How a Small-Town US Magazine Published Oct. 7 Atrocity Denial

In Northern California, just south of the renowned Silicon Valley, lies the small town of Gilroy, home to roughly 60,000 residents. Gilroy markets itself as a place defined by a tight-knit community and abundant nature. It is best known for its annual garlic festival.

That is why it is so striking to find a piece in its community lifestyle publication, Gilroy Morning Hill TODAY, about the Israel-Hamas war that is so far beyond the pale – so riddled with distortions and omissions – that it reads less like a misguided explainer and more like an exercise in moral inversion.

In “Finding Our Feet in a World Upside Down: Why Facts Matter in Our Small Towns,” Mike Sanchez, more troublingly the magazine’s editor, presents a narrative that does not merely criticize Israel, but systematically distorts the war itself: downplaying Hamas’s atrocities on Oct. 7, including sexual violence now attested to by freed Israeli hostages, eyewitnesses, forensic experts, and international bodies, while omitting Hamas’s governing role in Gaza, erasing its responsibility for civilian suffering, and recycling a familiar catalogue of anti-Israel claims stripped of context and agency.

Rewriting Oct. 7

Sanchez’s description of Oct. 7, 2023, is revealing. He writes that “Hamas fighters breached the fence enclosing Gaza” and overran “21 Israeli settlements,” killing hundreds of Israeli soldiers and civilians. He claims they “stumbled upon” the Nova music festival, where festival-goers were hunted down, gang-raped, murdered, and kidnapped, violence he elsewhere casts doubt upon or dismisses entirely. He further suggests that the IDF was responsible for many civilian deaths that day, alleging soldiers were “instructed to kill everyone in sight, including comrades and civilians.”

Sanchez also writes that “Palestinian civilians who entered through the breaches were also caught in the bloodshed.” This phrasing erases the documented reality that many of those civilians actively participated in looting, assaults, kidnappings, and the abuse of hostages, including the scenes of Israeli hostages being paraded through Gaza and spat upon by crowds.

Perhaps recognizing, at some level, how offensive this framing is, Sanchez briefly acknowledges that Oct. 7 was “horrific.” But the concession is fleeting. Gaza, readers are told, is equally “horrific,” before the article devotes the next page and a half to a familiar catalogue of false accusations against Israel, presented as settled fact.

A Catalogue of Claims, Minus Responsibility

The article reproduces nearly every standard anti-Israel talking point: inflated casualty figures presented without any distinction between civilians and combatants; claims that Israel blocks aid while ignoring Hamas’s theft and diversion of humanitarian supplies; famine declarations treated as uncontested; accusations of deliberate hospital targeting without mention of Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure; and assertions that journalists and entire families are being systematically wiped out.

International organizations and activist NGOs are treated as final arbiters of truth, despite their documented reliance on Hamas-controlled sources and their failure to interrogate casualty data or distinguish causes of death. One such citation is B’Tselem, invoked as proof that Israel is committing genocide, as though the claim itself settles the question.

Every talking point in the piece systematically omits Hamas’s role in the suffering of Gazans. There is no acknowledgment that Hamas hijacks humanitarian aid, embeds itself in civilian infrastructure, operates an extensive tunnel network beneath homes and hospitals, or infiltrates medical and UNRWA staff. Hamas’s own responsibility for Gaza’s water and electricity infrastructure, long predating this war, is ignored entirely.

When responsibility is stripped away this completely, outcomes are presented as facts, but they function as accusations.

By contrast, Israel has evacuated over 90 percent of Gaza’s population to designated areas in an effort, however imperfect, to mitigate civilian harm. Any analysis that excludes Hamas’s deliberately destructive strategy presents a fundamentally distorted picture of responsibility.

Bringing It Back Home to Gilroy

The article then attempts to explain why this distant war should matter to Gilroy readers. Here again, facts are selectively framed.

US military assistance to Israel is misrepresented as excessive spending beyond the agreed $3.8 billion framework, portrayed as yielding no returns, with no explanation of how US foreign military financing actually functions or who benefits from it.

Anti-Israel campus protests in the United States are described as suppressed expressions of dissent, with universities accused of violating students’ First Amendment rights. HonestReporting spent months documenting these protests. They were frequently aggressive, antisemitic, and openly supportive of terror organizations. Jewish and Zionist students were harassed, blocked from campus spaces, and made to feel unsafe. Universities were slow, and in many cases reluctant, to intervene.

The piece goes on to frame “anti-Zionist” Jewish Americans and other public figures as victims of persecution, while minimizing or ignoring hostility directed at Jews who support Israel. The message is reinforced visually with curated cultural imagery, a familiar aesthetic strategy that softens the article’s accusations while reinforcing its moral framing.

Where You Get Your Facts Matters

Perhaps a small-town lifestyle magazine should avoid topics far outside its expertise. But having chosen to engage, it bears responsibility for accuracy and balance.

Legacy outlets like The New York Times and the BBC deserve sustained scrutiny for biased and reckless reporting. But the ripple effect works both ways. A local publication like Gilroy Morning Hill TODAY can shape perceptions just as powerfully, especially in communities where readers trust it to inform rather than indoctrinate.

Sanchez urges readers to seek facts beyond their confirmation bias, yet relies almost exclusively on sources that reinforce his own. In a publication aimed at neighbors who live alongside Jewish community members, that imbalance is not harmless. It is careless at best, and misleading at worst.