Even the media's Gaza 'investigations' hide the real story of Israel's atrocities

The atrocity news treadmill makes sure western media are so busy chasing after Israel’s latest crime in Gaza they never pause long enough to piece together the bigger story of genocide

An investigation by CNN into Israel’s strike on the Nasser Hospital this week – an attack that killed more than 20 people, including emergency workers and five journalists – is a case study in how even well-intentioned journalism, ostensibly examining Israeli crimes, ends up concealing more than it reveals.

CNN’s detailed examination of footage of Monday’s strike on the hospital in Khan Younis found that Israel’s so-called “double-tap” actually involved three missiles.

The first strike hit a fourth-floor stairwell close to a hospital upper balcony. Then, 10 minutes later, as emergency crews and journalists scrambled to help the victims, a second and third strike hit precisely the same spot.

A munitions expert who examined the footage notes that the second and third missiles were almost certainly fired from two different tanks in very close succession.

As he and CNN conclude, that removes any last trace of doubt on whether the attack on the hospital was, as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims, “a tragic mishap”. Rather, it was a highly coordinated precision strike.

CNN reiterates a further and important contextual point that should obliterate Israel’s subsequent justification for its attack, following what Israel terms an “initial investigation”.

Let us note in passing that the Israeli military is pretending to investigate itself only to dampen the rare furore that has erupted over the strike, chiefly because the new atrocity was caught on camera and killed journalists working for major western news organisations. Israel has abandoned almost all of its previous investigations as soon as the western media could be provided with a fresher atrocity to report on. And Israel seems to have an endless production line of atrocities with which to distract them.

All too predictably, Israel’s “initial investigation” found a “Hamas” excuse.

According to the Israeli military, it hit Nasser Hospital’s stairwell because it had identified a camera there supposedly being used by Hamas.

No ‘mishap’

Even if we take this claim seriously – which, outrageously, is exactly what the western media are doing – it falls apart on even the most cursory inspection.

Not least, the Israeli military was fully aware that this was a favoured spot for Gaza’s journalists, a place where they often congregated.

The high elevation and good cell signal meant that it was ideal for uploading their material and for conducting live broadcasts.

And the location at Nasser Hospital – the last (barely) functioning medical facility in southern Gaza – meant it was certain to be at the centre of the story every time Israel bombed the surrounding area, as it does relentlessly.

Nasser Hospital was the site from which emergency crews were dispatched, and it was the place where Israel’s bloodied victims were brought for treatment.

CNN’s investigation features several photographs and videos of the journalists Israel killed this week working on the balcony and stairwell in the preceding several months. The photo below, by Mohammad Salama, was taken on June 12 and includes two of the journalists Israel killed this week: Mariam Abu Daqqa and Moath Abu Taha.

All of this was known to the Israeli military. When they targeted a “Hamas camera”, they knew that, in reality, that camera was being used by a Reuters journalist, Hussam Al-Masri.

Israel’s ever-present drones, their whine constantly filling the skies over Gaza, had been watching him and other journalists on that stairwell day after day, week after week, for months on end.

And when Israel struck 10 minutes later with two coordinated missiles, it knew that the main victims would be the emergency workers who went to rescue survivors from the first strike and journalists – al-Masri’s friends – who were nearby and rushed to the scene.

Nothing was a “mishap”. It was planned down to the minutest detail.

Reuters smears itself

But here is where we get to the main problem with CNN’s coverage.

In picking apart Israel’s patently bogus claims, the investigation treats those claims with a seriousness they in no way merit. And worse, it ignores the wider context that damns Israel and makes the investigation itself – any investigation – utterly redundant in terms of determining whether a war crime was committed.

On that matter, there can be no debate. And yet, CNN’s investigation takes as its premise the idea that there are two sides to be considered and settled. That the truth has to be determined. That Israel’s case needs to be weighed.

These are the straws that western leaders, and the large contingent of genocide apologists in western professional circles, including journalists, so desperately clutch at.

Because otherwise it would be only too clear that they have been cheerleading – and assisting – a genocide for two years.

The first point is this: An investigation by Israel, or anyone else for that matter, is not needed to establish whether the targeted camera belonged to Hamas. It didn’t because it belonged to Reuters news agency.

The extraordinary contortions made by Reuters to avoid pointing this simple fact out are illustrative of the way media outlets are willing to construct narratives that actually undermine the very thing they are supposed to be engaged in: truth-telling journalism.

Reuters knows the camera position on the stairwell was not being used by Hamas because Reuters was using it for their live feeds. Images of the wrecked camera even show it wired up for broadcast at the time it was hit.

And yet like the rest of the media, Reuters is required to play dumb: it reports Israel’s outright lie that it targeted a “Hamas camera” – and six terrorists alongside it – as if that might be true.

Reuters headline on the story – the only part that most people read – runs: Initial inquiry says Hamas camera was target of Israeli strike that killed journalists.

Notice, Reuters does not even put scare-quote marks around the term “Hamas camera” to alert readers to the fact that this claim should be treated with caution, or better still derision.

Nor does the agency include a comment from one of its senior editorial staff disputing Israel’s claim or presenting its own side of the story.

Astonishingly, Reuters instead colludes in smearing itself by entertaining Israel’s claim that its own live-feed camera was being used by Hamas.

Rather than defend its own journalist, it leaves it up to an Israeli military spokesperson to later conclude that al-Masri, Reuters’ journalist, was not the intended “target” – and thereby, presumably, exonerate him of being a terrorist. If only Reuters had done that first.

But the Israeli spokesperson’s “admission” only deepens the absurdity of Israel’s claims. How was a Reuters camera serving Hamas when it was being operated at the time by a Reuters journalist who was not the target?

Don’t look to Reuters, or CNN, or any of our western media for an answer. The mystery will simply be left to permanently cloud our understanding.

Are the media doing all this in the interests of a self-sabotaging notion of phoney “balance”? Or because the job of Reuters and the rest of the establishment media is to reinforce a western narrative in which Israel is always the good guy, even when it is perpetrating genocidal “mishaps” – and because the journalists these media outlets employ are terrified of incurring the wrath of Israel, and Washington behind it?

If even Reuters behaves this way when its own camera has been recruited by Israel to justify the murder of one of its own journalists, what more can we expect of media like CNN when they “investigate” the story?

These outlets are all so utterly servile to an overarching narrative that promotes the interests of the West and its top military client state in the oil-rich Middle East that they would rather bury the truth than risk taking on the centres of power.

Routine war crimes

Second, even if we accept Israel’s ludicrous claim that it identified a “Hamas camera” at the site, why did it fire two more missiles 10 minutes later?

The Reuters camera was destroyed and the journalist operating it killed in the first hit. Israel knew that because its drones surveilled the site of the attack.

A second round of missiles was entirely unnecessary – if the aim was to take out the camera.

But, of course, that wasn’t the aim. The goal was – as it has been throughout this genocide – to target both the enclave’s medical workers, who are needed to save the lives of those Israel wants to exterminate, and the media workers Israel wishes to kill so there are no witnesses to its Final Solution for the people of Gaza.

A 10-minute delay between strikes was ideal in attracting the very people that are highest on Israel’s list to murder.

The point intentionally lost as CNN and the rest of the media pretend to debate the logistics of the strike is that this is yet another attack by Israel – one of hundreds – on Gaza’s hospitals over the past two years.

And it is just the latest assassination strike against Gaza’s journalists, more than 200 of whom have been killed – an unprecedented death toll.

Intentionally attacking hospitals and killing journalists used to be considered the gravest of war crimes.

Now these attacks are so routine that the latest one on Nasser Hospital is simply the unremarkable backdrop to a story – a preposterous one – about whether there was a secret Hamas camera in a busy stairwell used by journalists. Even to entertain the story as credible, as the western media is doing, is an insult to Gaza’s journalists and to western audience’s intelligence.

Third, shortly after the attack on Nasser Hospital, CNN interviewed Dr Mimi Syed, who revealed that, exceptionally, there had been no foreign doctors or aid workers at Nasser Hospital that day. All of them had been required to attend in person a training session on gender sensitivity at the offices of the World Health Organisation. Attendees have backed up her account.

Even more unusually, even the doctors leaving Gaza the next day, who had no need of the training and tried to be excused, were told they had to attend.

All of this had to be coordinated with an Israeli military liaison body, COGAT, that approves the movement of foreign workers in Gaza if they are to avoid being killed in drone strikes.

Most likely Israel insisted on the pretext for evacuation so it could strike the hospital and kill Palestinian emergency crews and journalists without also harming foreigners and so limit whatever tepid indignation the murder of Palestinian journalists would provoke from the western media.

But at the very minimum, if the pretext for the evacuation was not initiated by Israel, it was Israel that took advantage of an opportunity to strike the hospital when it knew it was going to clear of foreign staff.

Either way, this was no “mishap” – and had nothing to do with a “Hamas camera”.

It was about creating yet another opening to attack a hospital, the last one functioning, just barely, in its area. It was about killing yet more of Gaza’s medical workers and journalists. And it was about further normalising the war crimes needed to advance the genocide to its horrifying end.

And yet this part of the story, perhaps the most crucial in understanding what went on, is not included in CNN’s “investigation” at all, even though it was CNN that conducted the earlier interview in which Dr Syed made her revelation.

You might imagine that CNN and other outlets – were they really interested in getting to the truth – are all over this incriminating testimony. And yet this part of an “investigation” has not been pursued. Extraordinarily, it is all but impossible to find mention of it in coverage of the strike.

On the news treadmill

The facts that CNN and other western media are duty bound to ignore in their news “investigations” are the very facts that are most glaring, most unmistakeable.

That Israel has been systematically destroying the enclave’s hospitals to bring to a hastier close the genocide of Gaza’s people as they are bombed, displaced and starved to death; and that Israel has been assassinating Gaza’s journalists – our chief witnesses to the crime – to add a layer of “plausible deniability” to its genocidal ambitions.

The media’s “investigations” raise but never answer the question of whether Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, even though the answers are staring us in the face. Before we get an answer, Israel is busy with the next atrocity and the restless media busy chasing after fresh answers on the relentless news treadmill.

The truth lies not in the details CNN, Reuters or any other news outlet briefly pore over before pursuing the next “news event”. There is a bigger picture all that frenetic activity is designed to distract from. Journalists and their audiences can study the trees, but they must never be allowed to stand back and see the wood.

Israel was emboldened to kill five journalists at Nasser Hospital this week because the western political and media class meekly swallowed Israel’s patent lies two weeks earlier when Israel killed six journalists in Gaza City, claiming one of them was a terrorist.

No one should be surprised when Israel executes another handful of journalists next week or the week after.

But doubtless there will continue to be media “investigations”. Journalists will show they are on the case – even as hospitals keep getting attacked, journalists keep being assassinated, children keep dying of starvation, and an unremarked genocide unfolds to the bitterest of conclusions.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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