For more than two years, Israel has carried out a remorseless campaign of erasure in Gaza, reducing the territory to rubble. Many Palestinians in the enclave have been turned into accidental journalists.
Amid Israel’s ban on foreign journalists, the only sources of information have been the citizens living through and live-streaming the genocide. Even so, their courageous efforts were not widely appreciated.
“There are no journalists in Gaza,” David Lammy, then the British foreign secretary, asserted late last year. The same sentiment was expressed by prominent CNN presenter Christiane Amanpour.
The implication was that Palestinians could not be trusted to narrate their reality accurately or objectively, and that only mainstream journalists could serve as credible truth-tellers to aid public understanding.
Rooted in hubris, this theory has been put to the test and comprehensively shattered, as journalists from Britain’s main broadcasters – including ITV, Sky News and the BBC – recently entered Gaza, and characteristically obscured the reality. They upheld the fiction that Gaza represents the site of complex warfare, not meticulously orchestrated mass slaughter.
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Or as some might say, business as usual.
Reporting from Gaza in early November, the BBC’s Lucy Williamson noted: “This is just a taste of what two years of war has done to Gaza … Israel’s army says it’s still fighting Hamas here almost every day.” The desolate landscape in Gaza is framed as a byproduct of Israel’s violence, carefully directed exclusively at Hamas.
An accompanying article persists with this characterisation of an intricate conflict. The headline cites “total devastation after two years of war”, while the text reproduces Israel’s usual robotic renditions of Hamas tunnels and terror infrastructure, effectively whitewashing the sustained annihilation of Palestinian life since October 2023, while justifying continued attacks.
An Israeli spokesperson is quoted directly as saying the level of destruction was “not a goal”, and adding: “The goal is to combat terrorists.” Above these quotes, the article features an image of the pulverised and flattened neighbourhood of Shujaiya – highlighting the stark contrast between the BBC’s framing and the inescapable truth.
Distorted picture
Although Israel’s brutality has not stopped, the BBC refers to the ceasefire as leaving Gaza in a “tense limbo”. In reality, Israel has violated the ceasefire around 500 times since October, killing more than 300 Palestinians and levelling hundreds of buildings.
The BBC’s reporting from Gaza capped off 25 months of distorted coverage, painting a wildly inaccurate picture based on predetermined conclusions about Israeli retaliation and “self-defence”, while ignoring the raw truth of systematic ethnic cleansing. Doing that from the comfort of an office is bad enough, but committing to it while standing amid the apocalypse in Gaza is grotesque. What is long ingrained is not easily uprooted.
Days after the BBC’s report came a Sky News piece, also from a Middle East correspondent embedded with the Israeli military. It features similar descriptors about Gaza’s “devastation” and “wasteland”, contextualised as the “scars of war”. An Israeli army spokesperson is allowed to frame events: “We’re not staying here as a hobby. We’re staying here to secure the people of Israel.”
Mainstream media in the UK have consistently told the wrong story about Gaza. They have concealed, watered down and aimed to prevent the public from connecting the dots
This positioning of Israel’s actions as solely reactive is preserved throughout Sky’s reporting. When correspondent Adam Parsons mentions hearing automatic gunfire during his visit to Gaza, resulting in the deaths of Palestinians who were allegedly crossing the “yellow line” that now divides the enclave, he quickly inserts the Israeli version of events: “Israel says they were Hamas terrorists.”
This bolsters the impression of Israeli soldiers engaging in violence only to snuff out threats in a multifaceted war. “So long as Hamas still has weapons, it is very hard to imagine Israel withdrawing from this blighted land,” Parsons says.
Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza is illegal under international law, yet mainstream media are all too eager to repackage it as a military strategy rooted in necessity.
To its credit, unlike the BBC, the Sky News package included the perspective of a Palestinian civilian in Gaza. While the Israeli military did not allow embedded journalists to speak directly with Palestinians, the interview was arranged through a colleague in the territory. “I’m giving up,” said Iman Hasoneh, a mother from Shujaiya. “One day they will just announce that we have all been killed.”
What should have been a perspective supplementing the story of a population subjected to two years of unparalleled horror, is presented merely as an allegation countering a plethora of Israeli claims. Such framing reinforces the illusion of a complicated war defined by two irreconcilable narratives and unfortunate casualties, far removed from the conditions on the ground, where indiscriminate bombardment has killed tens of thousands of people. More than 80 percent of Gaza’s war dead were reportedly civilians.
Deceptive framing
It’s worth reflecting upon what Gaza has endured during Israel’s merciless carpet bombing over the past two years. A recent UN report noted that Israel has created a “human-made abyss” in Gaza, and “significantly undermined every pillar of survival”.
The executive director of Unicef noted in July that an average of 28 children were killed daily in Gaza – the equivalent of “a whole classroom of children killed, every day for nearly two years”. The International Committee of the Red Cross diagnosed it as “worse than hell on earth”. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and UN experts have all concluded that Israel is committing genocide.
Israel’s killing on an industrial scale is nothing like the portrait composed by UK broadcasters. It would be almost impossible to arrive at that conclusion from watching and reading their coverage, which portrays Israeli violence as inevitable retaliation with regrettable collateral damage.
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The problem is not limited to their diluted, deceptive framing of the Gaza slaughter. It’s also what is omitted: no mention that Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice, nor that the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for crimes against humanity against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
The countless nuggets of information that could be used to rebut Israeli narratives, or to bring into sharp focus what the camera lens is showing, are peculiarly left out.
It could be argued that when journalists are embedded with the Israeli military, their coverage is naturally suppressed – but both the BBC and Sky News emphasised repeatedly that they maintained editorial control. The reporting can thus be reasonably interpreted as a deliberate construction of an alternative reality.
An ITV News journalist also entered Gaza recently, and produced arguably the most forthright coverage. John Irvine states plainly and unambiguously: “I was in both Mosul and Raqqa as the Islamic State was being demolished, but the level of the obliteration here puts both those pummelled places in the shade.” He also clearly and accurately refers to the territory Israel is controlling within the yellow line as “occupied”.
But the report still contains military jargon, using terms like “fought over” and “warfare” to consolidate the perception of two warring sides. And in the segment with the Israeli military spokesperson, when asked if the destruction was “a military necessity”, the answer given is yes, unchallenged.
What makes this particularly striking is that ITV’s own documentary recently exposed both genocidal intent among Israeli soldiers and the licenses to vengefully and freely kill civilians in Gaza, material that could have been put directly to the spokesperson. Instead, like Sky News and the BBC, the untold brutality was left framed as the remnants of a convoluted military campaign, not sinister state policy.
Mainstream media in the UK have consistently told the wrong story about Gaza. They have concealed, watered down and aimed to prevent the public from connecting the dots. But what we’re seeing today from inside Gaza may be the most serious offence yet, allowing the perpetrators of the genocide to narrate the story – despite these reporters seeing the reality with their own eyes.
What the UK media class lacks in journalistic integrity, it compensates for in generosity – supplying the very evidence that will indict it when the reckoning comes.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
