How the Media Became a Weapon in the Gaza Genocide

It’s hardly interesting to say that western media coverage of Israel’s year-long war on Palestinians in Gaza has been an indictment of much of what passes for journalism in the US, UK and Europe. Anyone paying even slight attention to the reporting provided by independent and non-western media has had their eyes opened to that fact long ago.
But here’s another fact. The role of the media in covering one of the most one-sided, destructive and grotesque assaults in recent memory hasn’t simply been to conceal its excesses from its audience (though maintaining political docility has certainly seemed an imperative). Rather, by careful framing, selective omission and the strategic deployment of a sheen of ‘objectivity’, the media has functioned as an actor in this war. Not, of course, as a combatant, but as something far more valuable than mere human lives to a state wishing to hide its crimes behind the lie of a modern, progressive democracy: a weapon. From the BBC to CNN, from The New York Times to The Guardian, outlet after outlet has made itself a strategic asset, both for Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal regime, and for the western powers urgently seeking to maintain the status quo in the region, no matter the cost.
This hasn’t been difficult, thanks to the framing – ready-made – through which western audiences have been primed to view all events involving the Middle East. The ease with which consumers of news have been able to absorb a narrative involving clear-cut contrasts between terrorists and victims, barbarian chaos and liberal order, bloodthirsty massacres and the merely incidental damage of ‘the world’s most moral army’ is no accident.
For 23 years at least, the war on terror has been the lazy and simplifying lens through which western powers and their allies have been able to justify asset-grabs, contraventions of international law and domestic political suppression. That fake stamp on the Arab world has erased all distinctions between different groups of ‘rebellious’ Muslims, merging resistance with insurgence, independence movements with Islamist-imperialist projects, and positioning all as a threat. Do it right, and political parties become terrorists, journalists become combatants, Hamas becomes Al Qaeda becomes Hezbollah becomes Isis becomes hospital doctors and patients and poets and taxi drivers; becomes housewives and husbands, becomes humanitarian workers and teachers, and eventually becomes five-year-old Hind Rajab dying of her gunshot wounds, terrified and alone amongst the bodies of her murdered family as the dark sets in.
At the beginning (of course, it was far from the beginning) of Israel’s current assault on Gaza, studio-based journalists enforced this homicidal frame ruthlessly. “Do you condemn Hamas?”, they demanded of anyone attempting either to historicise the 7 October infiltration of Israel or to warn of the impending consequences of Israel’s western-sanctioned freedom to indiscriminately bomb a tightly-packed civilian enclave under the guise of a ‘right to self defence’.
The question had multiple functions. It served to instantly delegitimise any speaker sympathetic to the Palestinian cause – including almost every Palestinian invited on air – by casting them as suspicious: someone who might be quietly celebrating the crimes of 7 October. It also made any presentation of an analytical view of the events of 7 October impossible, with those attempting to do so swiftly accused of caveating their condemnation.
This mixing of two modes of discourse, in which any causal explanation of events leading to 7 October was instantly recast as a justification for those events, was contrived to cut off any telling of the history of Israeli oppression, occupation and apartheid, banishing that vital history from people’s screens. More recent events that preceded 7 October, like the killing of 492 Palestinians in the non-Hamas controlled West Bank in 2023, or the 204 Palestinians killed by Israel’s military or settlers in 2022, went largely unmentioned. This served Israel’s interests too, erasing both its role in bringing about the conditions in which 7 October occurred while concealing its government’s lack of preparedness for a reckoning that was predictable. A particularly stark example of this anti-journalism occurred on 10 October last year, when Sky’s Kay Burley more than once accused Palestinian ambassador to the UK Husam Zomlot of saying of 7 October that “Israel had it coming”. What he actually said was: “Israel knew this was coming their way.” Sky later apologised – but see the trick?
The vacuum left by the crushing of attempts to explain the story of Palestinian resistance was quickly filled with manufactured horror, readily accepted by an audience starved of any alternative view. Hamas had, it was widely reported, beheaded 40 babies. It had, it was said, cooked a child in an oven. Both claims were false, though continued to be amplified by journalists, pundits and political figures. Still, Israel held invitation-only screenings of a film assembled from recovered Hamas fighter body-cams. It would, the country promised, vindicate Israel’s actions in Gaza by proving the most heinous accusations of Hamas’s crimes. Except it did not. It showed the grim war crimes that were already known: Kibbutz civilians and Nova party-goers gunned down or blown up with hand grenades; dead children too. But even some viewers supportive of Israel noted the absence of confirmation of the worst charges levelled against Hamas. The aim of the film, however, wasn’t to provide new information. It was to elicit emotional reactions from select journalists and members of the chatterati and to shore up support for the radical violence being inflicted on Gaza. Invited viewers from the media lined up to express their horror online, on TV and in the pages of newspapers, vying to out-condemn one another. Of course, by this point – just a month into Israel’s assault – over 10,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza, with little corresponding hand-wringing.
Despite the clear evidence that Israel was slaughtering Palestinians en-masse, delegitimising those who would speak on their behalf remained a priority. Imperative to Israel’s case for its war was the idea that everyone in Gaza was in some way complicit in 7 October, and so a legitimate target of the IDF’s purported campaign to eliminate Hamas. Sometimes, Israeli military spokespeople made that claim explicit, in which case it was usually challenged by journalists; at others it was implied, and allowed to stand. Later, as Israel found itself dragged to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) by South Africa, accused of conducting a genocide against Palestinians, Israel charged UNRWA – the UN aid agency for Palestinian refugees – with employing over 1,000 people connected with Hamas and other resistance groups in Gaza. On the same day the ICJ imposed a string of provisional measures on Israel aimed at preventing genocide, it was the unsubstantiated UNRWA story that dominated western airwaves. It led a number of countries to pull funding for the organisation, materially worsening the situation for Palestinians in Gaza. A later investigation found evidence that nine UNRWA employees may have been involved in the 7 October attacks. While much of the funding was reinstated, the agency’s largest donor, the US, has said UNRWA will receive no money until next year. Meanwhile, over 200 UNRWA employees in Gaza have been killed by Israeli attacks so far.
The number of Palestinians killed, injured and displaced by Israel’s assault continued to climb as western journalists failed time and again to challenge Israel’s spokespeople on the country’s tactics. Officials have been repeatedly allowed to broadcast the myth of the precision of Israel’s military operations in Gaza unchallenged. Claims of widespread, systematic sexual assault on 7 October remain largely unsubstantiated, as do the Israeli military’s assertions that Hamas uses civilians and civilian infrastructure to shield its operations. Yet they too formed the basis of reports – many now debunked – asserting these claims as fact. And while Israel’s claims and justifications were reported almost daily, noticeably absent were the voices of those coordinating the resistance in Gaza. Interviews with leaders of groups like Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad have been rare, meaning western audiences have been deprived of the necessary context to form informed views on the groups’ military and political aims and tactics.
Instead, the media has persistently cast Palestinians as either terrorists or victims of a humanitarian disaster. Both categorisations have served Israel’s objectives in the region. If Palestinians are terrorists, they appear to occupy an extra-judicial space, one in which they can be pursued and killed, jailed and tortured outside of the law so beloved by the international rules-based order, a notion that now lies in tatters. And if Palestinians are the victims of a mere humanitarian disaster, one which kills, injures, starves, displaces or makes them – in the new, chilling terminology of international aid organisations – a ‘Wounded Child, No Surviving Family’, one never need worry about the agents of this cataclysm. Countless headlines employing only the passive voice when reporting the mass killing of Palestinians have further embedded the image of a natural, rather than supremely man-made, catastrophe.
Palestinians have also been dehumanised in more overt ways – again, serving the interest of a state that has always seen them as less than human. “Animals” is how they’ve been referred to by several Israeli officials, including defence minister Yoav Gallant. The media, in its excitement to report on the exceptionally rare operational successes Israel has had inside Gaza, has actively contributed to this. In June, Israeli forces managed to rescue four hostages from Nuseirat camp in central Gaza during a daytime raid. In the process, they killed over 250 Palestinians, and injured hundreds more. This was not, for many outlets, a fact worth registering in their headlines; apparently hundreds of Palestinian lives for the freedom of four Israelis is a rate of exchange so reasonable it deserved no comment.
As Israel’s war reaches the end of its first year, it can’t be denied that mainstream reporting in the West has improved somewhat. This has largely come as a result of the exposure of journalistic blunders and the efforts of researchers to point out disparities in the ways Palestinian and Israelis are represented. In fairness to western media, it has also had its reporting hindered by Israel’s refusal to allow journalists into Gaza. That ban is now the subject of a case before Israel’s supreme court. Brought by Foreign Press Association, and backed by the BBC, it’s hoped the supreme court will grant access despite having turned down a similar application out-of-hand in January. Still, journalists’ and editors’ reluctance to improve their reporting on the assault, to incorporate important historical context and to probe the claims of Israeli officials has contributed to the harm being done to Palestinians – a harm now being inflicted on others in the region, too.
Those same media failures have also been a form of self-harm. In a poll conducted in May, most US Democrat voters said that they believed Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. According to YouGov polling from July, 31% of Britons report that their sympathies lie more with Palestinians, with just 17% reporting more sympathy for Israel. Clearly, Israel’s media strategy isn’t working, while the passive manner in which media outlets helped to enable it has undermined trust in their journalism.
Instead, people are turning to new platforms for their news. In the UK, 73% of people now access the news online. Globally, around a quarter of people aged 18-24 rely on TikTok for current affairs. It’s in digital spaces like these that Palestinian journalists, largely excluded from mainstream outlets, have made their voices most loudly heard. Bisan of Gaza – real name Bisan Owda – was recently awarded a News Emmy for her documentary ‘It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive’. Cataloguing a year’s worth of carnage in Gaza, Owda continues to broadcast via social media the reality of Israel’s assault on the enclave, at increasing risk to her own life. After all, the targeting of Palestinian journalists in the territory by Israel has meant that over 130 have so far been killed – at a rate of more than ten per month.
On hearing that her reporting had won the award, Owda said: “We all know the truth, but our fear undermines our ability to say it out loud, and sometimes even drives us to hide it! But remember that a world without colonialism is a world without fear… and that truth is the only way we can be free from fear.”
Every journalist in every newsroom in the West knows exactly what’s happening in Gaza. And every one of them either did know – or should have known given Israel’s history of violence against Palestinians – exactly what would unfold after 7 October. What’s been lacking isn’t knowledge, but rather the moral courage to report the truth. The truth isn’t for the faint-hearted. It takes courage to risk alienation by condemning Israel, a western ally, and courage to put journalistic access to one’s own political leaders on the line by condemning their support for the assault. And it takes even more courage to cut a clear path through a colonial history of abuse and occupation that western audiences have long been primed to reject. But journalism – and the truth – demands nothing less.
Steven Methven is a writer and researcher for Novara Media’s live YouTube show Novara Live.