Hamas terrorists filmed their atrocities. They murdered civilians, dragged hostages into Gaza and left behind recordings of crimes they committed on October 7. Yet three years later, a new Anti-Defamation League investigation describes how Wikipedia editors removed detailed accounts of those atrocities, reduced the visibility of Hamas’s anti-jewism and fought to keep sexual violence wrapped in qualifying language. Some of the editors were banned. Much of their work survived.
The report, released October 15, exposes a failure that banning a few accounts cannot repair. According to the ADL, Wikipedia never systematically reviewed the contributions of the sanctioned editors to determine what they had distorted or removed. Their accounts were restricted while the articles they helped shape continued serving as reference material for readers around the world. An encyclopedia that claims neutrality should not need an outside organization to explain why removing a disruptive editor requires examining the damage left behind.
The public editing record shows how quickly the work began. On October 10, 2023, just three days after the massacre, an editor calling himself Iskandar323 moved extensive material about Hamas’s anti-Jewism, human shields, child combatants and human rights abuses out of its main article and into “Criticism of Hamas.” The explanation was that the main page was too long. A brief summary and a link replaced the detailed material, making readers take an extra step to learn about the organization whose terrorists had just slaughtered civilians and kidnapped families.
At the time, the main Hamas article was drawing close to a million views a day, according to the ADL. The separate criticism page attracted far fewer. The practical result was straightforward: at the moment the world wanted to know what Hamas was, readers of its main Wikipedia entry were being shown less of its record. Calling the operation an administrative adjustment did not change what disappeared from their view.
In November, the same editor removed a substantial section about decapitation, sexual violence and torture from the article now called “Gaza war.” The material included reporting on footage of an attempted decapitation shown to journalists and accounts of forensic examinations. That particular deletion was reverted, but the ADL documents subsequent removals and says the detailed forensic account was not restored. The current article compresses mutilation, torture and sexual violence into a sentence qualified by “reportedly engaged,” while the detailed passages about victims bound with wire and an attempted decapitation are absent
The ADL documents a prolonged fight over the word “reportedly” in the opening of Wikipedia’s dedicated October 7 sexual violence article. One editor repeatedly restored it after at least four others removed it, continuing the dispute between August 2024 and November 2025. The opening now states directly that sexual violence occurred. That correction was necessary, but it does not erase the history of contributors having to fight to get the article to say plainly what the evidence supported.
Iskandar323 was eventually banned from Wikipedia after violating an earlier restriction on editing the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The ADL’s current audit found that approximately 91 per cent of the account’s assessable edits across six major articles remained in place as of August 2026. Its demand is for a review of those contributions to identify and repair distortions. Wikipedia’s disciplinary process dealt with access to the editing tools. The published record still needs attention.
Meanwhile, Canadian activists are openly organizing their own Wikipedia campaign. Artists Against Artwashing is advertising an October 22 workshop to create entries honouring Palestinian artists and expose “Canadian, Zionist backers of genocide,” according to an announcement independently confirmed by The Jerusalem Post. The group, which campaigns against the Azrieli Foundation, held an earlier workshop focused on related articles in April. Its advertised objective is political before participants have made their first edit.
MJN has already examined how coverage of October 7 pushes the massacre and its victims into the background. Wikipedia gives that problem another route into public understanding. Wikimedia acknowledges that its content feeds search engines and trains artificial intelligence models. A distorted account can travel well beyond the original page, arriving as an apparently authoritative answer without any indication of the editorial fight that produced it.
ADL researcher Daniel Kelley told JNS that the organization contacted the Wikimedia Foundation about the findings and had not received a response. The demand for an audit is elementary: examine the altered articles, restore sourced material where its removal distorted the account and correct misleading wording. Hamas left recordings of its crimes and families waiting for stolen loved ones.
An encyclopedia has a responsibility to preserve that history accurately. Banning editors while leaving their distortions unexamined is a failure to finish the job.
Leave a Reply