The Gaza war is the biggest failure of journalism in history
98 per cent of reporters cite fabricated Hamas casualty figures. Only five per cent mention Israeli data. Jihadi propaganda has gone global
When the results of the new study into the Hamas casualty figures were released last night, much of the findings were sadly as expected. The Gaza authorities fail to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, giving the impression that the 44,000 dead were all civilians.
Hamas has over-reported fatalities of women and children, even counting those who had died before the start of the war. About 5,000 naturally-occurring deaths, including those lost to cancer, have been added to the tally of “victims”. The age of the casualties has been systematically revised downwards to inflate the number of “children” killed.
This confirmed and enhanced the seminal work first of Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the University of Pennsylvania, then of Tom Simpson, Lewi Stone and Gregory Rose.
But one piece of research stood out.
According to the new report – produced by Andrew Fox for the Henry Jackson Society – only five per cent of the media organisations surveyed cited casualty figures issued by the Israeli authorities. By contrast, 98 per cent used those provided by the Hamas-controlled health ministry.
This means that almost all Western media outlets have unflinchingly disseminated Hamas propaganda to their tens of millions of viewers while disregarding Israeli figures almost entirely. The world’s journalists have taken the word of jihadi butchers above the evidence-based testimony of a friendly democracy and shared this narrative with the world.
It is no exaggeration to say that this comprises the most scandalous betrayal of journalistic ethics in history. The fact that it has received little attention in the press only confirms a herd instinct to cover the backs of colleagues.
It doesn’t stop there. Every piece of footage released from Gaza has been subjected to censorship by Hamas. That has been the case for years; during the 2014 conflict, a rare lapse in Hamas censorship allowed an Indian film crew to film some terrorists firing rockets from a residential area. Despite happening thousands of times during the war, this was the one and only time such a scene had been caught on camera. It caused a global sensation.
The world’s media knows full well that Hamas is the gatekeeper of film from Gaza. They know that as a result, their viewers will never see any evidence of dead or wounded terrorists on their screens, only dead or injured civilians. Any ethical broadcaster would screen such material with a health warning: “the following footage has been censored by Hamas”. But not a single one has done so.
This has been profoundly effective in turning public opinion against Israel. Day in, day out, viewers are told that the IDF has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza, with no mention made of the fact that about half of them were terrorists. This is accompanied by footage of heartrending carnage that has had all the terrorists edited out. As a result, people naturally conclude that Israel is conducting a “genocide”, believing that they have seen the evidence with their own eyes.
It is worth watching this video of an Israeli interrogation of Tarek Abu Shaluf, a captured Islamic Jihad spokesman. He reveals exactly how the terrorists play the media, and how journalists are willingly complicit in this misinformation campaign. “The international media differs from the Arab ones,” he says at one point. “They focus on humanitarian issues. We don’t speak to them in the language of violence, destruction and revenge.”
Reporters know full well that the propaganda they are given is fabricated, he adds, but they broadcast it to the world anyway so that Hamas doesn’t stop cooperating. “They need us for more interviews,” he says.
The results can be seen in the polls. In October 2023, Britons were almost twice as likely to hold Hamas most responsible for the war than the Israeli government. After a year of misinformation in the media, however, 60 per cent considered Israel’s military actions to have gone too far in Gaza, with only 12 per cent thinking it was “about right”. In turn, the weight of public opinion affects government policy, isolating the Jewish state and placing it under huge international pressure to let the jihadis survive.
The truth, of course, is that Israel has killed about one civilian for every combatant in Gaza. Every single such death is a profound tragedy, but as numerous international experts in urban warfare have confirmed, this rate of collateral damage is lower than any other army has accomplished in history, including the British and American armed forces.
Such has been the power of the Hamas propaganda, however, enabled by a complicit international media, that anybody who tells the truth about this war is laughed out of the room. It is no exaggeration to say that this monstrous act of collusion with our jihadi enemies is the darkest chapter of journalism in history.