{"id":302261,"date":"2025-09-01T12:01:57","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T11:01:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=302261"},"modified":"2025-08-31T14:55:29","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T13:55:29","slug":"how-western-media-helped-turn-israels-genocide-into-fake-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/09\/how-western-media-helped-turn-israels-genocide-into-fake-news\/","title":{"rendered":"How Western Media Helped Turn Israel\u2019s Genocide into \u2018Fake News\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Israel\u2019s intent to annihilate Gaza would have been clear much sooner had we listened to Palestinian journalists, rather than the evasions and equivocations of the <\/em>BBC.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

26 Aug 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0Israel\u2019s justification for the mass slaughter of Gaza\u2019s people and their starvation \u2013 now officially confirmed as a famine engineered by Israel \u2013 was built on a parade of easily discredited lies from the start: of beheaded infants, of babies in ovens, of mass rape.<\/p>\n

It should surprise no one that Israel continued advancing similarly outrageous lies as it set about \u2013 as all genocidal regimes must do \u2013 dismantling the most basic infrastructure of survival for Gaza\u2019s population.<\/p>\n

It cut off humanitarian aid delivered by the United Nations agency Unrwa, and destroyed the enclave\u2019s hospitals, while killing, jailing and torturing<\/a> its medical personnel.<\/p>\n

Israel claimed it had documents proving the UN was a front for Hamas \u2013 documents<\/a> it never produced. Meanwhile, all 36 of Gaza\u2019s hospitals have been attacked \u2013 attacks whose implicit rationale was that they were built atop Hamas \u201ccommand and control centres\u201d, though those centres have never been found.<\/p>\n

Expanding this narrative, Israel rounded up<\/a> and jailed the enclave\u2019s leading doctors, who had been working round the clock to treat the endless tide of maimed men, women and children, as supposed \u201cHamas operatives\u201d in disguise.<\/p>\n

Also as any genocidal regime must do \u2013 especially one that wishes to uphold the pretence that it is a democracy with the world\u2019s \u201cmost moral army\u201d \u2013 Israel laboured tirelessly to cast a pall of darkness over its atrocities.<\/p>\n

It blocked western journalists from accessing Gaza, and then picked off Palestinian journalists<\/a> in the enclave one by one, until more than 200 had been assassinated, 11 in the past couple of weeks alone, including contributors to Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera. Others have been forced to flee<\/a> to safety abroad.<\/p>\n

The western press corps, which barely raised a peep about its exclusion for most of the past 22 months of genocide, collectively shrugged its shoulders as its colleagues in Gaza were slowly exterminated. Nothing to see here.<\/p>\n

That was until this month, when Israel celebrated<\/a> an air strike that killed six Palestinian\u00a0journalists, including the entire five-person team covering Gaza City for Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

The strike\u2019s timing was extremely fortuitous. Israel is calling up 60,000 troops<\/a> for a last push into the remains of Gaza City, where around one million Palestinians \u2013 half of them children \u2013 are holed up, being starved to death.<\/p>\n

Those civilians will either be killed or rounded up into a concentration camp<\/a> Israel is calling a \u201chumanitarian city\u201d, close to the border with Egypt. There, they will await their ultimate expulsion \u2013 possibly to South Sudan, a failed state where Israel provided the arms<\/a> that has fuelled civil war and violence.<\/p>\n

Campaign of vilification<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Israel justified its murder of Al Jazeera\u2019s crew on the grounds that one among them, Anas al-Sharif, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, was secretly a \u201cHamas terrorist\u201d.<\/p>\n

The claim was no less preposterous than the excuses Israel has been using to rationalise its exclusion of aid workers, and its killing and jailing of hundreds of Gaza\u2019s medical staff.<\/p>\n

Gaza\u2019s doctors \u2013 overwhelmed every day for nearly two years with numbers of dead and wounded more normally associated with major natural disasters, and in conditions where they are denied basic medicines and equipment \u2013 supposedly had enough time on their hands to spend it colluding with Hamas fighters. Or so Israel would have us believe.<\/p>\n

Sharif, we are told, similarly found time between breaks from his 22-month, frantic reporting schedule \u2013 much of it on camera \u2013 to serve<\/a> as a Hamas commander \u201cdirecting rocket attacks on Israeli civilians\u201d.<\/p>\n

Presumably, he had superhuman powers that meant he could survive on no sleep for two years and, like a quantum particle, be in two different places at the same time.<\/p>\n

We now know exactly where this ridiculous story originated: from something Israel calls its \u201cLegitimisation Cell\u201d. The intelligence unit\u2019s name, which was surely never supposed to come to light, is the give-away. Its job has been to legitimise Israel\u2019s atrocities with stories vilifying its victims and thereby making the genocide<\/a> more palatable to Israeli and western audiences.<\/p>\n

The Israeli news website +972 exposed<\/a> the cell within days of Sharif\u2019s killing this month, reporting that it was formed after 7 October 2023 \u2013 the day Hamas and other groups broke out of their Gaza prison camp, spreading carnage, following 17 years of a brutal siege.<\/p>\n

The Legitimisation Cell\u2019s central purpose has been to help Israel plant stories in the western media portraying Gaza\u2019s hospitals as hotbeds of terrorism, and its journalists as \u201cundercover Hamas operatives\u201d.<\/p>\n

Fabricated evidence<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Drawing on three Israeli intelligence sources, +972 reported that Israel\u2019s motive in creating the Legtimisation Cell was not security-related, but driven purely by propaganda needs \u2013 or what is known in Israel as \u201chasbara\u201d.<\/p>\n

The cell was reportedly desperate to find a link \u2013 any link \u2013 between a handful of journalists in Gaza and Hamas, in order to sow doubt in the minds of western audiences to justify killing the enclave\u2019s press corps and stop them exposing Israeli atrocities.<\/p>\n

Precisely echoing the long-time warnings of Israel\u2019s critics, these intelligence officials told +972 that the cell\u2019s work was viewed as being \u201cvital to allowing Israel to prolong the war\u201d. The aim was to stop popular opposition in the West to the genocide growing to the point where it might force western capitals \u2013 Israel\u2019s patrons \u2013 to pull the plug on Israel\u2019s killing machine.<\/p>\n

Another source added: \u201cThe idea was to [allow the Israeli military to] operate without pressure, so countries like America wouldn\u2019t stop supplying weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to these sources, Israeli officials were so keen to get their genocide-prolonging messaging out to western audiences that they \u201ccut corners\u201d \u2013 a polite way, it seems, to indicate that they simply fabricated evidence.<\/p>\n

After Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul and his camera operator were killed in July 2024, Israel cited a 2021 document allegedly found on a \u201cHamas computer\u201d to argue that he was a \u201cmilitary wing operative\u201d, and that he had taken part in the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.<\/p>\n

Yet the supposed document states that Ghoul received<\/a> his military rank in 2007, when he was 10 years old.<\/p>\n

In Sharif\u2019s case, he was accused in advance. In October 2024, Israel claimed that he and five other Al Jazeera journalists secretly belonged<\/a> to the military wings of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. In March, one of them, Hossam Shabat, was assassinated<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The \u2018fake news\u2019 scam<\/strong><\/h3>\n

It was not just Al Jazeera journalists on the ground in Gaza who were being maligned. Addicted to its extravagant lies, Israel claimed that the Doha-based channel itself was taking editorial directives from Hamas.<\/p>\n

Months into Israel\u2019s genocide, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had crafted an evidence-free narrative<\/a> that Al Jazeera was a \u201cterrorist channel\u201d that \u201cactively participated in the October 7 massacre\u201d.<\/p>\n

That provided the cover story for Israel to outlaw Al Jazeera last year, shuttering<\/a> its operations in illegally occupied East Jerusalem and, since September, in the West Bank.<\/p>\n

There was a direct parallel with Israel\u2019s strategy against Unrwa, weaponising the grossest of lies to evict it from Gaza, and leaving the people there prey to Israeli soldiers and an Israeli and US-backed mercenary group, the misnamed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation<\/a>(GHF).<\/p>\n

The GHF\u2019s game plan has been to terrorise the population away from so-called \u201caid hubs\u201d with lethal gunfire. That has allowed Israel\u2019s starvation campaign \u2013 for which Netanyahu is sought by the International Criminal Court \u2013 to continue, paradoxically, under cover of a supposed humanitarian initiative.<\/p>\n

Since July, the Committee to Protect Journalists had been warning<\/a> that Sharif\u2019s life was in imminent danger and that he was being \u201ctargeted by an Israeli military smear campaign, which he believes is a precursor to his assassination\u201d.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s true concerns were highlighted last month by army spokesperson Avichay Adraee<\/a>, who accused Sharif\u2019s reporting from Gaza City of blackening Israel\u2019s image by promoting \u201cHamas\u2019s false starvation campaign\u201d.<\/p>\n

Adraee argued<\/a> that Sharif was a part of \u201cHamas\u2019s military machine\u201d for reporting<\/a> on the same escalating famine that the UN, World Health Organisation and major human rights groups have been warning of for months \u2013 and which the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) announced last week was now at the highest level of famine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the same way that Israel has engineered Gaza\u2019s famine by vilifying and excluding UN aid agencies, it is preventing proper coverage of the famine by vilifying and assassinating Palestinian journalists.<\/p>\n

On Monday, Israel bombed Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, killing 21 people, including five journalists<\/a> who worked with Middle East Eye and the Reuters and AP news agencies, among other outlets.<\/p>\n

Tall tales of ties to Hamas serve a similar purpose in both cases. If western publics can be made to suspect that Palestinian journalists are reporting under Hamas\u2019 direction, then coverage of Israeli atrocities can be dismissed as \u201cfake news\u201d \u2013 and the genocide prolonged yet further, even as images of emaciated children fill our screens.<\/p>\n

Question of \u2018proportion\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In executing Sharif, Israel claimed it had proof he was an \u201cactive Hamas terrorist\u201d and \u201chead of a cell in their rocket brigade\u201d. But even the documents it released<\/a> \u2013 none of which has been made available for independent verification \u2013 showed him being recruited in 2013 and leaving the group in 2017.<\/p>\n

Even if these claims were accepted as true \u2013 which, given Israel\u2019s long and consistent record of lying, would be foolhardy in the extreme \u2013 they suggest Sharif had not been involved with Hamas for eight years before he was targeted by Israel.<\/p>\n

In other words, even according to the fanciful \u201cevidence\u201d supplied by Israel\u2019s Legitimisation Cell, Sharif enjoyed civilian status when Israel murdered him and five other journalists next to him. The strike on the journalists\u2019 tent was therefore a flagrant war crime.<\/p>\n

But while Israeli mendacity is entirely to be expected \u2013 after all, it is the whole purpose of its official hasbara industry \u2013 what astonishes most is the western media\u2019s continuing connivance in promoting Israel\u2019s litany of lies.<\/p>\n

Germany\u2019s most popular paper, Bild, published<\/a> a front page that might as well have been written by the Israeli military: \u201cTerrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.\u201d No claim, no quote marks. Just a statement of fact.<\/p>\n

The UK media was little better, with most outlets prominently featuring<\/a> Israel\u2019s unevidenced \u201clegitimisation\u201d smears of Sharif in headlines and coverage<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Astonishingly, BBC reporting on its flagship News at Ten swallowed whole Israel\u2019s framing of Sharif as a legitimate target \u2013 as well as uncritically peddling the presumption that Israel was targeting him and him alone.<\/p>\n

It posed this obscene, highly slanted question<\/a>: \u201cThere\u2019s the question of proportionality. Is it justified to kill five journalists when you were only targeting one?\u201d<\/p>\n