Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
In the piece Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), wrote: “The high rate of journalists’ deaths and arrests, including a slew in the West Bank; laws allowing its government to shut down foreign news outlets deemed a security risk, which the prime minister has explicitly threatened to use against Al Jazeera; and its refusal to permit foreign journalists independent access to Gaza all speak to a leadership that is deliberately restricting press freedom. That is the hallmark of a dictatorship, not a democracy.”
As well as restrictions on media access to Gaza, particular broadcasters face other restrictions. At the start of April Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had proclaimed he would “act immediately to stop” Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera’s operations inside Israel.
Israel’s parliament passed a bill allowing it to close Al Jazeera’s office in Israel, block its website and ban local channels from using its coverage. However ongoing ceasefire negotiations with Hamas, brokered through Qatar, were perhaps a bulwark against haste. The company is still broadcasting from Israel, but its future status is uncertain.
At the annual International Journalism Festival in Perugia on April 17-21, one of Al Jazeera’s former Gaza-based correspondents Youmna ElSayed, spoke of the dangers of covering the war as a Palestinian journalist, including the belief that she, along with others, had been targeted by the Israeli military. “Journalists were under fire from day one,” she said. Despite having little equipment and the destruction of media offices, “We did what we could to show the world what was really going on,” she said.
The CPJ said on April 20 that at least 97 journalists and media workers were among the more than 34,000 people killed since the war began.
ElSayed regretted leaving Gaza but said it was her only choice to save the lives of her children. She said: “This entire world would have known nothing, seen nothing of what has been happening in Gaza … if it wasn’t for those Palestinian journalists.”
She claimed that international journalists had given up on forcing the Israeli army to let them into Gaza. “This is something that is unprecedented and has not happened anywhere else in the world. But yet, international journalists have given up on that right.”
Access to Gaza
However, journalists’ organisations and the correspondents themselves have been lobbying for access to Gaza for months now. But the Israeli government appears to be not giving way.
The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen, also speaking in Perugia, confirmed that it had been a really difficult story to cover, principally, “because the main meat of it – which is what’s happening in Gaza, we can’t get close to”.
From a production point of view, he said sometimes it feels like, “climbing through mud trying to generate the material that’s necessary to put together a report for television news”. He added it was very hard “to be a TV reporter on a story that you can’t see yourself”.
The Israeli government says the number of international journalists given press accreditation to work in Israel since October 2023 is 3,400. This has given journalists access to the West Bank and enabled coverage of settler violence against the local Palestinian population, but not to Gaza.
But as I wrote in November, the only permitted trips into Gaza have been via Israel Defense Forces-controlled embeds (where the journalist travels with the military and therefore their ability to see or cover stories is restricted).
CNN’s Clarissa Ward was the first foreign journalist who made it into Gaza without the army, and she did this by accompanying an aid convoy supported by the United Arab Emirates in December 2023. During this two-hour trip to Rafah, where 2.3 million residents are now based, the area was bombed and she filmed operations in a field hospital, and talked to doctors and injured children.
With 20 years of war reporting under her belt, she concluded: “Like Grozny, Aleppo and Mariupol, Gaza will go down as one of the great horrors of modern warfare.”
From outside the country, media outlets keep trying to check and verify information on the bombings from the IDF by using geo-location and AI software to scan satellite imagery for bomb craters and destruction. In December this enabled the New York Times to conclude that “during the first six weeks of the war in Gaza, Israel routinely used one of its biggest and most destructive bombs in areas it designated safe for civilians”.
Israeli media coverage
Within Israel, the media are mostly publishing the IDF version of events unchallenged. According to Israeli journalist and activist Anat Saragusti: “Hebrew-speaking Israelis watching television news are not exposed at all to what’s going on in Gaza. We don’t see atrocities, the rubble, the destruction and the humanitarian crisis. The world sees something completely different.”
Meanwhile, the left-wing newspaper Haaretz (published in Hebrew and in English) has been threatened with financial penalties for “sabotaging Israel in wartime” through its more nuanced journalism. According to reporter Ido David Cohen, writing in December, it is the television news channels that present the most extreme example of censorship, as they have “devoted themselves to national morale, exclusively relying on official military statements and completely ignoring Palestinian casualties”.
In the same article, cultural commentator and academic David Gurevitz claimed the numbers of Palestinians killed remains an abstract concept for many Israelis: “The Israeli audience isn’t capable of accommodating two kinds of pain together, seeing and identifying with the human victim of the other side as such, and the media follow suit.”
This argument was backed up this month by Israeli journalist Yossi Klein who wrote: “The most taboo number in Israel is 34,000. You can’t talk about it, you can’t mention it, and if someone speaking on a panel accidentally blurts it out, they should add, disdainfully: ‘according to Palestinian sources’.”
Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh works in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on December 12, 2023. (Photo by Mahmud HAMS / AFP) (Photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty Images)
“After murdering multiple Al Jazeera journalists, Israel is now moving to expel the news organization entirely,” said one advocacy group.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged Monday to “immediately” move to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from Israel after the Knesset approved legislation that gives the country’s government the power to shut down the operations of foreign media outlets deemed a threat to national security.
In a social media post, Netanyahu called the Qatari-owned network a “terrorist channel” and said he would use the new law to halt its activities in Israel.
“I welcome the law promoted by Communications Minister Shlomo Karai with the support of coalition members led by coalition chairman Ofir Katz,” wrote Netanyahu.
Under the new law, the Israeli communications minister can ban foreign outlets with the prime minister’s permission. The measure, which also gives Israeli authorities the power to confiscate a foreign media outlet’s equipment, passed the Knesset in an overwhelming 71 to 10 vote.
The law’s passage comes days after Al Jazeera broadcast video footage of Israeli soldiers gunning down two unarmed Palestinians in northern Gaza, one of whom was waving a piece of white fabric in a gesture of surrender. The footage showed Israeli bulldozers subsequently burying the two bodies under the sand of the beach where the killings took place.
“Israel continues to act as a rogue, authoritarian state with total impunity.”
Al Jazeera has a bureau in Jerusalem and offices in the West Bank and Gaza, and it has covered Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip closely and critically, regularly reporting and broadcasting footage and eyewitness accounts of Israeli atrocities. Al Jazeera is one of the few international media outlets to broadcast live from Gaza during Israel’s latest war on the Palestinian enclave.
The outlet’s correspondents have been among the dozens of journalists killed, wounded, or detained by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 7.
Wael Dahdouh, Al Jazeera‘s Gaza bureau chief, was wounded by an Israeli missile attack in December. Israeli forces have killed five members of Dahdouh’s family—including his son, Hamza, who was also an Al Jazeera journalist.
“After murdering multiple Al Jazeera journalists, Israel is now moving to expel the news organization entirely,” Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East wrote in response to the new law’s passage. “Israel continues to act as a rogue, authoritarian state with total impunity.”
Al Jazeerareported Monday that the Netanyahu government has been threatening to shutter the outlet and other publications for months under the guise of wartime security.
In a statement ahead of Monday’s vote, the Association for Civil Rights expressed opposition to the proposed crackdown on foreign media outlets, arguing that the measure’s “real purpose is not security-related but political: to allow the government to impose sanctions on foreign broadcasting tools whose broadcasts are not to its liking.”
“In addition to the grave infringement on freedom of expression and freedom of the press, it also prohibits the court from overturning a non-proportional decision, effectively tying the court’s hands from intervening in decisions regarding the closure of media outlets,” the group said. “This is a direct continuation of the judicial overhaul, harming the courts and media outlets, all while cynically using war and security justifications.”
The Washington Post (11/22/23) said it couldn’t make a definitive assessment of whether Biden’s atrocity claims were true. But Israel’s official casualty list (11/11/23) had already debunked them.
In late November, the Washington Post (11/22/23) factchecked President Joe Biden’s repeated claims that babies had been beheaded during Hamas’s October 7 attack in Israel.
Biden’s remarks during a November 15 news conference triggered the factcheck:
Hamas has already said publicly that they plan on attacking Israel again, like they did before, to where they were cutting babies’ heads off to burning women and children alive.
Despite acknowledging a lack of confirmation of such atrocities, the Post stopped short of branding Biden’s statements false, and declined to dole out any of its iconic Pinocchios.
“It’s too soon in the Israel/Gaza war to make a definitive assessment,” Post Factchecker Glenn Kessler wrote, noting that even the most basic facts weren’t yet known.
“The Israeli prime minister’s office has said about 1,200 people were killed on October 7, down from an initial estimate of 1,400,” he said, “but it’s unclear how many were civilians or soldiers.”
An authoritative count
That statement isn’t true. While the exact number killed amid the extreme violence and chaos of October 7 may never be finalized, an authoritative count of civilian deaths—as well as data that definitively refutes claims babies were beheaded—was available to anyone with access to the internet little more than a month after the attack.
That’s when Bituah Leumi, or National Insurance Institute, Israel’s social security agency, posted a Hebrew-language website (11/9/23) with the name, gender and age of every identified civilian victim and where each had been attacked.
Two days later Bituah Leumi (also transliterated as Bituach Leumi) posted an English-language news release (11/11/23) publicizing the website as a memorial to the civilian victims of the “Iron Swords” war—Israel’s name for Hamas’s attack and Israel Defense Forces’ response. (The news release refers to “695 identified war casualties,” but there are no wounded; all the victims are listed as “killed.”)
The journalistic importance of the memorial website was shown less than a month later, when Haaretz (12/4/23), Israel’s oldest newspaper, used the social security agency’s data to debunk some of the most sensational atrocities blamed on Hamas.
‘Proved untrue’
Haaretz (12/4/23) reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most sensational atrocity claims were “inaccurate.”
Haaretz’s 2,000-word, English-language article was cautious, with allowances for mistaken and exaggerated reports from traumatized observers describing horrific scenes of carnage. But unlike the Washington Post’s factcheck, the Israeli newspaper didn’t pull its punches, flatly concluding that some of the claims of atrocities “have been proved untrue.”
Chief among the claims disproved was that Hamas fighters deliberately slaughtered dozens of babies—beheading some, burning and hanging others.
“According to sources including Israel’s National Insurance Institute, kibbutz leaders and the police, on October 7 one baby was murdered, 10-month-old Mila Cohen,” the Haaretz article stated. “She was killed with her father, Ohad, on Kibbutz Be’eri.” The child’s mother survived.
In addition to a single infant, the social security agency’s list of victims includes only a few other young children. Haaretz’s reporters were able to determine the circumstances of each of their deaths:
According to the National Insurance Institute, five other children aged 6 or under were murdered, including Omer Kedem Siman Tov, 2, and his 6-year-old twin sisters Arbel and Shachar, who were killed on Kibbutz Nir Oz. There was also 5-year-old Yazan Zakaria Abu Jama from Arara in the southern Negev, who was killed in a Hamas rocket strike, and 5-year-old Eitan Kapshetar, who was murdered with his parents and his 8-year-old sister, Aline, near Sderot.
Haaretz also used the social security data to refute allegations made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Biden that Hamas targeted and tortured children:
There is no evidence that children from several families were murdered together, rendering inaccurate Netanyahu’s remark to US President Joe Biden that Hamas terrorists “took dozens of children, tied them up, burned them and executed them.”
‘Details still sparse’
The Washington Post (12/4/23) acknowledged the Haaretz story the same day it was published, with a one-paragraph “update” inserted into its November 22 factcheck. While crediting Haaretz with doing a “detailed examination of unverified accounts of alleged atrocities disseminated by Israeli first-responders and army officers,” the Post downgraded the Israeli newspaper’s conclusion, saying only that “no accounts of beheaded or burned babies could be verified.”
While the Post noted that Haaretz “could document only one case of a baby being killed in the Hamas attacks,” the update did not explain that the source of that critical fact was an agency of the Israeli government. Nor did the Post alter the factcheck’s inconclusive, mishmashed “Bottom Line”:
Almost two months after the Hamas attack, details are still sparse on claims of beheading of babies. One IDF official says he found a decapitated baby; a first responder says “little kids” were beheaded, though an exact number was not provided. Forensic records that would document the cause of death have not been released. There also are reports of at least two beheadings of adults—a soldier and a Thai worker. First responders say they viewed these bodies.
There is little dispute that many of the civilians killed by militants on October 7 died in especially brutal ways. But caution is still warranted, especially at the presidential level, about statements that babies were beheaded. The available evidence does not need exaggeration.
An unnecessary retraction
PolitiFact (11/21/23) retracted this story (10/20/23) because it didn’t include Israeli claims about mutilated babies that—according to Israel’s official records—didn’t exist.
The Post wasn’t the only factchecker that wavered when judging reports of slaughtered Israeli babies. The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact retracted its story (10/20/23), headlined “How Politicians, Media Outlets Amplified Uncorroborated Report of Beheaded Babies.”
PolitiFact took the embarrassing action after being savaged by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, better known as CAMERA.
CAMERA, which Haaretz (9/5/16) described as “a right-wing media watchdog that routinely attacks news outlets over their coverage of Israel,” blasted PolitiFact as “unethical,” “sloppy and misleading” (11/8/23) for failing to include in its story all reports of mutilated babies made by Israeli military spokespeople, government officials and emergency response workers.
PolitiFact (11/21/23) conceded “our initial story was incomplete,” and published a revised story (11/21/23) that included many of those comments. The new version also quoted an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson stating “that verified testimonies state some people were beheaded, but they could not confirm how many.”
Like the Post’s Factchecker, PolitiFact drew no conclusions about the truth or falsity of those claims, declining to issue a rating on its “Truth-O-Meter.”
‘Details still emerging’
Snopes (10/12/23) says it’s still too soon to say whether babies were beheaded on October 7, thought it promises, “We will update this story once more information comes to light.”
The factchecking website Snopes (10/12/23, last updated 12/18/23) also declined to provide a definite answer to the question posed in its headline: “Were Israeli Babies Beheaded by Hamas Militants During Attack on Kfar Aza?”
“At present, details are still emerging from communities affected in Israel, the death tolls are still being counted, and the manner of many deaths have not yet been confirmed,” Snopes stated.
In one of eight updates, Snopes cited Haaretz’s December 4 “analysis of child deaths during the October 7 attack.” But, as with the Washington Post’s update, Snopes did not mention that the newspaper had used Israeli social security data in its investigation.
FactCheck, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, (10/13/23) did find that a Facebook video was correct in saying “that ‘no evidence has been provided’ for the viral claim that ‘40 babies’ were ‘beheaded’ by Hamas.”
But a November 14 update, included in the story, quoted the head of Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine saying that “many bodies” of victims he had examined were “without heads.” But he couldn’t determine whether the decapitations were deliberate or the result of explosions.
FactCheck has not published any more on the issue.
The missing proof
FAIR.org (10/20/23): “The claim about beheading babies was…a shocking story that served to turn off logic and critical thinking.”
There’s a reason why the major factchecking organizations hesitate to pass judgment on the widespread claim of slaughtered babies: They rightly conclude that the lack of verifying evidence, such as photos or autopsy reports, does not conclusively prove the claims are false.
FAIR contributor Saurav Sarkar made that precise point in his report (10/20/23) lambasting “corporate media” for “their repetition of the shocking, unsubstantiated claim that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies in its violent attack on a kibbutz in southern Israel on October 7.”
“So we have a story, and that story was generated in a grossly irresponsible way, and then repeated over and over,” Sarkar stated. “But what proof do we have that the story is false? After all, even if it was reported badly, and repeated without additional substantiation, it might be true.”
Bituah Leumi, the Israeli social security agency, provided that missing proof when it posted the official list of victims that showed only one infant was killed in the attack.
The mainstream US news media ignored that authoritative evidence.
‘War on truth’
AFP (12/15/23) reported that data from Israel’s social security agency “invalidates some statements by Israeli authorities in the days following the attack.”
The first major news outlet outside of Israel to use data from the social security agency’s website was the French wire service Agence France-Presse.
The AFP’s 1,000-word, English-language dispatch, headlined “Israel Social Security Data Reveals True Picture of October 7 Deaths,” was picked up by France24 (12/15/23), the Times of India (12/15/23), the financial weekly Barron’s (12/15/23) and a scattering of small newspapers, including the Caledonian (Vermont) Record (12/15/23).
The AFP story covered much the same ground as Haaretz’s analysis, listing the same slain infant—Mila Cohen—and five other young victims under 7 years old in refuting claims of wholesale slaughter of babies.
While Google searches found no US mainstream media reporting on the Israeli social security agency’s data, several independent journalists did.
Gareth Porter, an American historian and journalist whose credentials go back to the Vietnam War, cited the social security data in an article in Consortium News (1/6/24) that argued that the Netanyahu government sought to build support for the invasion of Gaza by “inventing stories about nonexistent atrocities and planting them with credulous US news outlets.”
In February, Jeremy Scahill used that data to make the same case in a 8,000-word article, headlined “Netanyahu’s War on Truth,” in the Intercept (2/7/24), the investigative website he helped found.
Both journalists credit the December 15 AFP dispatch as the source of the Israeli social security data. (Porter’s story provides a link to the Times of India; Scahill links to France24.)
Earlier this week a third independent journalist, Glenn Greenwald (3/3/24), quoted the December 4 Haaretz report, which used the Israeli social security data, in a YouTube video, titled “October 7 Reports Implode: Beheaded Babies, NY Times Scandal & More.”
Emotion-inflaming stories
Media focus on the imaginary beheaded babies helped Israel get away with killing hundreds of actual babies (Al Jazeera, 1/25/24).
In the months since the Haaretz and AFP reports were published, Bituah Leumi has updated its civilian death count to 779, including 76 foreign workers, as more victims are identified (Jewish News Syndicate, 1/15/24.).
But a detailed examination this week of the 16-page list of victims on the memorial website found no additional infants or young children—only those already accounted for by Haaretz and AFP—and a total of 36 children under 18 years old.
Mila Cohen remains the only infant reported killed in the October 7 attack.
US corporate media’s failure to cite the social security agency’s data to forcefully refute claims of butchered babies and other outrages comes at a high cost. Such emotion-inflaming stories continue to foul the public debate over whether Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 Palestinians (AP, 2/29/24)—two-thirds of those women and children (PBS, 2/19/24)—is a criminally disproportionate response to the Hamas attack.
The ministry said of the 30,035 people killed so far in the conflict, more than 13,000 were children and 8,800 women. At least 70,457 people have been injured, of which more than 11,000 are in critical condition and need to be evacuated.
In January, when the Health Ministry had estimated the number of children killed at 10,000, Al Jazeera (1/25/24) published the names of more than 4,200 Palestinian dead under 18 years old. Of those children named, 502 were under 2 years old—that is, infants.
Unfounded horror stories about Hamas’s infant victims that should have been debunked were still being repeated by Biden (12/12/23) at a campaign fundraiser more than two months after Israel was attacked:
I saw some of the photographs when I was there—tying a mother and her daughter together on a rope and then pouring kerosene on them and then burning them, beheading infants, doing things that are just inhuman—totally, completely inhuman.
This time the Washington Post didn’t factcheck Biden—even though the White House stated months earlier that the president had never seen such photos (CNN, 10/12/23).
NEWS channel Al Jazeera formally asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) today to investigate the fatal shooting of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh as she was reporting from a Palestinian refugee camp in May.
Al Jazeera has accused the Israeli government of specifically targeting its journalists, calling Ms Abu Akleh’s death a war crime.
The news outlet wants ICC prosecutor Karim Khan to include the reporter’s killing, as well as last year’s Israeli air strike on Al Jazeera’s offices in the Gaza Strip, in his ongoing investigation into allegations of war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza.
[Responding to applause] Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Here we are at the Labour Party conference 2022 - and thanks to the Tory party appointing simple maths misunderstanding incompetents - on the cusp of being elected the UK's government.
I'll let you into a secret conference. I am the Establishement's man (more on that later). What I want to tell you right now is that I will govern, WE will have a Labour govenment looking after the Capitalists' interests through the hard times ahead until the Conservatives can take over again, after the hard times ahead, with an almost sane leader.
Yes, I promise to you conference that you can depend on me to look after the rich and powerful just as the Tories do while they take a break and duck out of the total chaos that they've caused. And I say clearly to you conference, that I am proud to do this work for the rich and powerful, to be their servant, to keep them safe while I perform my caretaking role for Capitalism.
It has been a long road for me to achieve power and I want to thank those that have helped me. I particularly want to thank the Labour officials who were so hostile to and totally undermined the previous leader. And I particularly want to thank the Zionists.
I know that all of you in this hall, in this party can't say that word Zionist - that ist forbidden - but I can because I'm leader. So thanks to all the Zionists that hounded out the previous Labour leader and his supporters so that I was able to expell them for being opposed to Zionist apartheid, for being Socialists and anti-racist.(2) We can't have any of them in this party, this is a new era, we are at the centre of UK politics, we are New Labour, the New Red Tories.
We are in a new era conference. You will be aware that I thanked the Zionists by installing a former Israeli spy into the centre of Labour Party activities, actually a member of 8200 Unit, to spy on you members and pursue the interests of Israel.(1)
I am in thrall to Israel - but don't you dare call me a Zionist - dat is forbidden. As I said I am an Establishment man but unfortunately, what I have yet to realise is that the Establishment moves very slowly but ever so occasionally has seismic shifts. I still have yet to realise that the UK establishment may not be too pleased with me being so in thrall to a foreign state and installing a former Israeli spy in my office.
As I finish this sermon, I ask you all to join me in singing the National Anthem ...
(1) Also responsible for rapid rebuttal according to the job description.
(2) This is all well documented by al Jazeera in their 2 investigative reports 'The Lobby' and 'The Labour Files'.
