How is the media still getting the Gaza murdered paramedics story so wrong?

Israel's execution of 15 emergency workers a month ago is incontrovertibly established. So why are the Guardian and other outlets still so ready to fudge the issue?

Here is yet another example of stunningly craven journalism from the Guardian, entirely illustrative of what is going on across the British establishment media in its coverage of Israeli war crimes in Gaza for the past 18 months.

We are now a month on from Israel executing 15 paramedics and hiding their bodies in a mass grave. Since then, video footage has surfaced of that atrocity, showing Israeli soldiers firing on a convoy of emergency vehicles that were clearly marked and with their warning lights on. We have had postmortems of the victims showing they were shot from close-range in the head and torso. And we've had eye-witness accounts of the killings.

All of that, of course, is on top of compelling circumstantial evidence. Israel sought to destroy the evidence of its war crime by crushing the emergency vehicles and then burying them, along with the bodies of the 15 crew members, presumably in the hope that they would decompose and make it hard to forensically determine exactly what had happened.

The latest evidence to emerge, reported by Israel's Haaretz newspaper this week, shows that Israeli soldiers fired continuously for three and a half minutes on the convoy, despite the emergency vehicles being clearly marked.

According to details from an internal investigation by the Israeli military leaked to the paper, the soldiers fired from near-point-blank range and even while the emergency workers were trying to identify themselves. (Not surprisingly, the other parts of the investigation, those made public, have been a whitewash, suggesting only “professional failures” and “operational misunderstandings”.)

In other words, this new evidence confirms that Israeli soldiers intentionally murdered most of the occupants of the emergency vehicles with a prolonged hail of bullets. Those who survived, the postmortems suggest, were executed with shots to the head or torso. Then the evidence was hurriedly buried.

None of this is surprising. We have known for some time, as repeatedly reported by the Israeli media, that the Israeli military has created undeclared “kill zones”, where anything that moves is shot – even children, aid workers and emergency crews.

As has also been evident for most of the past 18 months, Israel is implementing a policy to destroy Gaza's health sector, including its hospitals and ambulances, and killing or kidnapping medical staff – on top of wrecking the rest of the enclave's infrastructure. The goal is to force the Palestinian population out of Gaza, driving them into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai.

Israel is carrying out a genocide to facilitate its ethnic cleansing plan.

The murder of the 15 paramedics entirely fits with this picture.

The video evidence has already proven that Israel's original claim that the ambulances and fire engines were “advancing suspiciously” – whatever that is supposed to mean – was utterly untrue.

Israel's other implausible claim, that several of the emergency crew were really Hamas fighters in disguise, has been thoroughly debunked too. The biographies of those murdered by Israel show they have long been emergency workers. Israel has been relying on this kneejerk excuse every time it gets caught lying about its latest atrocity.

So how on earth is the Guardian still writing a headline like this:

New details on killing of paramedics in Gaza appear to contradict IDF’s account

Or writing a first paragraph like this one:

New developments have come to light in the killing of 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers by Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip last month, with evidence reportedly contradicting the Israel Defense Forces’ claim that soldiers did not fire indiscriminately at the medical workers.

The “evidence” cited by the Guardian is a reference to the Haaretz report of Israeli soldiers firing for three and a half minutes on the convoy.

The Guardian’s wording falsely suggests two things. First, that the Israeli military's account of the killings still has enough credibility that it needs contradicting. And second, that Haaretz’s latest evidence only “appears to contradict” an account that has already been so repeatedly contradicted that it cannot be entertained as true on any level whatsoever.

The Guardian’s phrasing is also utterly subservient to Israel. The Israeli military framed its internal investigation as if its aim was to determine whether soldiers fired “indiscriminately” or not – so that it can then claim to have concluded that they did not fire indiscriminately.

That presumably means the Israeli military wants us to believe its soldiers shot at the emergency vehicles with precision and intention – in this case, to kill those “Hamas fighters” invented retroactively by the Israeli military to justify its atrocity.

The Guardian buys into this framing, suggesting that the unpublished part of the investigation found that the three and a half minutes of live fire at the vehicles was actually “indiscriminate” rather than intentional.

The reality is far worse: it was both. Israeli soldiers fired indiscriminately at the vehicles with the intention of killing all of the emergency workers inside. The issue of “discrimination” is meant only to serve as a red herring.

Before Haaretz’s new disclosure it was already clear that the Israeli military’s account was a pack of lies. So why is the Guardian not doing its job? Why is it still pretending a month on that the Israeli military’s version has not already been thoroughly discredited?

Even a highly cautious headline from the Guardian ought to read like this:

New details on killing of paramedics in Gaza further discredit IDF’s account

And the text should read:

New developments have come to light in the killing of 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers by Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip last month, with an internal Israel Defense Forces’ investigation reportedly finding its soldiers fired a prolonged hail of bullets from close range at a clearly marked convoy of emergency vehicles.

Any rookie journalist knows the Guardian is reporting this all wrong. It keeps giving Israel the benefit of the doubt, even after the case against Israel has been proven. It keeps fudging the story. It keeps suggesting that Israel’s guilt is not already an incontrovertible, established fact.

If this isn’t clear to you, just imagine how this story would have been reported were the executed paramedics Ukrainian and the soldiers responsible Russian. Not like this, you can be sure.

Why are a whole team of highly experienced Guardian journalists still getting this story so wrong? It is not because they are incompetent. They get it wrong because it is their job to do so: they work for a corporate media outlet, one that exists within a corporate news system that serves a corporate financial system that is protected by corporate political structures.

Or for shorthand, these journalists – whether they understand it or not – work for the British establishment, advancing British foreign policy goals that are subservient to Washington’s imperial demands for global full-spectrum dominance.

The role of corporate advertising is clear. It is there to make us want to consume, to encourage us to feel that we need more to be complete, to cultivate an aspiration in us to a materially “better” way of life. People in the advertising industry don’t think of themselves as monsters. Nonetheless, the profession’s goal is to create an endless demand for resources on a finite planet. Ultimately, it is to will the suicide of our species.

The role of the corporate media is no different. It is there to create the illusion that we are the masters of our own thoughts. It is there to make us think we have reached an independent understanding of the world, even though that understanding has been carefully crafted for us from birth. It is there to cultivate a worldview in us that aligns precisely with the privileging of a tiny corporate elite whose wealth depends on the relentless pillaging of the planet for their benefit.

Journalists don’t think of themselves as monsters either. Nonetheless, they are part of a media machine whose goal is to lull us into passivity as our leaders actively collude in the perpetration of a genocide, as our corporations, militaries and intelligence services press ahead with endless wars for resource control, and as the tripwires of nuclear confrontation grow ever more numerous and entangled.

No one wants to think of themself as a monster. But we keep doing monstrous things.

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

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