Israel’s intent to annihilate Gaza would have been clear much sooner had we listened to Palestinian journalists, rather than the evasions and equivocations of the BBC
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 its 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 has 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.
