas killed 1300 people including 36 children, but Israel killed 60 times as many people - which makes Israel 60 times worse terrorists than Hamas." As if war is just about scorecard-keeping. As if military objectives don't exist. As if the entity responding ferociously to a declaration of war can be credibly accused of being the terrorists themselves.  As if a country facing opponents with genocidal intentions, do not have a right to fight with everything they've got to defeat that threat...

The "Genocide" Label

Cenk and the entire left-wing media establishment continue calling the Gaza situation a "genocide" even after the ceasefire. It wasn't a genocide. It was a war. Every war death is a tragedy - especially the deaths of children and innocent people. The responsibility for those deaths lies with the people who started and prolonged the war. No genocide in history was started and perpetuated by its victims.

TYT are never honest with their audience about the fact that in most armed conflicts, civilian deaths outnumber military deaths considerably. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that 90 percent of conflict deaths are civilians. The Gaza war was brutal and tragic, but even if we take the most unfavourable civilian death toll of around 83% which is often cited by Cenk Uygur, it was less deadly than would be expected by the Red Cross.  And that's before taking into account Hamas' tactics which involved purposefully trying to get Palestinian children and women killed for propaganda value. 

Cenk and Ana know that collateral damage - unintended civilian deaths from military operations - is an unfortunate part of war. But they refuse to acknowledge it. Whenever Cenk discusses this or someone tries to educate him on it, he flies into rage, sarcastically mocking his opponent: "Oh sure, the Palestinians made the Israelis kill thousands of children!" As if Israel had the option of simply surrendering, abandoning the hostages, and capitulating to terrorists, in order to spare Palestinian civilians from suffering the fate that Hamas inflict on Israeli civilians. 

The Gaza Death Count Would Have Been Zero

Cenk and Ana have never been straightforward with their audience about this: Gaza's death toll from 2023 to 2026 would have been almost nothing without the October 2023 invasion by the Palestinians. There would have been no war. There would have been no bombing.  Furthermore, the death toll would have been dramatically lower if Palestinians had returned the hostages in 2023, rather than perpetuating the war until 2025. The death toll would have been lower if Hamas had let civilians use the tunnels for shelter. The real reason the death toll was high is that Hamas deliberately sacrificed Palestinian civilians as pawns and valued freeing convicted murderers in prisoner exchanges more than it valued Palestinian lives. Cenk and Ana lie to their audience and never admit any of this.

Cenk loves to sarcastically mock that Israel "accidentally" - complete with air quotes - murdered thousands of Palestinian kids. The implication is that Israel intentionally killed children. It's an absurd claim with zero evidence. Children died. It's tragic. Full responsibility belongs to Hamas, which started and perpetuated the war for two years.

What TYT Never Explains

Cenk and Ana never tell their audience that Gaza's war was fought in one of the most densely packed urban environments in modern conflict. The IDF's efforts to minimize civilian casualties are extensively documented, yet TYT refuses to acknowledge them - preferring instead to disingenuously the IDF's efforts to keep civilians out of harm's way. TYT never mention that 70 percent of Gaza's buildings were destroyed, yet the IDF managed to get 98 percent of Gaza's population to safety while fighting was happening in their neighborhoods. 

TYT refuses to contextualize the war's battles and Israel's response because it would force their audience to recognize that those actions don't look like the actions of a military trying to kill innocents. They won't tell viewers that Israel has made documented efforts to separate militants from civilians, often at the cost of its own military effectiveness, in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

In warfare, every moving target has the same dusty grey appearance. Soldiers need to make split second decisions.  In December 2023, when three Israeli hostages were tragically shot by an IDF soldier who mistook them for militants, TYT did not  tell their audience that Hamas have a decades-long history of disguising themselves as civilians and then ambushing IDF border guards or military personnel – and that it was with that context that the IDF personnel made the tragic split second decisions that they made that day. 

Cenk Uygur and his TYT team are never interested in providing context that might lead their audience to have empathy and put themselves in the shoes of an Israeli civilian or defence person.  Rather, TYT demonize all Israeli Defence personnel, ignoring the poignant fact that the selfless men and women of the IDF are all that protect 9 million Israelis, including 2 million Muslim Israelis, from a holocaust at the hands of their neighbors who subscribe to the most extreme radical Islamist beliefs and ideology.