[First published by Middle East Eye]
Israel’s justification for the mass slaughter of Gaza’s people and their starvation – now officially confirmed as a famine engineered by Israel – was built on a parade of easily discredited lies from the start: of beheaded infants, of babies in ovens, of mass rape.
It should surprise no one that Israel continued advancing similarly outrageous lies as it set about – as all genocidal regimes must do – dismantling the most basic infrastructure of survival for Gaza’s population.
It cut off humanitarian aid delivered by the United Nations agency Unrwa, and destroyed the enclave’s hospitals, while killing, jailing and torturing its medical personnel.
Israel claimed it had documents proving the UN was a front for Hamas – documents it never produced. Meanwhile, all 36 of Gaza’s hospitals have been attacked – attacks whose implicit rationale was that they were built atop Hamas “command and control centres”, though those centres have never been found.
Expanding this narrative, Israel rounded up and jailed the enclave’s leading doctors, who had been working round the clock to treat the endless tide of maimed men, women and children, as supposed “Hamas operatives” in disguise.
Also as any genocidal regime must do – especially one that wishes to uphold the pretence that it is a democracy with the world’s “most moral army” – Israel laboured tirelessly to cast a pall of darkness over its atrocities.
It blocked western journalists from accessing Gaza, and then picked off Palestinian journalists 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 to safety abroad.
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 colleagues in Gaza were slowly exterminated. Nothing to see here.
That was until this month, when Israel celebrated an air strike that killed six Palestinian journalists, including the entire five-person team covering Gaza City for Al Jazeera.
The strike’s timing was extremely fortuitous. Israel is calling up 60,000 troops for a last push into the remains of Gaza City, where around one million Palestinians – half of them children – are holed up, being starved to death.
Those civilians will either be killed or rounded up into a concentration camp Israel is calling a “humanitarian city”, close to the border with Egypt. There, they will await their ultimate expulsion - possibly to South Sudan, a failed state where Israel provided the arms that have fuelled civil war and violence.
Campaign of vilification
Israel justified its murder of Al Jazeera’s crew on the grounds that one among them, Anas al-Sharif, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, was secretly a “Hamas terrorist”.
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’s medical staff.
Gaza’s doctors – 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 – supposedly had enough time on their hands to spend it colluding with Hamas fighters. Or so Israel would have us believe.
Sharif, we are told, similarly found time between breaks from his 22-month, frantic reporting schedule – much of it on camera – to serve as a Hamas commander “directing rocket attacks on Israeli civilians”.
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.
We now know exactly where this ridiculous story originated: from something Israel calls its “Legitimisation Cell”. The intelligence unit’s name, which was surely never supposed to come to light, is the give-away. Its job has been to legitimise Israel’s atrocities with stories vilifying its victims and thereby making the genocide more palatable to Israeli and western audiences.
The Israeli news website +972 exposed the cell within days of Sharif’s killing this month, reporting that it was formed after 7 October 2023 – the day Hamas and other groups broke out of their Gaza prison camp, spreading carnage, following 17 years of a brutal siege.
The Legitimisation Cell’s central purpose has been to help Israel plant stories in the western media portraying Gaza’s hospitals as hotbeds of terrorism, and its journalists as “undercover Hamas operatives”.
Fabricated evidence
Drawing on three Israeli intelligence sources, +972 reported that Israel’s motive in creating the Legtimisation Cell was not security-related, but driven purely by propaganda needs – or what is known in Israel as “hasbara”.
The cell was reportedly desperate to find a link – any link – 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’s press corps and stop them exposing Israeli atrocities.
Precisely echoing the long-time warnings of Israel’s critics, these intelligence officials told +972 that the cell’s work was viewed as being “vital to allowing Israel to prolong the war”. The aim was to stop popular opposition in the West to the genocide growing to the point where it might force western capitals – Israel’s patrons – to pull the plug on Israel’s killing machine.
Another source added: “The idea was to [allow the Israeli military to] operate without pressure, so countries like America wouldn’t stop supplying weapons.”
According to these sources, Israeli officials were so keen to get their genocide-prolonging messaging out to western audiences that they “cut corners” – a polite way, it seems, to indicate that they simply fabricated evidence.
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 “Hamas computer” to argue that he was a “military wing operative”, and that he had taken part in the 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.
Yet the supposed document states that Ghoul received his military rank in 2007, when he was 10 years old.
In Sharif’s case, he was accused in advance. In October 2024, Israel claimed that he and five other Al Jazeera journalists secretly belonged to the military wings of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. In March, one of them, Hossam Shabat, was assassinated.
The 'fake news' scam
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.
Months into Israel’s genocide, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had crafted an evidence-free narrative that Al Jazeera was a “terrorist channel” that “actively participated in the October 7 massacre”.
That provided the cover story for Israel to outlaw Al Jazeera last year, shuttering its operations in illegally occupied East Jerusalem and, since September, in the West Bank.
There was a direct parallel with Israel’s 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 (GHF).
The GHF’s game plan has been to terrorise the population away from so-called “aid hubs” with lethal gunfire. That has allowed Israel’s starvation campaign – for which Netanyahu is sought by the International Criminal Court – to continue, paradoxically, under cover of a supposed humanitarian initiative.
Since July, the Committee to Protect Journalists had been warning that Sharif’s life was in imminent danger and that he was being “targeted by an Israeli military smear campaign, which he believes is a precursor to his assassination”.
Israel’s true concerns were highlighted last month by army spokesperson Avichay Adraee, who accused Sharif’s reporting from Gaza City of blackening Israel’s image by promoting “Hamas’s false starvation campaign”.
Adraee argued that Sharif was a part of “Hamas’s military machine” for reporting on the same escalating famine that the UN, World Health Organisation and major human rights groups have been warning of for months – and which the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) announced last week was now at the highest level of famine.
In the same way that Israel has engineered Gaza’s famine by vilifying and excluding UN aid agencies, it is preventing proper coverage of the famine by vilifying and assassinating Palestinian journalists.
On Monday, Israel bombed Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, killing 21 people, including five journalists who worked with Middle East Eye and the Reuters and AP news agencies, among other outlets.
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’ direction, then coverage of Israeli atrocities can be dismissed as “fake news” – and the genocide prolonged yet further, even as images of emaciated children fill our screens.
Question of 'proportion'
In executing Sharif, Israel claimed it had proof he was an “active Hamas terrorist” and “head of a cell in their rocket brigade”. But even the documents it released – none of which has been made available for independent verification – showed him being recruited in 2013 and leaving the group in 2017.
Even if these claims were accepted as true – which, given Israel’s long and consistent record of lying, would be foolhardy in the extreme – they suggest Sharif had not been involved with Hamas for eight years before he was targeted by Israel.
In other words, even according to the fanciful “evidence” supplied by Israel’s Legitimisation Cell, Sharif enjoyed civilian status when Israel murdered him and five other journalists next to him. The strike on the journalists’ tent was therefore a flagrant war crime.
But while Israeli mendacity is entirely to be expected – after all, it is the whole purpose of its official hasbara industry – what astonishes most is the western media’s continuing connivance in promoting Israel’s litany of lies.
Germany’s most popular paper, Bild, published a front page that might as well have been written by the Israeli military: “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.” No claim, no quote marks. Just a statement of fact.
The UK media was little better, with most outlets prominently featuring Israel’s unevidenced “legitimisation” smears of Sharif in headlines and coverage.
Astonishingly, BBC reporting on its flagship News at Ten swallowed whole Israel’s framing of Sharif as a legitimate target – as well as uncritically peddling the presumption that Israel was targeting him and him alone.
It posed this obscene, highly slanted question: “There’s the question of proportionality. Is it justified to kill five journalists when you were only targeting one?”
The “proportionate” framing takes it as read that Israel had a right to respond with lethal force to an inciting cause – Sharif’s presumed terrorist links – and asks only whether that inciting cause justified the scale of Israel’s lethal response.
Israel could not have hoped for more. In line with the work of the Legitimisation Cell, it had shifted BBC News away from reporting an Israeli war crime against journalists, and redirected it into a debate about whether its act was measured or wise.
Tables turned
Piers Morgan, whose hugely popular online show Uncensored has been one of the main debating platforms where Israel’s supporters and critics clash, illustrates how easily Israel is allowed to shape the narrative.
Morgan perfectly illustrates the way in which western journalists willingly accept racist assumptions about non-western journalists, even when they appear to be challenging those assumptions.
Shortly after Sharif’s murder, Morgan invited on Jamal Elshayyal, the director of Al Jazeera’s programme 360. He had to go head-to-head with Jotam Confino, a journalist who once worked for the Israeli TV channel i24 News, which was central to spreading Israel’s “beheaded babies” deception, and now writes for right-wing, and fervently pro-Israel, publications such as the Telegraph and the New York Sun.
Confino’s role in the debate was to bolster Israeli talking points about suspicions that Sharif was a Hamas terrorist. Elshayyal countered by listing Israel’s decades-long record of assassinating journalists who embarrass it, especially Palestinians. He noted Israel’s infamous execution of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, and the subsequent exposure of its serial lies designed to obscure its role in her murder.
He also highlighted the wider dangers to the safety of journalists from colluding in vilification campaigns like the one against Sharif, premised on the idea that assassination is warranted for journalists who hold political views their executioners dislike.
Predictably, this argument passed right over Morgan’s head.
Confronted by the absence of any evidence for Sharif being a Hamas cell commander, Confino switched his attack to wider claims that the Al Jazeera journalist might have been sympathetic to Hamas.
But he did not stop there. He turned his sights on Elshayyal, arguing that he was in no position to defend Sharif, as he had expressed anti-Israel views on social media.
Extraordinarily, Morgan then joined Confino in interrogating Elshayyal on his political views – demanding that he condemn Hamas for its 7 October 2023 attack. Notably, no demand was made of Confino to condemn Israel for its far graver genocide.
Implicit in this deeply disturbing – and racist – exchange was the assumption that Arab journalists must demonstrate their ideological bona fides to western journalists before their views, and lives, count.
Elshayyal was there to defend not only Sharif, but the right of journalists to report freely without threat of assassination, whatever their politics. Instead, he found himself forced to defend his right to participate in the debate, based on his own political positions.
A show, hosted by a leading British journalist, that should have clearly denounced the Israeli war crime of systematically murdering journalists in Gaza quickly got sidetracked into a witch hunt against journalists critical of Israel.
Expendable lives
The context that has been missing from western coverage is this: Israel has killed more than 240 Palestinian journalists in Gaza over the past two years – more than all the journalists killed in both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the Afghanistan War combined.
This is a pattern – a glaring one – but seemingly one to which western journalists are entirely blind, even as Israel continues to bar them from reporting in Gaza, nearly two years into its genocide.
Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, recently observed that Israel is “running a very carefully planned, targeted programme of assassination to remove any kind of independent reporting on Gaza”.
The western media’s indulgence of Israel’s bare-faced lies is not just an abandonment of the fundamentals of journalistic ethics. It also puts a target on the backs of all journalists still reporting in Gaza.
It sends a message to Israel that their lives are seen as expendable; that even the flimsiest of excuses for murdering them will be treated seriously.
What is even more perverse is that western journalists are themselves normalising a precedent that poses the gravest of threats, both to their own lives from rogue states and to the future of war reporting.
Pattern of lies
Israel’s “legitimisation” narratives work only because of the receptivity of western journalists to these disinformation campaigns – and the priming of western audiences to similarly accept them.
They work because a deep-seated racism has been cultivated in us, generation after generation, by the West’s political and media classes.
Israel established its Legitimisation Cell only because it knows how easy it is to exploit western fears. It presents its case through western spokespeople – speaking fluently in the native tongues of audiences – who tap into long-established colonial anxieties of “barbarians at the gate” and threats to “western civilisation”.
Nonetheless, as the slaughter by Israel has dragged on, month after horrifying month, western publics have gradually found it harder and harder to buy into these narratives.
The longer Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza and mass starvation of its population has continued, the harder it has been to hide Israel’s pattern of lies – and an ever-emerging bigger picture that suggests not a war of “self-defence”, but one of genocidal ambitions.
The shocking images of emaciated children, after months of Israel openly confessing it is starving Gaza’s population, tell their own story – one so glaring that it should not have needed an official confirmation from the IPC.
Last week, +972 revealed that, contrary to months of Israeli claims that most of the dead in Gaza are Hamas fighters, the Israeli military’s own figures show that, in fact, more than four out of five are civilians.
That ratio is clearly intentional. In an audio recording recently leaked to Israel’s Channel 12, Major General Aharon Haliva, who led Israeli military intelligence in its first six months responding to Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack, can be heard saying that killing tens of thousands of Palestinians is “necessary for future generations”.
He added: “For every one person [killed] on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn’t matter now if they are children.”
In other words, from the outset, the Israeli military’s goal was to commit indiscriminate mass murder to force Palestinians into permanent quiescence, to accept their indefinite servitude.
Increasingly, as audiences see images of Gaza’s wholesale destruction, and learn of the eradication of its hospitals and the Israeli-engineered famine there, they cannot help but question how the death count has barely risen over the past year.
Israel’s claim that the 62,000 death toll is inflated by a Hamas-controlled health ministry sounds preposterous. Israel has destroyed Gaza’s government offices, leaving them largely unable to count the dead.
Most audiences are starting to suspect, in line with experts, that the true number of dead is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands.
All of this would have been clear much sooner had we been readier to listen to Palestinian journalists, rather than the evasions and equivocations of the BBC and Piers Morgan.
They and the rest of the western press corps have been integral to Israel’s “legitimising” of its genocide. Western journalists have proved to be entirely unreliable arbiters of truth in Gaza.
But the genocide offers a more general lesson about what counts as news at home and abroad; about who is allowed to shape the news and why.
The obscuring of the Gaza genocide – and of western collusion in it – provides a snapshot in high definition of the racist, colonial agendas that dominate what we call news.
Are we ready to learn that lesson?
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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This is brilliant work once again Jonathan. Thank you 👍
Thank you @Jonathan_K_Cook for this excellent article and all the other reports you produce. I'd like to see this published in the @ScotNational.... 👍