Drop Site News Contributor Cheered Kids Acting Out Terrorism
Ismail Nofal cheered for five-year-olds portraying terrorists in a grotesque Gaza kindergarten graduation. He's also praised a Hamas founder and a terrorist who murdered a rabbi.
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Every few months, Drop Site News finds a new way to make my job easy. Since I first wrote about the outlet in January 2025, and came back to it in April after they picked up a Gaza reporter CNN had already dropped, the list of contributors with ties to terrorists or affection for them has only grown. The newest name on it is Ismail Nofal.
On August 8, Drop Site ran a Nofal byline built entirely around Hussam Abu Safiya, the former Kamal Adwan Military Hospital director, who just so happens to be a colonel in Hamas, but whom the outlet presents as merely a wrongfully detained doctor. Nofal’s Substack bio calls him a “Palestinian journalist” from Gaza who writes stories that reflect the “reality of his people.” It leaves out the part of that reality in which he he spent years documenting on his own accounts, which is his admiration for the men who kill Israelis.
The kindergarten graduation
Nofal’s most recent turn in the spotlight came courtesy of his own archive. As HonestReporting noted this week, I dug up a video Nofal posted from a Gaza kindergarten graduation, in which five-year-olds act out terrorism scenes with toy weapons. He wrote over the footage that a people who embrace their weapons from a young age will never be defeated, and identified the event as the graduation of the Islamic Hudna kindergarten. It came to light the same week two Palestinian factions were confirmed to be sending fifteen-year-olds to their deaths in Gaza.
Repatedly glorifying terrorists
On July 22, 2017, Nofal posted a roster of attackers to Instagram. He wrote that God seemed to have chosen the name Muhammad to carry out that week’s attacks, and that the army of Muhammad had begun its return, which he added was exactly what they hoped for. He then listed eight of them by name and hometown, starting with the three Muhammad Jabarins from Umm al-Fahm who had shot two Israeli police officers to death at the Temple Mount days earlier, and closed with a hashtag asking God to grant all of them a place in paradise.
A Hamas founder’s funeral
Six months later, Nofal pointed his camera at the funeral of Imad al-Alami. Al-Alami helped found Hamas and sat on its political bureau, and he died in early 2018 from a gunshot wound he gave himself while inspecting his own weapon at home. Nofal posted images of the flag-draped body being carried through Gaza and described the scene as the funeral of the martyred commander Imad al-Alami, may God have mercy on him. He tagged the post with his own photography credit, so there is no question about whose work it was.
An elegy for the man who killed Raziel Shevach
Weeks after that, Nofal wrote a short tribute to Ahmad Jarrar. He told Jenin and Palestine not to weep and to raise their heads high with their heroes, and called Jarrar a valiant one who deserved God’s mercy. Jarrar led the cell that gunned down Rabbi Raziel Shevach near Havat Gilad in January 2018, and Israeli forces killed him in Jenin on the same day Nofal published the eulogy.
The running total
Nofal is the sixth Drop Site contributor I’ve flagged for this. He follows Abdel Qader Sabbah, whom CNN cut loose over his own Hamas material; Hossam Shabat, whom the IDF identified as a Hamas sniper; Mujahed al-Saadi, who also writes for the Islamic Jihad-owned Palestine Today; AbuBaker Abed, who called for Israel to be wiped off the map and welcomed the October 7 attack; and Ahlam al-Talouli, whom Drop Site itself called a trusted source after she celebrated that attack as it was happening.
The government should deny Drop Site’s pending 501(c)(3) application and end the fiscal sponsorship it currently runs through the Social Security Works Education Fund. Congress and the Justice Department should be asking why an American outlet keeps finding room for writers tied to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, especially the ones other newsrooms already turned away.
Have you forwarded this information to the dept of state? The DOJ? and the IRS? If not please do . And keep on exposing them to the light. It's a great article.