The Lies About Israel | According to its former Spokesman

He came in faded rose polo, grey shorts, cream loafers, and a beaded bracelet. You'd have needed to check his bio to believe that this was the man who spent the first years of Israel's war with Hamas correcting BBC anchors, in a suit and tie as the State Spokesman.

The claim that gives this article its title

Eylon Levy was the Israeli government's English-language spokesman until March 2024. He has not softened since.

"The so-called Gaza genocide is the most successful hoax of the 21st century. There is a movement around the world trying to convince good, ordinary people that Israel is an evil, genocidal, fascist, apartheid, baby-eating state. Why do they spread these lies? Because they want to destroy this country."

Before we landed, colleagues in Manila were already writing that Philippine journalists who took this trip had picked a side. So I put it to him directly: how would you answer the charge that we are here carrying your government's propaganda?

He did not pretend the accusation was baseless in principle. He argued that the campaign against Israel depends on keeping visitors out.

"A critical part of that strategy is to prevent people from seeing it with their own eyes. So that you can't go back home and say, guys, this is nonsense. We saw with our own eyes."

It is exactly what a man in his job would say. It is also a falsifiable claim, and the only way to test it is to go, report, and check.

So we checked. He said Amnesty International "didn't post a single tweet about the hostages. Not one." But Amnesty posted about the hostages, issued at least seven statements demanding their release, and called hostage-taking a war crime one month into the war.

He said roughly a third of the names on the Committee to Protect Journalists' Gaza casualty list worked for Hamas or Islamic Jihad media outlets. CPJ did open a review in June 2026, and did remove names — eight of them as combatants, out of a list of 209. Four percent, not a third.

He offered the Al-Ahli hospital blast of 17 October 2023 as the case study every journalist should be taught. A claim of 500 dead in an Israeli airstrike travelled the world within the hour, while Israel, which believed a Palestinian rocket had fallen short, could not risk answering before it was certain.

"By then, the lie has already gone all around the world." American, British and French intelligence later assessed a misfired rocket. Amnesty, the UN and Channel 4 reached no conclusion. The figure of 500 was never established; US intelligence estimated 100 to 300.

Which makes his point better than his own version of it did. A false number travelled in an hour. An account that was substantially right arrived late, and carried inside it a claim that has never been substantiated. Nearly three years on, the correction is still being argued about.

That is what an information war looks like — not one side lying and one side telling the truth, but a permanent argument in which being mostly right and being believed turn out to be two different problems.

Rikki Mathay, news anchor of Mata ng Agila International, who teaches crisis communications at the University of the Philippines, asked him what Israel should have communicated differently after October 7. His answer was not a defence of Israel's messaging.

"I think Israel could have done a better job of communicating the truth."

In September 2025 the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza; Amnesty International reached the same conclusion in December 2024. The United States and Germany reject that finding, and the International Court of Justice has issued provisional measures but has not ruled. Anyone who tells you the case is settled, in either direction, is not telling you the truth.

On journalists

His frame for the whole war runs the same way — that Hamas chose to fight where Israel is weakest:

"Hamas is not stupid. I give respect to our enemies. Hamas knew that it could not defeat Israel on the battlefield. Israel has a stronger army. Where can it defeat Israel? In the battle of narratives and in the media."

"For Israel, dead civilians are a tragedy. For Hamas, it was a strategy."

Which took him to the press, and to a question he turned back on the room:

"Do you think it's possible to be a member of a terrorist organization and a journalist at the same time? If you work for a terrorist group's media channel — are you a journalist, or are you a terrorist, or are you both?"

"You cannot work for Al Qaeda's newspaper. You cannot work for ISIS radio and be a journalist at the same time. You're not a journalist. You're a content creator for a terrorist group."

He claimed that roughly a third of the names on the Committee to Protect Journalists' Gaza casualty list worked for Hamas or Islamic Jihad media outlets, and that CPJ had quietly dropped several after the groups themselves published martyrdom notices identifying them as fighters.

However, further research reveals the second half of that is right and the first half is wrong by an order of magnitude. CPJ did open the review, in June 2026, and did remove names — eight of them as combatants, out of a list of 209.

What ends the war

"Hamas must be disarmed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and the population must be de-radicalized. The three Ds."

"In 2005, Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip. It uprooted the settlements — 8,000 men, women, children. It even dug up the bodies from the cemeteries. And said: you want a state? Let's see if you can turn it into the Singapore of the Middle East. And immediately Hamas took over and used it as a launchpad."

The evacuation and the exhumed graves are accurate. "Immediately" is not: Hamas won an election five months later and seized Gaza by force twenty-one months after the last Israeli soldier left.

For the record: the Embassy of Israel arranged this trip. No question was reviewed in advance, no draft was asked for, no condition was set.

Before we left, Levy asked for our numbers.

"For a while I've been saying I really want to do a lot of Filipino media, but haven't had contacts within the industry. So I'd really like this to be the start of a relationship."

That, too, is on the record.  So is the reason we went. Not to carry a government's case, and not to be counted on anyone's side. You cannot check a claim you have refused to hear. He was persuasive in that room. But his words and numbers can be checked.

That is not propaganda. That is the job.

The author was part of the Philippine media delegation that travelled to Israel. This is the second in a series of reports from that trip.

Sourcing and disclosure

This article is drawn from on-the-record remarks by Eylon Levy at a briefing during the visit of the Philippine media delegation to Israel in 2026. Levy is the former spokesman of the Israeli government and now heads the Israeli Citizen Spokespersons' Office, a private advocacy organisation; he held no government role at the time of the briefing.

The delegation's trip was arranged by the Embassy of Israel. No question was submitted for approval in advance, no draft of this or any other article was reviewed by any Israeli official, and no condition was placed on what could be reported.

Quotations are taken from a recording of the session and lightly edited for spoken-word repetition without altering meaning. Where a claim made during the briefing did not hold up against the primary record, that is noted in the text and any reader may verify it independently.

AI tools were used for transcription and research assistance. All quotations were checked against the recording and all sources confirmed by the author. Reporting, interviewing, editorial judgment, and final text are the author’s.