How Israel spins Gaza killings to avoid being held accountable

More than 38,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s nine-month military assault against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. However, according to The Lancet medical journal, the number of fatalities is probably more like 186,000, shining a spotlight on how difficult it is to measure the carnage because of the restrictions Israel has placed on news reporting of the Gaza conflict.

Israel only embeds journalists with its army in the Gaza Strip if they agree to allow its censors to review all reports and videos. Reporters who refuse are banned from entering the Strip. However, independent Gaza-based reporters, mainly from Arab media outlets, have been covering the Israeli carnage and many of them have paid the ultimate price for seeking to report the truth.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 108 journalists have been killed in the war and many more wounded. It is the deadliest period for journalists in the history of the organization, which began documenting media deaths in 1992.

Last week, one CNN reporter noted that his reports were not censored or reviewed by the Israeli military, although he only interviewed the Israeli spokesperson on what was happening in Gaza.

Restricting and censoring news reporting in a conflict zone is the first step toward controlling the narrative. 

Ray Hanania

Controlling the media and restricting and censoring news reporting in a conflict zone is the first step toward controlling the narrative. And Israel needs to ensure its spin is dominant because, while Hamas militants killed about 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, including some soldiers, the Israelis have killed about 30 times more Palestinians, including some Hamas militants.

Controlling the reporting gives Israel the ability to lie to the public about what it is doing and blur the reality of the carnage. For example, a majority of those killed by Israel are believed to be civilians. The UN estimated in May that 69 percent of the reported deaths were of women and children. But because Israel refuses to permit UN workers to monitor the killings first-hand, banning them from much of the Gaza Strip, the UN revised its estimate down to 52 percent a few days later.

Israeli pundits did not say what caused the revision but did stress that the number was exaggerated. In fact, The Times of Israel incorrectly stated that the UN “sharply revised” down the number of “identified” women and children killed. “The new figures … reduce by more than half the number of women and children that it previously said had been killed during the war, although other ‘unregistered’ deaths may be pending,” it reported. However, a reduction from 69 percent to 52 percent is not “more than half,” but what can only be considered a “slight” revision. Even if the figure is 52 percent, that still represents more than 19,000 women and children — that we know of.

That must be a “win” for Israeli propaganda and a consequence of controlling the reporting from the war zone that Israel continues to dominate.

But to ensure that American sympathies are not eroded by the adjusted 52 percent figure — after all, Hamas was only accused of killing a handful of children in the Oct. 7 assault and that raised a national storm of indignation and outrage that echoed through the halls of American politics — Israeli spokespeople continue to assert that the deaths are a consequence of Hamas’ actions. This aims to allow the Israeli soldiers who put these Palestinian women and children in their sniper scopes or target them with rockets and bombs to remain blame-free.

Israeli military spokesman Peter Lerner last month said: “Every civilian life lost in this war is a result of how Hamas has operated.” The Washington Post noted after reporting this quote: “Israeli officials routinely deny charges that they have deliberately targeted civilians and blame Hamas for operating in areas where civilians are put at risk.” I guess the word “routine” makes the Israeli assertions reportable.

If this were happening anywhere else in the world, the media would take an entirely different and more confrontational stand against the party responsible for the massacre of so many women and children.

Just look at the coverage of the Russian war against Ukraine. It is reported without pushback from Moscow that more than 8,000 civilians have been killed by the Russian assault just in territory controlled by Ukraine. Nearly every day, American media reports cite the number of Ukrainian civilians killed. In the last week, the Associated Press reported, without worrying about angering the censors, that 31 people were killed in a single Russian assault.

Blaming the Russians for civilian deaths strengthens the national outcry against Russia. Meanwhile, deflecting blame for the killing of Palestinians gives Israel the political cover to continue what it is doing without an American backlash.

Another win for Israel is how the media restricts its coverage of the issue of hostages. Hamas took hundreds of civilian and military hostages during its Oct. 7 attack. Their plight is given regular front-page coverage by the US news media.

If this were happening anywhere else in the world, the media would take an entirely different and more confrontational stand.

Ray Hanania

But Israel has held thousands of Palestinian civilians hostage over the years in so-called administrative detention, a system that allows the Israeli authorities to hold anyone they like without ever having to lay any charges. These hostages are incarcerated for infinitely renewable six-month periods without ever facing legal proceedings.

Many of the thousands of administratively detained Palestinians — men, women and children alike — constitute an obvious form of hostage-taking that is intended to subdue anti-Israel expressions by Palestinians.

Support in the US for Ukraine is driven by an emotional indignation that is spun by the way the war and the deaths are presented. In the Israel-Palestine war, support for Israel is driven by the spinning of perceptions, which minimizes the moral outrage of it killing women and children.

How Israel and its American supporters conduct themselves has nothing to do with the rule of law, democracy, human rights, morality or even ethics. It is all about the ability to make yourself look good and moral, even while inflicting the most horrendous human suffering.

• Ray Hanania is an award-winning former Chicago City Hall political reporter and columnist. He can be reached on his personal website at www.Hanania.com. X: @RayHanania