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Israel's Systematic Killing of Journalists and Western Media Complicity in Portraying Genocide as "Self-Defense"
Fred Gransville
The world has seen an unparalleled slaughter of journalists following Israel's military attack on Gaza in October 2023. At least 103 journalists have been killed during the war within the first 150 days alone. The fatality toll is the highest media practitioner conflict in history. The regime's institutionalized killings of journalists are a reckless disregard for international law, a confirmation of the regime's dedication to muzzling truth. And still, in the presence of irrefutable evidence of targeted killings, Israel has not been held accountable, and Western mainstream media (MSM) continues to frame its actions as acts of "self-defense," essentially obliterating what many legal scholars and human rights organizations have confirmed as genocide.
The targeted intention of silencing journalists in Israel to conceal the truth regarding Gaza, the promotion of a sanitized version of facts by Western media, and the legal and moral implications of using the term genocide as a defense. Murders of journalists in Gaza during the 2023-2024 war are a record. The initial months of the attack saw a gruesome rate of one death every 1.5 days among journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Such enormous casualties of journalists in modern warfare have never before been seen.One of the killed journalists is Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was assassinated in 2022 by an Israeli sniper while donning a press vest. The killing, which exemplified Israel's broader policy of encircling opposition, offered a grim model for the coming years in Gaza. Reuters cameraman Issam Abdallah was struck in 2023 by an Israeli tank shell when he was reporting in Gaza's southern region. In 2024, another horrific incident took place when Palestinian reporters Hamza Al-Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya were killed in a drone strike while traveling by car, once again proving Israel's capability to target random reporters.
Targeting reporters on a large scale is not a matter of collateral damage. Human Rights Watch and others have testified to numerous instances where Israeli troops have targeted news outlets and reporters deliberately. With these attacks, the goal is unmistakable: wipe out independent media for reporting on Israeli war crimes and protect the world from seeing the extent of violence being perpetrated in Gaza.
The murders of these journalists are not just a sad loss of human life but a deliberate attempt to muffle the flow of information from Gaza, where the Palestinian struggle of suffering and resistance is overwhelmed by the Israeli narrative.
As the war rages on, journalists, particularly those based in Gaza, are constantly placed in danger by Israeli troops, so the mere function of objective reporting is a dangerous and often fatal task. Israel's Use of AI to Target Palestinians and Journalists IDF institutionally sanctioned journalist killings must further be contextualized within the broad framework of the use of Israeli artificial intelligence systems like "Lavender" to target and kill Palestinians. The artificial intelligence system will flag thousands as targets, there being little, if any, human control over or intervention with the system, and these, in turn, are carrying out the widescale killings.
In the past year, evidence has shown how "Lavender" has been utilized to identify more than 67,000 Palestinian fatalities so far, including a large number of civilian women and children. As the Israeli military relies on this technology so extensively, media correspondents covering the conflict or attempting to report within Gaza are most likely to be caught in the crossfire or become targeted as part of broader operations. The same technological infrastructures that were initially meant to make Israel's war troops "safe" are today ironically being used to make those reporting on the war even more susceptible.
These AI-based systems raise essential questions of responsibility and control. Relying on technology for target prioritization enhances the risk of mistakes and lack of due process in targeting actual military targets. This technological change has made the identification and targeting of targets increasingly effective but has also produced gargantuan disrespect for the principle of proportionality in international law. The outcome is catastrophic for both journalists and civilians in the middle since the line between combatant and non-combatant, between legitimate military targets and journalists, becomes increasingly blurred.
Silencing the Palestinian Narrative Israel's assassination of journalists is serving a more significant strategic purpose: muffling the Palestinian voice. In murdering witnesses to the Gaza slaughter and destruction, Israel gets hold of the narrative of the war. The less testimony about massacres and atrocities that manages to leak to the international community, the less there is international indignation at Israeli actions.
Without the story on Israeli government documents and the mass media outlets reporting these claims reproduced, Israel avoids the kind of international outcry that could lead to sanctions or intervention. The media gag also removes the political heat from Israel from governments and global organizations that would otherwise be compelled to act had its access to the unembellished truth on the ground not been stopped.
The targeting of journalists as an explicit policy. The targeting of media who try to report the Palestinian narrative is not a mistake but deliberate. This type of oppression of the media muzzles the Palestinian voice into a whisper that is lost within the din of the cacophony of deafening Israeli-endorsed noise. Also, it paralyzes any Palestinian media efforts to blame its actions on Israel as a state of war. It leaves Palestinians reliant upon a more and more polarized and biased global media system. When this is muted, the rest of the world is left in the dark about the reality of what's genuinely occurring on the ground, resulting in the construction of a narrative that war victors dictate, not its victims.
The suppression of the Palestinian experience—via violence and media censorship—is an effort to manipulate the world consciousness and prevent Palestinian civilians from exercising their human rights. Western Media Sanewashing Genocide - Presenting Massacres as "Self-Defense" The role of the Western media in dictating what the world is informed about the Israel-Gaza conflict cannot be overstated. Mainstream media have echoed Israeli propaganda for decades and have been prone to defaulting to the rhetoric of "self-defense" in an attempt to frame Israel's brutality.
The self-defense rhetoric is appealing: who can fault a nation defending itself from attack? But in describing the Israeli assault on Gaza, this rhetoric warps realities. Gaza is under the brutal rule of an Israeli regime, and the Palestinians, by international law, more precisely Article 51 of the UN Charter, are entitled to invoke the right of self-defense to which states are entitled. The employment of the "self-defense" language by the Israeli state to describe its actions obscures the imbalance of power, as Israel possesses one of the strongest armies in the world, and Gaza is an unarmed ghetto with no military.
Western media, in taking up this language, are participating in the propagation of a falsehood. Israeli officials consistently accuse Hamas of using human shields as a pretext for targeting civilians. Still, there is no evidence to back such claims, mainly when used as a pretext for shelling refugee camps, hospitals, and press bureaus. Also, the usage of the phrase "collateral damage" has been used to refer to the murder of thousands of Palestinians. Still, the veracity of how Israel has bombed the homes of journalists and media offices is in doubt when weighed against exceedingly severe doubts about the true motivation of such strikes.
The gulf between Israel's words and deeds reveals a clear motivation to mislead the world regarding the true nature of its military operations. For years, Western mainstream media has been an accomplice in propagating this myth and, in effect, closing its eyes to reality. Rather than questioning the legitimacy of Israel's self-defense claims, Western media has tried to exaggerate them, presenting Israel's actions as reasonable and justifiable. The constant retelling of this narrative without contradiction by mainstream media sources reflects a more profound failure on the part of journalism and a disregard for the journalistic principles of seeking truth in the face of political pressure. Censorship & Bias in Coverage Disappointing objectivity failures and censorship have predominantly marred media coverage of the Israeli-Gaza conflict.
A number of the globe's most prominent news agencies, such as CNN, BBC, and The New York Times, have persistently formulated their reporting around Israeli military press releases unconfirmed, thus repeating Israeli propaganda and stifling Palestinian voices. In others, Western media have aggressively censored pro-Palestinian perspectives. For example, the Los Angeles Times has dismissed from service journalists who signed an open letter condemning Israel's bombing of Gaza, yet another reflection of how corporate media acts in the interest of powerful state actors rather than in pursuit of truth.
This censorship is not exclusive to mainstream media. Pro-Palestinian content has been shadow-banned on Facebook while Israeli propaganda is boosted. This move is an example of the virtual-total domination by pro-Israeli lobbies of Western media and technological platforms, which makes media a site where the Palestinian account is de-legitimized, and Israel's self-defense account is largely unopposed.
Social media, formerly an open public space and platform for citizen reporting, increasingly becomes a tool of censorship where tweets questioning Israel's actions are censored while pro-Israeli propaganda dominates. Moreover, the media's inability to report the scope of damage in Gaza, Palestinian civilian casualties, and attacks on journalists points to a broader trend of information suppression. By reporting only those aspects of the conflict that fit into the preconceived framework of Israeli self-defense, the media essentially covers up the larger context of Israeli occupation and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.
The "Both Sides" Fallacy The worst aspect of Western coverage of the Israel-Gaza war is the framing of it as a "both sides" story. This misleading equivalence hides the enormous power disparity between Israel, a nuclear state with one of the world's most sophisticated militaries, and Gaza, a besieged ghetto with no standing army. It overlooks the ghastly death toll disparity, in which more than 30,000 Palestinians were killed in the recent war and some 1,200 Israelis. Also forgotten is the long history of decades of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
The banal "both sides" equation constructs an artificially created balance that undermines the true Palestinian agonies and the international juridical and moral obligations that demand the responsibility of Israeli conduct. This false narrative allows Israel to depict itself as a victim, an equal target of the Palestinians as well as itself, and therefore, its actions as defensive, not aggressive. By refusing to recognize the asymmetry of the conflict, the media conceals the reality of Israel's occupation and abuse of Palestinians and frames the issue as one of reciprocal violence instead of one of colonial rule, dispossession, and oppression.
Legal & Ethical Implications: Genocide Under Disguise of Self-Defense South Africa's ICJ Case against Israel South Africa courageously indicted Israel for genocide in January 2024 before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). This case highlighted some of the most striking aspects of Israel's actions in Gaza: mass murder, starvation through siege of humanitarian aid, and deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure like hospitals, universities, and media centers.
Although the gravity of such charges would have warranted front-page coverage in Western media, the case was almost ignored by Western media as "controversial" rather than as a proper challenge to Israeli action. This type of media criticism is representative of a broader Western reluctance to criticize Israel for its human crimes. The South African allegations are supported by sheer documentation in the form of human rights reports chronicling on a massive scale the destruction of civilian life in Gaza. But the world legal order has reacted slowly to such charges, and Western governments have been entirely compliant or submissive in the face of gigantic evidence of genocide.
The failure to act legally significantly and the failure to hold Israel's action accountable to international law demonstrate the structural bias in the world legal order in which Israel is allowed to continue its actions with impunity. The Danger of "Self-Defense" Rhetoric The "self-defense" discourse is replete with dangerous implications when applied to excuse the Israeli aggression in Gaza. It creates a paradigm in which all Palestinian actions against it are "terrorism," and Israel can condone its violence with impunity on an ongoing basis. It enables Israel to exercise unbridled, indiscriminate violence against civilian populations with impunity, de facto legitimate war crimes.
The genocidal definition of self-defense also dehumanizes Palestinians. It reduces them to mere obstacles to Israeli security, as is evident in the inflammatory rhetoric of Israeli politicians, who have referred to Gazans as "animals" or "human animals." When such rhetoric commands the public arena, it is easier to legitimize the killing of crowds of civilians. The "self-defense" discourse breeds a poisonous climate under which genocide can be made legitimate as an acceptable defense measure, leaving room for continuous large-scale slaughter of innocent civilians to take place in the legal, political, and social arenas.
Unless the world community begins regarding this excuse as a manipulative device, it will continue to promote further promoting more states toward adopting similar justifications for violence and oppression. Historical Parallels Justifying Israeli actions under the guise of self-defense is not new and is a maneuver that is also copying the rhetoric of hegemonic states in excusing mass brutality.
In Rwanda in 1994, the international community disavowed nascent warning indicators of genocide. In 2003, in Iraq, weapons of mass destruction and deception culminated in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. In Gaza, the same script is being followed, with the media repeating Israeli propaganda and downplaying the scale of the violence. As in all previous genocides, the international community has been slow to react, and the world risks repeating its errors in the face of another artificial disaster.
The Fight for Truth The systematic murder of journalists by Israel and the complicity of the Western media in portraying genocide as a "self-defense" measure is an attempt to silence the truth and avoid accountability. Targeted assassination of journalists is a powerful tool in Israel's policy of setting the narrative on Gaza, and Western media outlets, instead of being counter-narrative, have become complicit in spreading it. The importance of genocide being treated as self-defense is not restricted to this war alone; it is a wrong precedent for strong countries to operate with impunity and exercise the right of self-defense.
To act on behalf of this crisis, independent investigations on the killing of journalists and the human rights abuses overall in Gaza must be called into action. Besides, individuals and institutions must condemn the mainstream media for their biased reporting and give a platform to independent journalists and Palestinian voices who will not be silenced in sharing their stories.
The world is witnessing a live genocide, and history will determine if it remembers those who were silent. The genocide and dead journalist truth will not be silenced, but its broadcasting responsibility lies on our shoulders. Israel's Systematic Killing of Journalists and Western Media.
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Israel's Systematic Killing of Journalists and Western Media Complicity in Portraying Genocide as "Self-Defense"
https://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2025/03/30/israel-s-systematic-killing-of
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