Report: Israeli Military Has Unit That Exists to Justify Targeting Journalists
The Israeli military operates a special unit known as the “Legitimization Cell” that exists to create propaganda justifying the military’s targeting of civilian infrastructure and civilians, particularly journalists, in order to ensure that Israel maintains its legitimacy on the world stage, an investigation finds.
According to a +972 Magazine and Local Call investigation published Thursday, the Legitimization Cell is a public relations unit that is tasked with finding a narrative to create cover for some of the most highly criticized actions by Israel’s military.
“If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there’s a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent — as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable,” an Israeli intelligence source told journalist Yuval Abraham.
“The idea was to [allow the military to] operate without pressure, so countries like America wouldn’t stop supplying weapons,” another Israeli source said.
Observers have seen this pattern play out numerous times, including in the recent assassination of famous Gaza journalist Anas Al-Sharif, who Israel killed along with five other Al Jazeera journalists earlier this week. Israel has long smeared Al-Sharif as a member of Hamas — claims that he always denied and for which Israel has not provided any evidence that can be independently verified.
Israel does this regularly. Last year, after killing Al Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, Israeli officials claimed that he was given a Hamas military ranking in 2007 — when al-Ghoul was only 10 years old.
“[T]hree intelligence sources said the army treated the media as an extension of the battlefield, allowing it to declassify sensitive intelligence for public release,” said the investigation.
+972 and Local Call report that the Legitimization Cell is responsible for narratives like its denial of responsibility for the strike on Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City in October 2023 — a high-profile strike that killed hundreds of Palestinians. The bombing gained widespread media attention as one of Israel’s first strikes on Gaza’s health care system that it has now destroyed, with Al-Ahli put out of service by Israeli attacks.
A flood of disinformation sourced from the military — much of which was later debunked by numerous investigations — followed the attack. The day after, the Legitimization Unit put out a recording of a phone call that it claimed was between two Hamas operatives saying that the hospital was struck by a misfired Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.
But this claim was roundly debunked by analysts and multiple news outlets. And the phone call, too, was fake — a Palestinian human rights activist told +972 and Local Call that it was actually a benign phone call between him and his civilian friend that had been intercepted by the military. Israel keeps a huge database of Palestinians’ phone calls as part of its vast surveillance network.
In response to the report, the Israeli military outright admitted that Israeli military intelligence maintains “research teams” that have the goal of “discredit[ing]” journalists reporting from Gaza who are supposedly “Hamas members.”
But, despite supposedly being responsible for finding journalists’ ties to Hamas, the “research teams do not play a role in the selection of individual targets to be attacked,” the report finds — meaning that they are looking for justification after the fact.
“There was this phrase, ‘That’s good for legitimacy,’” one source told +972 and Local Call. “The goal was simply to find as much material as possible to serve hasbara efforts.”
Sources recalled a case where the Legitimization Unit falsely represented a journalist as a member of Hamas’s military wing, saying that the propaganda research cell was “eager” and “excited” about the narrative. “In the end, they realized he really was a journalist,” and he wasn’t targeted, one source claimed.
Israel has long had a robust propaganda operation — so robust, in fact, that Israel has exported some of its intelligence and surveillance technologies. Members of one of its well-known intelligence units, Unit 8200, are trained in Israel but go on to work across numerous sectors, including as journalists in the U.S. at outlets key to shaping American opinion.
The Israeli military operates a special unit known as the “Legitimization Cell” that exists to create propaganda justifying the military’s targeting of civilian infrastructure and civilians, particularly journalists, in order to ensure that Israel maintains its legitimacy on the world stage, an investigation finds.
According to a +972 Magazine and Local Call investigation published Thursday, the Legitimization Cell is a public relations unit that is tasked with finding a narrative to create cover for some of the most highly criticized actions by Israel’s military.
“If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there’s a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent — as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable,” an Israeli intelligence source told journalist Yuval Abraham.
“The idea was to [allow the military to] operate without pressure, so countries like America wouldn’t stop supplying weapons,” another Israeli source said.
Observers have seen this pattern play out numerous times, including in the recent assassination of famous Gaza journalist Anas Al-Sharif, who Israel killed along with five other Al Jazeera journalists earlier this week. Israel has long smeared Al-Sharif as a member of Hamas — claims that he always denied and for which Israel has not provided any evidence that can be independently verified.
Israel does this regularly. Last year, after killing Al Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, Israeli officials claimed that he was given a Hamas military ranking in 2007 — when al-Ghoul was only 10 years old.
“[T]hree intelligence sources said the army treated the media as an extension of the battlefield, allowing it to declassify sensitive intelligence for public release,” said the investigation.
+972 and Local Call report that the Legitimization Cell is responsible for narratives like its denial of responsibility for the strike on Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City in October 2023 — a high-profile strike that killed hundreds of Palestinians. The bombing gained widespread media attention as one of Israel’s first strikes on Gaza’s health care system that it has now destroyed, with Al-Ahli put out of service by Israeli attacks.
A flood of disinformation sourced from the military — much of which was later debunked by numerous investigations — followed the attack. The day after, the Legitimization Unit put out a recording of a phone call that it claimed was between two Hamas operatives saying that the hospital was struck by a misfired Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.
But this claim was roundly debunked by analysts and multiple news outlets. And the phone call, too, was fake — a Palestinian human rights activist told +972 and Local Call that it was actually a benign phone call between him and his civilian friend that had been intercepted by the military. Israel keeps a huge database of Palestinians’ phone calls as part of its vast surveillance network.
In response to the report, the Israeli military outright admitted that Israeli military intelligence maintains “research teams” that have the goal of “discredit[ing]” journalists reporting from Gaza who are supposedly “Hamas members.”
But, despite supposedly being responsible for finding journalists’ ties to Hamas, the “research teams do not play a role in the selection of individual targets to be attacked,” the report finds — meaning that they are looking for justification after the fact.
“There was this phrase, ‘That’s good for legitimacy,’” one source told +972 and Local Call. “The goal was simply to find as much material as possible to serve hasbara efforts.”
Sources recalled a case where the Legitimization Unit falsely represented a journalist as a member of Hamas’s military wing, saying that the propaganda research cell was “eager” and “excited” about the narrative. “In the end, they realized he really was a journalist,” and he wasn’t targeted, one source claimed.
Israel has long had a robust propaganda operation — so robust, in fact, that Israel has exported some of its intelligence and surveillance technologies. Members of one of its well-known intelligence units, Unit 8200, are trained in Israel but go on to work across numerous sectors, including as journalists in the U.S. at outlets key to shaping American opinion.
The Assassination of Palestinian Journalists
Image courtesy of Al Jazeera.
In contemporary conflict the “weaponization of information” or “targeting of journalists” shows a pattern of squashing dissent. Analysts like Martin Libicki and John Arquilla argue how information itself becomes a battlefield in what they call noopolitik. The U.S. and Israel are historically accustomed to exploiting land, sea and air. Manipulating the information space is also nothing new. +972 Magazine’s Yuval Abraham indicated that Israeli intelligence, or Aman, formed Legitimization Cells to preempt Gaza journalists as Hamas members when Palestinian reporting was spot on, although the press with a political affiliation is commonly accepted elsewhere in the world.
In this Q&A, legal scholar and international relations expert Richard Falk discusses the August 10, 2025, Israeli airstrike that killed four Al Jazeera journalists and two others in Gaza. Falk argues that discrediting truth-tellers and murdering the press is consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology.
Daniel Falcone: When we first spoke on the ruthless censorship of Palestinian journalism, you emphasized how they play a crucial role in challenging the symbolic dominance of the Israeli narrative, often costing their lives. How do you interpret the ongoing deliberate censorship of Palestinian journalism in both Israel and the U.S. and what does that say about the perceived threat of their reporting to dominant geopolitical interests?
Richard Falk: When our eyes and ears are conveying a sense of reality that collides with the strategic interests of autocratically disposed governance, the established elites and special interests attached to the status quo become anxious. One response is to exert pressure on private sector media, including advertisers, to engage in self-censorship of a character that obscures perception with ambiguities and false accusations. Israel, with Euro-American acquiescence has gone along with the weaponization of antisemitism to situate criticisms of Israel and Zionism in a zone of uncertainty that blunts action-oriented responses based on international law or shared values, while discrediting or punishing those critics however strong their credentials as skilled analysts and trustworthy presenters of reality as honestly perceived.
The prolonged reluctance of influential media in the West to name the assertion of Jewish primacy in various domains of Israeli life as racial or ethnic discrimination that constituted an institutional adoption of a governance style that violated the 1973 International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid is a striking pre-October 7 example of this phenomenon. Both Western governments, especially, the United States and its NATO partners, remained silent about these apartheid accusations even in the face of a series of academic style reports by the most respected international human rights NGOs (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International), the UN (ESCWA 2017), and even the leading Israeli human rights NGO (B’Tselem) each documented the apartheid allegation.
Despite these responsibly asserted apartheid accusations they were neither substantively challenged nor commented upon but completely ignored. Indeed, the most forthcoming response, although not intended as such, was from Israel, which indirectly confirmed apartheid allegations in the Knesset Basic Law adopted in 2018. This type of legislation enjoys the highest status in Israel, which has no constitution. The 2018 law explicitly identified Israel as the state of the Jewish people exclusively enjoying the right of self-determination, privileging Hebrew as the official language, and oblivious to the human rights of Palestinians and other minorities living in Israel as well as in the Palestinian Territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
This slippage of Israel’s formal democracy into the silent embrace of apartheid was revealingly not treated as relevant in any way to a proper appraisal of Palestinian resistance in the context of the October 7 attack. Instead, public discourse almost totally decontextualized October 7 without reference to the harsh Israeli blockade of Gaza maintained since 2007 or the periodic massive Israeli military incursions of 2008-09, 2012, 2014 or the failure to even explore the diplomatic initiative of Hamas for a long-term ceasefire with a duration of up to 50 years.
The response to the publication of the UN ESCWA (Economic and Social Commission of West Asia) report, of which I was co-author along with Virginia Tilley, seems especially illustrative of this impulse to fight back against fact-based scholarship, journalism, and independent experts. Shortly after its issuance in March 2017 our report was attacked in a Security Council meeting by the Israeli and American diplomats in a typical diatribe that was obviously intended to divert attention from the apartheid allegations to claims that the authors were biased against Israel. Seeming to expect self-censoring discipline even at the UN after October 7, the Trump chief representative at the UN, Ambassador Nikki Haley, dutifully launched a venomous personal attack on me (“What’s wrong with this Falk guy?”) and threatened U.S. defunding of the UN if the recently selected UN Secretary General, António Guterres, did not repudiate apartheid report.
In response, Guterres appeased the U.S. by ordering the report withdrawn from the ESCWA website, where it was reported to be receiving record number of requests, but stopped short of repudiating its contents. It was enough of a cave in to prompt the principled resignation of the Executive Secretary of ESCWA, Rima Khalif, to resign. [See “Dismissing Israel apartheid report is an abuse of power writes author,” Middle East Monitor, April 26, 2017.]
This ESCWA anecdote is significant because it demonstrates that the diversionary formula of silence + defamation + naming inhibitions + threats was relied upon before October 7 to protect Israel not only from allegations of serious international crimes but from truth-telling efforts by experts and scholars to name the realities reported upon in a truthful, recognizable language by individuals whose work was highly respected in professional circles. It should not occasion surprise that the same tactics of deflection have been used with even greater vigor to obscure the shameful realities of Gaza genocide. These tactics are losing their self-censoring implementation in recent months as the persistence of genocidal language and tactics by Israeli leaders become increasingly undeniable, not so much by words as by the daily images of dying children and starving Palestinians being shot and often killed at crowded and unruly U.S./Israeli administered aid sites while struggling for death-averting sacks of food.
Daniel Falcone: The recent Israeli strike that killed several Al Jazeera journalists outside Al-Shifa Hospital, including Anas al-Sharif, was later accused posthumously of being a Hamas operative, a practice from allies and outlets with actual problematic connections. How does international law evaluate such retroactive justifications for targeting press members in conflict zones?
Richard Falk: I regard as this post-hoc justification for targeting and killing Anas al-Sharif in a Gaza hospital safe zone as an extension of Israel’s determination to destroy, discredit, and inhibit scathing criticism of its genocidal campaign against a defenseless civilian population, estimated at about 2 million survivors of an October 7 population of 2.3 million. Israel tries here to envelop brave Gaza journalists in an intentionally dense ‘fog of war,’ reinforced in relation to Anas al-Sharif by the inflammatory accusation without any accompanying evidence that he is an undercover Hamas operative.
Ever since this military onslaught commenced nearly two years ago, Israel has been targeting the most influential journalists by relying on advanced surveillance techniques being developed by Palantir and Anduril, companies mentioned by name in the UN Special Rapporteur in her report that led to her formal sanctioning by the U.S. Government on July 9. The report to the UN entitled “From the Economics of Occupation to the Occupation of Genocide,” devoted to depicting corporate complicity drawing upon a large data base. This continues Israel’s policies of non-cooperation with the most carefully crafted critical journalism that justifies punitive action against truth-telling journalists by an appeal to economic and political national interests.
The U.S. Government acting outside the combat zones in Gaza or neighboring Israel has been experimenting with less lethal tactics that have similar goals of inducing confusion, silence, and uncertainty, reinforced by strongly discouraging naming of the carnage and accompanying dehumanizing language as ‘genocide’ on principal media platforms. The defunding of leading university research programs by claiming to be reacting to campus antisemitism and the mounting challenges to undocumented foreign students seems both integral to the commitment to silence Israel’s critics and an aspect of the wider Trump agenda to discredit knowledge based governance, which would make the citizenry even more susceptible to the ultra-right belief-based agenda of the MAGA base, which includes waging a regressive epistemological war against reliance on science-oriented experts. Such a worldview diverts attention from the gravity of increased global warming and indulges the most rapacious dimensions of capitalism.
Let me conclude my response by grieving over Anas al-Sharif’s untimely and vengeful assassination by quoting his words indicting our silence and passivity: “If this madness doesn’t end, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased—and history will remember you as a silent witness to a genocide you chose not to stop.”
Daniel Falcone: Al Jazeera has long accused the IDF of running a campaign of incitement against its journalists, calling it a tactic to justify the targeting. How do you view this use of dehumanizing language in priming the public for violence against media workers?
Richard Falk: I regard Al Jazeera’s accusations as well founded as a first approximation. The fact that more than 230 journalists have been killed by Israel firepower in Gaza since October 2023, many by design and at close range does give these accusations what lawyers call a prima facie case. It would seem consistent with the stress that Israel has long put on the control of the public discourse pertaining to the underlying Israel/Palestine conflict with tactics shifting as the context shifts. The gravity of the sustained assault on Gaza has gradually turned the tide of public opinion against Israel including its escalations of attempts by Israel to suppress journalistic realism and smear brave journalist as they try to cover the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the weakening of Western support for the Zionist Project. Al Jazeera has led this effort to tell it like it is, generating extreme hostility among the war planners and political leaders in Tel Aviv. It still not appreciated that this genocide is reaching the point of no return, where the next phase of lament will be in the spirit of ‘we did too little too late.’
Israelis have ‘a need not to know,’ and that places a strain on its highly effective state propaganda machine given what is seen and heard daily throughout the world with decreasing or abandoned filters. For journalism to flourish in this era it needs to be liberated from the beliefs of the ruling elites and get back to addressing the facts as impartially interpreted. There is no other means of assuring a revival of reality-based journalism that is not life threatening to the journalist, but this will depend on the educating the citizenry to demand the protection and valuing of such reportage by organizing civil society pressure on government and special interest private sector lobbying.
As suggested earlier in the moving words of Anas al-Sharif it may be already too late, even if such pressures arise forcefully to help end the suffering of Gaza survivors, but we owe it to ourselves and to the human future to shed cautious impulses, and go all out to end this horrifying spectacle of genocide and seek an edifying process by which the perpetrators are held accountable. At present it seems a dream, but some dreams are indirect agents of change.
Daniel Falcone: The journalists killed at the gates of the hospital were at a protected site under international law. This compounds the violation. Does this all suggest a greater erosion of respect for international humanitarian norms in Gaza?
Richard Falk: Such targeted assassinations aggravate the criminal offense of killing journalists properly identified. This assessment is especially true in relation to Gaza which remains an Occupied Territory subject to compliance by Israel with the framework of international humanitarian law, especially as set forth in the Geneva Convention IV governing Belligerent Occupation.
The manner by which these Al Jazeera journalists were targeted should also be legally and morally condemned as forming a vital component of the ongoing genocide by its obvious intention of punishing an influential journalist who conveyed to readers the true nature of the Israeli tactics, thereby warning surviving journalists to avoid truth-telling if they hope to live, a terrifying message that hopes to insulate this Israeli genocide from scrutiny and sanctions.
Daniel Falcone: Reports indicate possibly 186 journalists killed in Gaza since October 2023. Are we witnessing a collapse of traditional protections for war correspondents (Also see: “the limits of the war photograph” – Mary Turfah)? Or does this mark a change in how information and its messengers are deliberately neutralized as part of military strategy? Israel almost seems proud of this rogue element and technique to state building through state violence.
Richard Falk: You pose an essential question that it is difficult for me to offer a helpful response as I lack necessary familiarity with developing doctrine and how reporting the news is manipulated to avoid friction with public support for military operation. One of the learning lessons of Washington think tanks and foreign policy advisors was the misleading belief that ‘the war was lost in American living rooms,’ and especially seeing flag-draped coffins on TV carrying the remains of combat casualties. The solution devised, which conveniently relieved the military strategists for the political outcome of the Vietnam War was to embed journalists in combat units, supposing more favorable coverage of military operations and less emphasis on depicting casualties.
Israel seems to have followed a much cruder approach in relation to allegations of genocide -given plausibility by fearless journalists reporting from Gaza’s many ground-zero sites of devastation and suffering. Simply put, it is a matter of discrediting truth-telling journalists and other experts if the damaging reports are from Westerners, assassinating if from Palestinians, a pattern borne out by the statistics so far compiled and consistent with the apartheid worldview that dominates Zionist ideology and is subscribed to by a broad echelon of high-level Israeli advisors.
For Further Reading:
Abraham, Yuval – +972 Magazine
Albanese, Francesca – UN Human Rights Council
Davidson, Lawrence – To the Point Analysis
El-Ad, Hagai – B’Tselem
Falk, Richard and Tilley, Virginia – UN ESCWA report, …The Question of Apartheid (2017)
Levy, Gideon – Haaretz
Loewenstein, Antony – Middle East Eye
Mansour, Sherif – Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
Morayef, Heba – Foreign Policy
Paul, Ari – FAIR, The Battleground
Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
Nassar, Tamara – The Electronic Intifada
Pappé, Ilan – Al Jazeera, The Guardian
Shakir, Omar – Human Rights Watch
Turfah, Mary – Los Angeles Review of Books
Zunes, Stephen – The Progressive
The Deadliest Conflict in History for Journalists
August 15, 2025
Anas Al-Sharif. Photograph Source: Al Jazeera – Fair Use
In one night, Israel murdered Al Jazeera’s entire media crew in Gaza City.
The Israeli military admitted to assassinating the journalists in an August 10 airstrike on a media tent outside Al-Shifa hospital. The strike killed Al Jazeera Arabic correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal.
Freelance cameraman Moamen Aliwa and reporter Mohammad al-Khaldi were also killed.
At just 28, Anas al-Sharif was a renowned journalist, husband, and father of two young children. He and his colleagues lived through constant Israeli bombardment while reporting on every aspect of the escalating genocide in Gaza, including the mass killing and maiming of Palestinians, widespread destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure like medical facilities, and forced starvation.
Like other Palestinian journalists, Israeli forces threatened al-Sharif’s life repeatedly, falsely accusing him of “heading a Hamas militant cell.” Yet he persisted in his fearless coverage.
He also suffered profound loss. In December 2023, an Israeli airstrike targeted his family’s home in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing his 90-year-old father. Weeks before, Israeli military officials had demanded that al-Sharif stop reporting from northern Gaza. But he refused.
The UN and human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists, have all condemned the deliberate killings of al-Sharif and his colleagues.
Sadly, this isn’t the first time Israel has smeared Palestinian journalists as “militants” or “terrorists” without evidence and then killed them. Among others, Israel assassinated Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent Hossam Shabat on March 24 in a strike on his car. On July 31, 2024, Israeli forces also murdered Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul and his cameraman Rami al-Rifi in a drone strike on their car.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government has denied international journalists access to Gaza. Its murders of Palestinian media workers fit a pattern of trying to eliminate witnesses to its heinous human rights violations.
Nearly 270 journalists and media workers, the vast majority of them Palestinians, have been killed by Israel since October 7, 2023. They are not “collateral damage” — they’re being hunted.
According to Brown University’s Watson Institute, more journalists have been killed in Gaza over the past two years than in the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Ukraine combined.
The deliberate targeting and killing of journalists are blatant war crimes. Like all civilians, they must be protected. Journalists play an integral role in covering potential violations of international humanitarian law like we’ve seen in Gaza.
Alongside its devastating bombardments, Israel’s unlawful use of starvation as warfare and restrictions on humanitarian aid are destroying the existence of Palestinian life in Gaza. At least 61,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed, but the true number is estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
The U.S. continues to be an active participant in the ongoing genocide by providing Israel with military, economic, and diplomatic support. This must end. Israel’s nearly 18-year illegal siege on Gaza must be lifted immediately. All humanitarian aid must be allowed in, overseen by the UN and its partners, not the U.S.-Israeli death traps where soldiers shoot starving people at so-called “aid distribution sites.”
Despite Israel’s efforts to silence witnesses, Gaza’s brave journalists are still reaching the world. People continue to demand that their governments stop enabling the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — including in the U.S., where a bipartisan majority of Americans oppose Israel’s actions. Communities are also mobilizing for justice and accountability for all the slain journalists.
Right before his murder, Anas al-Sharif warned, “If this madness does not end, Gaza will be reduced to ruins, its people’s voices silenced, their faced erased…history will remember you as silent witnesses to a genocide you chose not to stop.”
Israel can’t escape its crimes by killing the messenger. The truth will prevail — and so must justice.
When Journalists Are Killed, Truth Is Also Killed
August 15, 2025
I recently told a friend that I feel as though I am the screaming persona in Edward Munch’s acclaimed painting, The Scream, while the rest of the world, and especially those thuggishly corrupt oil-rich Arab potentates hiding behind, and using their phony Islamic faith to suppress their people, with, of course, the best Israeli spy technology, taking their leisurely walk down the boardwalk of history.
Because of their sacred duty to Truth, Accuracy, and Objectivity, American media, collectively referred as The Press, employs thousands of dedicated women and men to disseminate local, state, national, and international news. And because of this sacred duty, the Press has been designated as the Fourth Branch.
And because of partisan and ideological advocacy, often blurring the lines between fact and friction, the press has had its issues. Unfortunately more people are drawn to the 24/7 cable news networks or quickie digital updates unfolding and affecting the comfortable bubbles they’ve circumscribed for themselves.
Further, when journalists are killed, imprisoned, or banished because the truth they utter challenges those in power, we lose. And killing the truth is a heinous assault on every citizen. Think of Saudi Arabia’s Jamal Khashoggi vanishing in the labyrinth of Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul Embassy. Think also of the 247 Gaza Palestinian journalists incinerated with U.S. made weapons, compliment of we, the taxpayers.In his July 28, 2025 column under the title Preaching to the Choir While Children Die: The Cost of Silence on Gaza, Craig Nash, Good Faith Media’s editor, states that while Good Faith Media produces “both news and opinion articles on our online platforms, the reality is that we don’t have on-the-ground presence in the Middle East. So any hard, breaking news coverage we might provide would simply be restating facts from established global news services.”
On its online site, Good Faith Media describes itself as “a merger between two historic Baptist Entities: Baptists Today (operating as Nurturing Faith and Baptist Center for Ethics).One can criticize U.S. foreign policy all one wants. However, criticizing Israel will plant the AI (anti-Semitic) letters on one’s forehead, or worse, one might be arrested, detained, stripped of one’s citizenship, and possibly deported.
Unfortunately, U.S. media (in all its forms) and politicians from both sides of the aisle, are held hostage to ADL (anti-Defamation League) and AIPAC’s (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) assaults on any entity that criticizes Israel’s years-long human rights violations and the unabated theft of Palestinian land in both the West Bank and Gaza. In short, the charge that one is an anti-Semite has been, and continues to be, as currently defined by the Trump administration, used as a weapon and a sword. And for years Mike Huckabee and like-minded Evangelicals have been ardent supporters of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Brother Huckabee et.al. state that Palestinians are an invented people, an idea that was propagated by Golda Meir. He is also asserting that Palestinians belong in Muslim countries. You’d think that Baptist preacher Huckabee would be preaching the beatitudes, proclaiming that Christ’s message was one of harmony, love, peace, and caring for the least.
Sadly, for these Christian warriors of the Hegseth and Huckabee types, what is unfolding in Palestine is a countdown to Armageddon, an eschatological final human destiny time when only Christians will be saved from the scourge of fire and death. And the Israel-cheering, even by the vast majority of Republican Congresspeople, goes on, unabated.
From my perspective, Saddam Hussein’s ill-advised invasion of Kuwait and Israel’s 1982 assault on Lebanon were but two Mothers of All Wars of the 1980. And during America’s two Iraq wars, journalists were embedded with Pentagon personnel whose purpose it was to filter the news in a sanitized manner, thus rendering the reports a watered-down good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, civilized vs. uncivilized narratives. Reporting on the heinous and brutal November 8, 2004 assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, for example, was a white-wash of the death of thousands of Iraqi citizens and the pulverization of a major Iraqi city. Should the reader wish to read about this gruesome and vengeful (Dick Cheney et. al.) destruction of the city of Falluja, the online “The Fallujah Files,” as described and chronicled by a U.S. Marine involved in this dastardly act, is “the story [in] an unvarnished, unsanitized [sic.] firsthand account … that includes descriptions and photos that are candidly disturbing. In telling this story [states the narrator] , I promised my fellow Marines that I would not sugarcoat our experience.”
And, to answer Mr. Nash’s posited observation about the lack of “on-the-ground presence,” Israel has never allowed any reporters into its Gaza colosseum of genocidal savagery. And for several months after the brutal October 7, 2023 Hamas assault on Southern Israel, the media exploded into a 24/7 frenzy detailing every gruesome act – so much so – some fabricated untruths became fact, without serious American or Western journalistic scrutiny or verification.
Israel’s deliberate blackout on its Genocidal war crimes, including the deliberate starvation and killings of aid workers and destitute starving Gazans of all ages, has been, until recently, glossed over. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, for example, run by Johnnie Moore, an evangelical Christian Zionist, Israel, the U.S., and contracted American mercenaries, has not allowed journalists to report on its shadowy, Machiavellian scheme whose sole purpose is to draw Gazans to four isolated locations so as to make the impending ethnic cleansing a benign natural outcome of war. Luring pauperized, starving people who’ve walked miles in searing heat for a morsel of a handout and then shooting them to death is a depraved, psychopathic crime. And the footage of a young lad, scooping flour into a makeshift bag formed by his extended ragged t-shirt is the Cri de Coeur for the starving 2.3 million population.
Add insult to injury, The Gaza Mediterranean shoreline, the only place Gazans are able to bathe or fish, have been declared off limits; the watchful eyes of armed Israeli drones are enforcing this brutality.
If the reader has not done so, she/he is urged to look up Mike Huckabee’s’ buffoonish performance for the media. Dressed in a military helmet, a diminutive flak jacket that highlights his girth and protruding gut as a result of eating well, the photograph, full of irony, depicts a bearded man oblivious to the starvation he and his boss have been orchestrating in a most bizarre danse macabre performative charade.
On Sunday, August 10, 2025, the Israeli army assassinated Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and five of his colleagues “in a targeted airstrike on a journalists’ tent outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The strike has effectively wiped out the entire staff of Al Jazeera in Gaza City, claiming the lives of one child and six journalists, including Al Jazeera correspondent Muhammad Qreiqeh.” Further, “Widely celebrated as the voice of Gaza, al-Sharif’s assassination comes after months of incitement against him and puts an end to his coverage ahead of an expected Israeli invasion of Gaza City. The Israeli army has reportedly given Gaza City residents until October 7 to evacuate, when the Israeli army plans to invade northern Gaza as part of its stated plan of conquering the entire Strip.”
According to Israeli hasbara, Anas was a Hamas operative. But then every Palestinian man, woman, child, and fetus is a Hamas operative who must be neutralized by a drone, jet, tank, or machinegun.
Mr. Nashe’s assertion that GFM does “not have on-the-ground presence in the Middle East” is both on target and understandable. It takes a big purse and logistics for GFM (an online entity that “provides reflection and resources at the intersection of faith and culture through an inclusive Christian lens”) — to have on the ground reporters in the Middle East.
Had it not been for on the ground Palestinian Gaza journalists, Israel’s complete blackout on the large number of civilian deaths and apocalyptic destruction would have gone unnoticed by a world that has, until recently, lost its moral compass, and only because the victims are brown people. And the same goes for the millions of starving Sudanese And somehow in all the political, social, economic, retributive vengeful actions, including all the environmental disasters of the past few months – befalling this nation, the Israeli assassinations of 232 (now 237) Gaza journalists who lie, with their sinews, cameras, mikes, helmets, and press insignia, whose buried remains are under the rubble or incinerated to ashes, strewn across the Gaza sand.
The killing of reporters who shed light on the grotesque bestiality of an army, led by a self-indulging megalomaniac prolonging the war to save himself from prosecution, is immoral. With Goya’s moving 82 etchings (Disasters of War) depicting the hauntingly ghastly and macabre barbarity of France’s early 19th century slaughter of Spanish citizens, to the tune of some 375,000 lives, the surviving Gaza Palestinian journalists’ reports will be etched in the annals of history, Never to be Forgotten. And like Picassos’ Guernica, the haunting images of Gazans will forever be the shameful canvas in the Museum of Modern Day Bestiality.
Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs’ April 1, 2025 report on the Cost of Wars reported that as of April 2025, 232 Gaza journalists were killed by Israeli forces, “with the vast majority being Palestinians, [and] nearly 380 have been wounded. … This is the highest journalist death toll of any U.S. war since the Civil War, and in fact tops the combined toll of journalist casualties in the U.S. Civil War, World War I, World War II, The Korean War, the Vietnam War (including assaults on Cambodia and Laos), the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing Ukraine War.” The report also states that this would be the equivalent of 8,500 U.S. journalists killed in the ongoing Gaza Genocide. And, in addition to targeting and killing journalists, “Israel has employed a full spectrum effort to undermine the free flow of information,” because of the “Israeli military’s destruction of the communications system in Gaza and intimidation and widespread repression of the press.”
When a Palestinian journalists’ photos become a target practice
See Israeli Journalist Jonathan Ofir’s Mondoweiss 5/9/25 report under the title “Israeli soldiers are using slain Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s face for target.” A U.S. citizen, on 5/11/2022 Shireen was reporting on Israel’s assault on a Palestinian Jerusalem neighborhood. An Israeli sniper “took her out” with a bullet to her head. Even though she is a U.S. citizen, the Biden Administration never fully investigated the shooting of Shireen and refused to meet with her family while at the same time I am a Zionist to the core Biden had several meetings with Israeli hostage families.
Regretfully, the vast majority of America’s journalists are complicit in a code that silences any criticism of Israel’s brutalities and defiance of some 57 U.N. Resolutions, with Mike Huckabee and his ilk leading the charge
And just as silence is complicity, so is the recently delivery of 2,000 bombs to Israel (totaling $509 million), at a time when budget cuts for vital human needs are slashed by a misguided president and a compliant Republican Congress.
Anas al-Sharif, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Moamen Aliwa and Mohammed Qreiqeh (photo credit: Al Jazeera)
Late last Sunday, a targeted Israeli attack killed prominent Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif alongside several colleagues. They were in a tent outside the main gate of Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital. Also killed were Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal, together with freelance cameraman Momen Aliwa and freelance journalist Mohammed al-Khalidi. Al-Sharif was previously part of a Reuters team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024.
Western ‘mainstream’ news outlets prominently featured Israel’s claim that Anas al-Sharif was a Hamas operative. This televised BBC News segment was typical:
‘Israel says Anas Al-Sharif was a member of Hamas, a claim long rejected by the news network, his family, and the Committee to Protect Journalists.’
Although scepticism was indicated, the Israeli propaganda claim skewed reporting by disrupting the reality that Israel had just deliberately murdered several journalists and media workers. This was exactly as Israel wished, diverting attention from its killings to addressing the presented ‘evidence’ of one victim being an active Hamas operative. This is part of a longstanding Israeli pattern of lies and deception since the genocide began in October 2023.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said:
‘Israel keeps killing journalists, usually accusing them of being part of Hamas’s military, rarely offering any proof beyond its own worthless assertions.’
Irene Khan, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, said:
‘This is a pattern the Israelis have used over the last 20 months…to assassinate and silence independent reporting on Gaza…they are running a carefully planned program of assassination.’
The Financial Times had a straightforward headline:
‘Israel kills famous Al Jazeera reporter in Gaza’
By contrast, the Daily Telegraph headlined:
‘Israel kills Al Jazeera journalist it accused of leading Hamas terror cell’
There was a follow-up piece by the paper’s Jerusalem correspondent, Henry Bodkin:
‘Why Israel believes Al Jazeera reporter killed in Gaza was a terrorist’
How does a journalist without mind-reading powers know what Israel ‘believes’, rather than what it claims or asserts?
The Daily Mail included the Israeli claim in its headline:
‘Five Al Jazeera journalists are killed in Israeli strike on tent in Gaza: IDF says it was targeting and struck “Hamas cell leader posing as correspondent”’
When not actually featured in newspaper headlines, Israel’s claim that Anas al-Sharif was active in a Hamas cell was prominent in reporting. The second line of a Sun news article was typical:
‘Anas al-Sharif, 28, was hit in the strike after the IDF claimed he was the “head of a terrorist cell in Hamas”.’
The UK-based Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) noted of media coverage:
‘Unlike the FT, many major outlets have centred Israeli propaganda that Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif was working for Hamas. Here’s how the media should be reporting things, beginning with the fact that Israel just killed four Al Jazeera journalists in a targeted strike.’
CfMM then pointed out that media outlets should have provided basic context in their reporting, including:
‘- The timing of this attack (on the eve of its latest expected assault on Gaza)
– Targeting of journalists not a one-off (some 240 killed by Israel so far – more than any other conflict)
– Israel doesn’t allow foreign journalists into Gaza’
Responsible journalism should also:
‘Humanise the victims. These journalists had been pivotal in sharing stories out of Gaza. Share their families’ and friends’ pain.’
CfMM also observed that reporting should have indicated prominently that Israel had already threatened al-Sharif, and that the Committee to Protect Journalists had warned that any attack on journalists is clearly unacceptable.
Finally, said CfMM, Israeli claims about al-Sharif needed to be put in proper perspective: that the claims are not supported by the ‘evidence’ presented.
In fact, responsible journalists should go further and explain to audiences that Israel has a long history of lying, fabrication and deceit. Since the genocide began, there has been a litany of lies that the ‘mainstream’ media have propagated and, when exposed, ignored or downplayed. Mehdi Hasan, founder of independent outlet Zeteo, powerfully debunked ten of the most egregious Israeli lies in a clip lasting just three minutes:
In summary, ‘Israel’s top 10 lies about its Gaza genocide’ presented by Hasan are:
1. Hamas systematically steals aid coming into Gaza.
2. It’s all about the hostages, i.e. if Hamas released the hostages, Israel would stop the genocide.
3. 40 beheaded babies, and babies in ovens or hung on clotheslines.
4. Mass rape on 7 October 2023 as a weapon of war.
5. Hamas ‘command and control centre’ under Al-Shifa hospital.
6. A schedule found for Hamas guards in Rantisi hospital (it was an Arabic calendar).
7. UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinians, is a front for Hamas.
8. You cannot trust the ‘Hamas-controlled’ health ministry.
9. Israel didn’t kill those 15 aid workers or 100 people waiting for flour.
10. Hamas uses human shields.
Following Israel’s targeted killing of Al Jazeera’s entire reporting team in Gaza City, Muhammad Shehada, a Gazan political analyst and Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, created this new brief summary of Israeli lies. Running at just over two minutes, Shehada observed that he kept going until he ran out of breath, but barely scratched the surface of Israeli deceit.
In his introduction, he said:
‘One thing that you need to keep in mind is that Israel has been lying incessantly since the beginning of the genocide. It’s been the cornerstone of Israel’s genocidal campaign to lie every single day about everything possible.’
Other than the Israeli lies cited by Hasan above, examples given by Shehada included: Israeli use of white phosphorus weapons; deliberately starving Gazans; gassing Israeli hostages; killing women and children with white flags; mass rape of Palestinians; non-existent tunnels under graveyards; Israeli snipers targeting children in the head; breaking the ceasefire; blowing up Gazans fleeing south; blowing up and destroying Kamal Adwan hospital; claiming that dead Gazan children are fake plastic dolls; creating alleged safe zones that they push people into and then bomb; Red Crescent staff participated in the 7 October attacks; designating journalists as Hamas militants (such as al-Sharif); Hamas hid giant supplies of fuel under Rafah; and on and on.
In conclusion, said Shehada:
‘You should attach as much value to Israel’s allegations about Anas al-Sharif, as to the dust on the floor.’
Western Media Complicity In The Slaughter Of Journalists
You might think that, with so much evidence of Israeli deception and outright lies, journalists would treat Israeli claims with extreme scepticism, while explaining to audiences why. This should especially apply to BBC News, the national broadcaster that is funded by a public licence fee and which is supposed to uphold the highest journalistic values as enshrined in the corporation’s Editorial Guidelines, and promised by its Royal Charter.
Of course, as is widely known by now, the credibility of BBC News has nosedived since the genocide began and there has even been significant discontent within its own newsrooms.
How did the BBC treat Israel’s targeted killing of Anas al-Sharif and his Al Jazeera colleagues in Gaza City? As we saw earlier, BBC news broadcasts prominently featured wording such as, ‘Israel says Anas Al-Sharif was a member of Hamas’.
When the BBC interviewed Martin Roux, head of the crisis desk at Reporters Without Borders, the BBC presenter inevitably began with, ‘Israel says…’.
Here is another BBC example that was broadcast live:
‘Let’s bring in our colleague Yolande Knell who is in Jerusalem. The accusation from Israel is that Anas al Sharif had a dual role, he was both in their words journalist and terrorist…’
There followed almost two minutes of bland, emotionless newspeak from Knell with only perfunctory scepticism about Israeli claims, and zero context about the longstanding Israeli pattern of denials, deceits and deceptions.
As media activist Saul Staniforth noted:
‘The IDF assassinated him. Now the BBC assassinates his character.’
The flagship BBC News at Ten actually broadcast a segment in which BBC correspondent Jon Donnison, reporting from Jerusalem, made this outrageous observation:
‘There’s the question of proportionality. Is it justified to kill five journalists when you were only targeting one?’
As Jonathan Cook noted, the comment was ‘obscene’. If you cannot grasp that, imagine that five well-known BBC journalists were killed in a targeted Russian strike inside Ukraine: perhaps Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet, Yolande Knell, Lucy Williamson and Jon Donnison working together from a makeshift base in Ukraine. Imagine that one of them, Donnison perhaps, had allegedly been secretly working for Ukraine, passing on intelligence information about Russian troop movements. If all five had been killed in a Russian attack, would that have been framed in BBC reporting as:
‘There’s the question of proportionality. Is it justified to kill five journalists when you were only targeting one?’
Of course not.
Consider also a press review segment on Sky News in which one of their journalists extensively recounted Israel’s claims about Anas al-Sharif’s active Hamas involvement ‘at the time of his elimination’, followed by:
‘Sharif himself had denied it. Al Jazeera deny it too. So, you know, you’re left with two sides here again’.
As journalist Afshin Rattansi, Going Underground presenter, observed:
‘The two sides:
‘An ethno-state perpetrating genocide that lies as much as it kills
‘A slain journalist who has shown the horrors of the genocide
‘And there’s “journalists” seemingly still can’t figure out that Israel had every motivation to kill a Palestinian journalist to stop him from showing the world the horror of the genocide they are perpetrating…
‘Bear in mind these people are paid well to be this awful at their jobs’
Karishma Patel, a former BBC News journalist who resigned over the broadcaster’s biased coverage of Gaza, said on X:
‘For nearly 2 years, I have been asking @BBCNews to critically engage with its sources over Gaza. Israel is a bad source. Uncritically repeating its claims, even with the caveat that they’re denied, is not journalism. Do your job. Verify.’
She continued, addressing the BBC:
‘You have put Palestinian lives at risk by legitimising Israeli claims that have laid the groundwork for its attacks. You have created the conditions under which Israel could kill AJ’s entire team in Gaza City. All you have ever had to do was follow the evidence.’
Journalist and documentary filmmaker Richard Sanders observed:
‘Israel last night murdered the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City. Western media should long ago have united to bring serious pressure on the Israelis to end the slaughter of journalists. Their failure to do so makes them complicit.’
Al Jazeera noted recently that Israel has killed nearly 270 journalists and media workers since 7 October 2023, listing all their names here.
‘An Insult To Journalism And A Stamp Of Disgrace For Humanity’
Tanya Haj-Hassan, a Toronto-based paediatric intensive care and humanitarian doctor who has worked in Gaza, told the UN last November:
‘Incredible Palestinian journalists covering the genocide of their own people have been repeatedly targeted by Israel and discredited, while both their reporting and their murder[s] have been largely ignored by mainstream Western media.’
She added:
‘Spend just five minutes in a hospital there [in Gaza] and it will become painfully clear that Palestinians are being intentionally massacred, starved and stripped of everything needed to sustain human life’.
The public have been moved by such authoritative testimony from many doctors, as well as countless, extremely harrowing scenes of devastation and suffering from Gaza, and are well aware that ‘mainstream’ media are protecting Israel. Reporting from a protest in Washington DC for Al Jazeera English, Shihab Rattansi said:
‘Several hundred demonstrators gathered outside the headquarters of various media organisations in this building: NBC, Fox News, ITN, the Guardian. They say that their coverage of the Gaza genocide has given Israel the room to kill so many, and notably so many journalists.’
Rattansi added of the protesters:
‘They’re trying to disrupt the narratives that are being told on these programmes. That message is, “Look, you’re no longer the gatekeepers. We know what’s happening in Gaza. We know about the genocide, despite your best efforts.”’
Mariam Barghouti, a US-born Palestinian journalist and policy analyst, stated via X:
‘We are no longer waiting for international journalists to condemn Israeli practices against children, civilians, and their own peers.
‘We condemn these journalists in their entirety. We condemn them for their journalistic malpractice, their ineptitude to fulfill their obligation to the world, and for engineering the narrative of victimhood for Israel.’
Barghouti added:
‘From correspondents to editors to producers, across Sky news to CNN, BBC, NYT and others. You’re an insult to journalism, and a stamp of disgrace for humanity.
‘You have wielded so much power, and at every juncture chose to abuse it. And here we emphasize and remember, it was a choice, because real journalists- like those in Gaza,- did not acquiesce and chose to report the truth even as their body began to eat itself from hunger & the bombs rained on them.’
Hind Khoudary, a Palestinian journalist based in Gaza, said:
‘I will not speak to foreign media about the killing of Palestinian journalists.
‘I will not sit on your global channels to be part of a segment you’ll forget by tomorrow.
‘To you, we are just a headline — a tragedy to consume, not colleagues to defend.
‘We are being hunted and killed in Gaza while you watch in silence. For two years, your fellow journalists here have been slaughtered. What did you do?
‘Nothing.
‘Or maybe it’s because we are Palestinian journalists — we don’t count as “real” colleagues in your eyes.’
Perhaps it is also because Palestinians are presented by western media as lesser humans than the rest of us.
Investigative journalist Matt Kennard has raised serious questions for well over a year about British complicity, indeed participation, in Israel’s Gaza genocide. Together with Palestine Deep Dive and Declassified UK, he has reported UK spy flights over Gaza: something the ‘mainstream’ media, in part, has only recently addressed (although notably not the BBC, so far).
Kennard noted via X on 11 August:
‘Likely that UK had a mercenary spy plane in the sky over Gaza when Israel targeted and killed 5 Al Jazeera journalists, including Anas al-Sharif, last night. The intelligence gathered by this plane goes directly to Israeli military in real-time. How long will we tolerate this?’
Declassified UK noted that the Hind Rajab Foundation has now identified Israeli air force commander Tomer Bar as one of those responsible for killing the Al Jazeera team in Gaza. Last month, Declassified UK revealed that Keir Starmer’s government had allowed Bar to visit Britain in July. He reportedly met with RAF commanders and attended the Royal International Air Tattoo event. Around the same time, air chief marshal Sir Rich Knighton, head of the RAF, was confronted by Phil Miller of Declassified UK:
‘Why are you still sharing intelligence with Benjamin Netanyahu while he’s wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza?’
Knighton refused to answer while his colleague, squadron leader Ryan Kerr, repeatedly tried to stop the interview by shoving Miller.
How long will ‘mainstream’ British journalists treat Israeli claims with minimal scepticism, indeed repeat and amplify Israeli lies and deceits?
How long will the British media broadcast Benjamin Netanyahu’s words, without pointing out that he is wanted by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity?
How long will UK media outlets soft-pedal challenges to Keir Starmer, David Lammy and other government ministers over their role in the Gaza genocide?
History will condemn them all.
No comments:
Post a Comment