The revelation that Hamas lied about how and when and by whose hand the Bibas children were killed has some crucial implications for any remotely intellectually honest person.

To put a fine point on it: Hamas lies about everything, and therefore Hamas has lied about everything. Hamas propaganda has shaped the world’s understanding of this conflict, and every syllable of it has been false.

One is tempted to interject here that an intellectually honest person would have already come to this conclusion and therefore perhaps there are precious few minds left to be changed. But integrity compels us to say what is true anyway.

Hamas’s lies about the Bibas family were shocking even by Hamas standards. Shiri and her two sons Ariel and Kfir were taken from their homes on Oct. 7, 2023 when Ariel was 4 and Kfir was less than a year old. Throughout the war, Hamas claimed they were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Yarden, Shiri’s husband and the kids’ father, was also taken hostage but held separately from his family. Hamas taunted him repeatedly, once even on camera for a propaganda video, about his family’s fate. Yarden was released this month.

Yesterday, Hamas returned the bodies of Ariel and Kfir and a third hostage, Oded Lifshitz, as well as a body they claimed was Shiri but turned out to have been a random unidentified Palestinian woman.

That wasn’t the only surprise revealed during Israel’s forensic examination of the bodies. The boys were not killed in an Israeli airstrike; they were murdered by their Palestinian captors, who strangled the children with their bare hands and then mutilated their bodies in order to try and obfuscate their cause of death.

The claim that the Bibases were killed in an IDF airstrike was believable enough—and therefore was widely believed. Even if that had been true, it wouldn’t have mitigated Hamas’s responsibility one iota. But since much of the world, from media to governments to activist organizations, was looking for any excuse to absolve Hamas and the Palestinians and to cast Israel’s counteroffensive as overly aggressive and counterproductive to boot, its underlying assumptions were accepted and repeated and shaped debate over the war even within Israel itself. And since Israel and the U.S. are democracies, public debate shapes war policy and outcomes as well.

In this way, Hamas has stage managed the war to an unprecedented degree.

It’s not as though we hadn’t caught Hamas in lies throughout the war, of course. After all, there are two kinds of Hamas statements: lies that have been exposed and lies that have yet to be exposed.

There are the big lies worth briefly recounting but which are by no means all of them. Hamas managed to get pretty much every major newspaper and network to double the actual numbers of civilian casualties (there were about 25,000 all considered) and inflated the overall casualty figures. Not only was there no genocide in Gaza, there wasn’t even disproportionate collateral damage.

Hamas and its NGO mouthpieces got the world to repeat the threat of looming famine, and the International Criminal Court put out a warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest on conclusively debunked charges of intentional starvation. (It turned out that Hamas, however, was intentionally starving Israeli hostages.)

Early on, Hamas blamed Israel for an explosion at a hospital in Gaza and claimed hundreds were killed. By the time it became clear that a Palestinian rocket was to blame, mob protests against Israel and the U.S. broke out across the world and President Biden’s meetings with Arab leaders were canceled.

Hamas has also lied about hostages, announcing the deaths of captives who were still alive. In one case, the terror group forced a female captive to participate in the staging of her own death.

Those big lies spawned a thousand little lies. But the point is that reporting on the conflict, which led to weapons embargoes by allies against Israel, was based on lies every step of the way. If you got your news from the New York Times or the Washington Post or the BBC or any number of others, you followed an entirely different war—one that didn’t happen.

The only way to have your outlet publish a factual accounting of the conflict is by assuming every statement by Hamas is a lie until definitively proved otherwise. If not, you’ll end up with the credibility of—well, of Hamas.