Why doesn't Israel let many reporters into Rafah?
Perhaps it would be a good idea after all
Last week, I visited the Holy Land with a delegation of senior military leaders from around the world, led by General Sir John McColl, former deputy supreme commander of NATO in Europe. The intention was to scrutinise how the IDF is conducting the war on the ground, amid allegations that it has been fighting without sufficient care for civilians.
The schedule was quite remarkable. Not only were we promised extensive briefings from top commanders and officials from across the military and intelligence services, but meetings with the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were also on the cards, as well as a tour of Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip.
Many members of the delegation were starting from a point of some scepticism. Their military backgrounds did not make them fully immune to the effects of the broadcast media, which paints such a bleak picture of the Jewish state that it is hard to resist that point of view. Tragic footage of suffering civilians – Hamas censors any pictures of dead or wounded combatants, creating the impression that Israel is targeting the innocent – is aired alongside Hamas talking-points, such as the allegation that Israel has killed “40,000” people in Gaza (nobody mentions that about half of these were terrorists, a better record than other armed forces).
Yet as the days went by and the military experts grilled Israeli decision makers about their strategy, tactics and rules of engagement, hearts and minds slowly changed. Soldiers understand the pressures and reality of combat. After observing the process by which every missile strike must be approved by experts in international law and senior officers before it is launched, for example, Sir John told me that the IDF system was “at least as rigorous” as that used by the British armed forces.
The question then became one of public relations. My military companions identified one key difference between the Israeli approach to warfighting and that used by Western states. Whereas Britain, America and other democracies treat the information campaign as seriously as the shooting one, making every effort to take public sympathies with them, Israel seemed to regard it much more lightly. Its public relations operations were underfunded and often shambolic and frequently felt more like a badly-formulated afterthought than an indispensable part of the war.
From one point of view, this is understandable. Israel is hated many orders of magnitude more than any other democracy. Bias against the Jewish state is structural at the United Nations – the Human Rights Council is mandated to discuss the “human rights situation in Palestine” at every single meeting, regardless of the myriad greater abuses elsewhere in the world – not to mention NGOs and the broadcast media. This has led many browbeaten Israelis to adopt a similar attitude to Millwall supporters: “No-one likes us, we don’t care.”
To some extent, this sensibility is found in the national character. As Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the fathers of the modern state, put it in 1911: “We do not have to account to anybody, we are not to sit for anybody’s examination and nobody is old enough to call on us to answer. We came before them and will leave after them. We are what we are, we are good for ourselves, we will not change, nor do we want to.”
That is all very well, but the problem is that it leaves a vacuum that is readily filled by Hamas and its outriders. The Gazan jihadis are the mirror image of the Israelis. Their warfighting capabilities are very limited yet they place much greater emphasis on propaganda. Lusting after headlines, they sacrifice as many of their own people as possible. That is why there is not a single bomb shelter in Gaza, and – unlike in every other modern example of bombardment, from the Blitz to Kyiv – not a single civilian is permitted in the relative safety of the tunnels. Brainwashing the soft West to support the very fanatics who wish to kill them is the Hamas strategy for victory. And they’re good at it.
This dark symbiosis, in which a jaded Israel neglects the opinion of the world while Hamas obsesses with it, became especially vivid on the day our group was to enter Rafah. The IDF ruled that as I was a journalist, I was to be excluded. So off went the former generals, special forces officers and war heroes in their helmets and their Kevlar, riding in a couple of armoured personnel carriers, while I slunk back my hotel room to lick my wounds and to write.
Several hours later, we were reunited. The delegation had seen rotting truckloads of aid piling up just inside Gaza, demonstrating that although Israel was sending more than enough in, the distribution inside the Strip was woeful. They had observed the efforts to destroy the tunnels, which required the IDF to drill down to the water table every seven yards along the Egyptian frontier. They had travelled along the Philadelphi Corridor to the sea and picked up pebbles as souvenirs. But the main impression they took away with them was the scale of the damage.
Not a single building was intact. Just the twisted, white carcasses of apartment blocks as far as the eye could see, covered in deep layers of dust. This was not evidence of disregard for civilian life. Although more than 1,000 Hamas combatants have been killed in the city, very few ordinary people have lost their lives, as almost all of them had been evacuated. Rather, the reason for the damage was that almost every single building had contained either booby traps or tunnel shafts or both.
Literally hundreds of tunnels run from the small town of Rafah into Egypt and north to the rest of the Strip. Each has multiple openings in schools, mosques, hospitals and private homes. It is no exaggeration to say that it is hard to find a building without a tunnel entrance in the territory. Many of these had been mined with improvised explosive devices by Hamas before the Israeli invasion. If IDF sappers were to defuse all of them, it would take them a great many years. So they had no choice but to blow them up.
Without journalists being allowed into Rafah to observe this state of affairs, however, combined with a patchy Israeli communication strategy, the destruction can be framed as evidence of “genocide”. In a meeting with the Prime Minister, the delegation raised this point. When the world’s journalists are finally permitted into the town, they will be shocked by the scale of the devastation, one of the generals said, suggesting that it would have been better to have given them access sooner. “Maybe that’s why we haven’t let them in,” the Prime Minister responded.
It is true that giving access to journalists would hardly guarantee fair coverage. Aside from the natural bias in the media, no reporter would be allowed to manoeuvre without a Hamas chaperone, meaning simply that the propaganda would be even more detailed and effective. Imagine Alex Crawford broadcasting from a hospital with a jihadi handler lurking in the background. Balanced? I don’t think so.
Reporters have been allowed into Gaza during previous conflicts and due to Hamas censorship, it has not gone well. The notable exception came in 2014, when Indian journalists from New Delhi TV happened to notice three Hamas men setting up a rocket launcher beside their hotel. The result was the only footage of Hamas in action that was aired during the conflict. The ITV broadcaster Rageh Omaar tweeted at the time: “You never see ANY Hamas fighters or armed men in streets in Gaza. No TV image at all of any Hamas militants during conflict – inevitably all one sees is the people paying the price – Palestinian civilians.”
Plus ça change, non? But that doesn’t mean that Israel couldn’t embed reporters with IDF platoons while they were forced to blow up buildings containing IEDs, for instance, to understand the reasoning firsthand. To be fair, there have been some embeds. But these have been few, far between, and have generally lacked strategic placement in terms of the messages that the world needs to hear.
The saddest part of this dysfunctionality is that it stems from a shameful global attitude towards the Jewish state. As members of the military delegation and I can personally attest, Israel is going to greater lengths than any nation in history to protect civilians while it fights a war that it did not start, against an enemy that values death above life. Yet because the IDF knows the bigotry of the media, it has chosen the defensive path of keeping them out. This allows people to mutter behind their hands that Jerusalem has something to hide.
As with everything related to Israel, this is an anguished dilemma. The IDF is damned either way and I can completely understand the policy. But where has it led us? Has it stemmed the flow of hatred directed at the Jewish state? It has not. Better, I feel, to let more journalists in with the IDF, particularly ones like me.
Excellent points. Definitely need the Israeli perspective.