Miss Israel Melanie Shiraz on Sunday condemned a series of social media posts by “Miss Palestine” Nadeen Ayoub over the war against Hamas in Gaza, calling her out for what Shiraz said was the misuse of her public platform as a contestant in the international beauty contest.

The battle of the beauties broke out after the 27-year-old Ayoub, who has labelled the two-year-old war in Gaza a “genocide” and is scheduled to compete against Shiraz, 26, in the Miss Universe pageant next month, released a series of posts on social media about the war. One vastly inflated the Palestinian death toll in Gaza, another labels Masada and Jerusalem as “Palestine.”

According to the post shared by Ayoub, the death toll in Gaza is 680,000, more than 10 times the unverified figures cited by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.

“There have been repeated posts amplifying fatality numbers so exaggerated they exceed even Hamas’s own inflated reports,” Shiraz said in a video released on Sunday. “This is not advocacy. This is fabrication.”

“With a large following and reach, she spreads lies so easily disproven that they corrode credibility,” she continued. “Worse, they shape the minds of impressionable young people, glorifying violence and pushing them toward conflict instead of peace.”

Another video Ayoub shared on her Instagram feed includes images of Israeli children murdered by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, which, according to Shiraz, are subtly presented in a way that implies they were Palestinians.

The post includes a clip of children killed in the war, among them the Bibas children, Ariel, 4, and his baby brother Kfir, nine months old, who were murdered by their Palestinian abductors in Gaza, as well as 12-year-old Noya Dan, an autistic Israeli girl abducted from her home in a southern Israeli kibbutz with her 80-year-old grandmother and subsequently killed.

“To take these innocent Israeli children—murdered in their homes or in captivity—and present them as though they were Palestinian casualties is not an act of compassion,” says Shiraz in the video. “It is a theft of identity, a falsification of truth, and a calculated attempt to weaponize tragedy for political purposes.”

Shiraz, a resident of Tel Aviv who grew up in the United States and studied at Berkley before becoming a data scientist, told JNS on Sunday that she felt it was her “moral duty” to speak out. “I cannot allow this false narrative to stand without a rebuttal.”

Ayoub did not immediately return a request for comment Monday.

The Miss Universe pageant is scheduled to take place in Thailand next month.

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