Emmanuel Macron stood before the United Nations this week and delivered what might be the most audacious revision of recent history ever uttered from that podium. The French president, in his infinite wisdom and apparent alternate reality, declared that “Hamas has never operated in the West Bank.” Let that sink in for a moment. Never operated. As if decades of blood, shattered bodies, and grieving families simply vanish when a European leader needs to score political points.
This isn’t a minor factual error. This is gaslighting on a global stage, and it demands a reality check that apparently Paris isn’t getting from its intelligence services.
The historical record screams a different story. Hamas cells operating out of Judea and Samaria have orchestrated hundreds of attacks against innocent civilians. We’re talking about systematic campaigns of terror that span decades, not some contested detail in a footnote. In 2001, Hamas operatives from these very regions executed the Sbarro pizzeria bombing in Jerusalem. Fifteen people murdered while grabbing lunch. A sixteenth victim finally succumbed in 2023 after spending more than twenty years in a coma. You want to tell those families that Hamas never operated there?
The carnage continued with brutal efficiency. A Hamas suicide bomber from Tulkarm walked into the Park Hotel in Netanya during a Passover seder in 2002 and killed thirty people. Thirty individuals celebrating a holiday meal, gone in an instant. Hebron-based Hamas cells were behind the 2003 Jerusalem bus bombing that killed twenty-three and the twin bus bombings in Beersheba the following year that took sixteen more lives.
Here’s what really guts you about Macron’s statement. The violence didn’t stop with the Second Intifada. In 2014, a Hebron-based Hamas cell kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers in Gush Etzion. Senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri later openly acknowledged his organization’s role. Those killings helped ignite that year’s Gaza conflict, a fact conveniently missing from Macron’s sanitized narrative.
Fast forward to recent years and the attacks keep coming. Hamas claimed responsibility for a June 2023 shooting in Eli that killed four people. They claimed a January 2025 attack in al-Funduq that left three dead, though Israeli security officials indicated the gunmen belonged to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas’s ideological cousins. Last year, a Hamas member opened fire on a vehicle near Bruchin, killing Tzeela Gez. She was pregnant and on her way to give birth. Her baby, delivered by emergency C-section, died two weeks later.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s office didn’t mince words in their response. They pointed out something that should mortify the French president if he’s capable of shame. Just two days before Macron’s speech, on the eve of Yom Kippur, Netanel Shukrun was murdered in his car by a Hamas terrorist in Judea and Samaria. The victim was a French citizen and father of six. With his final breath, he told his son to run. That’s the reality Macron erased with his grand pronouncement.
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called it right when he said it’s hard to imagine a more out of touch speech than what Macron delivered. Hamas terrorists carry out attacks against Jews in these areas with disturbing frequency. They have murdered countless Israeli civilians, and ignorance is no excuse for erasing their blood from the historical record.
Macron’s fiction didn’t stop with Hamas’s operational history. Throughout his address, he pushed the tired narrative about Palestinian sovereignty and violated rights while glossing over inconvenient truths about the Middle East. Arab citizens of Israel make up roughly twenty-one percent of the country’s population. They hold full citizenship, vote in free elections, serve in government, and enjoy freedoms their counterparts in surrounding Arab nations can only dream about.
You know what’s really happening here? Macron is playing to a European audience that prefers comfortable lies over uncomfortable truths. It’s easier to lecture Israel about Palestinian rights than to confront the reality that Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction. It’s simpler to gaslight the international community than to acknowledge that Israel faces genuine existential threats from groups that don’t hide their genocidal intentions.
This matters beyond the immediate insult to terror victims and their families. When world leaders casually rewrite history to fit their preferred narrative, they undermine the very foundation of honest diplomacy. How can you negotiate peace when basic facts become optional? How can you build coalitions against terrorism when European presidents pretend certain terrorist groups don’t exist in certain places?
The French president owes more than an apology. He owes an explanation for how his government’s intelligence apparatus failed so spectacularly, or worse, how he chose to ignore what they surely told him. Every grieving family, every survivor, every person who’s lived under the threat of Hamas terror in Judea and Samaria deserves better than Emmanuel Macron’s alternative facts served up with Parisian arrogance at the United Nations.
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