Protesters demonstrated outside several major US media outlets in Washington this week condemning their coverage of the genocide in Gaza, claiming they were to blame over misinformation and the worsening catastrophe.
Banging pots and pans to spotlight the starvation crisis, they accused the media of “complicity in genocide”.
Banners and placards proclaimed “Stop media complicity in genocide” and “US media manufactures consent for Israel’s crimes”, as the protesters demonstrated outside media offices that included NBC News and Fox News.
But the irony was that while the protests appeared to have been ignored or overlooked by national media in the US – and certainly in New Zealand, they were strongly reported by at least one global news agency, Turkey’s Anadolu Agensi.
The protests echoed a series of statements by various news media organisations, such as Agence France-Presse concerned about the safety of their journalists from both under fire and the risk of starvation, and media freedom advocacy groups.
The Doha-based global television news network Al Jazeera, that has been producing arguably the best and most honest news coverage of Gaza and the occupied West Bank – which earned it being banned last year by both Israel and the Palestinian Authority from reporting inside their territory — called for global action to protect Gaza’s journalists.
It said in a statement that Isael’s forced starvation of the besieged enclave that threatened Gaza’s entire population, including those “risking their lives to shed light on Israel’s atrocities”.
Death toll passes 60,000
On Tuesday this week, the world noted a grim milestone in Gaza, with the Health Ministry announcing that the death toll had surpassed 60,000 (this does not include the tens of thousands of people buried under the rubble and missing, presumed dead).
Put in perspective, that is one in every 36 people in Gaza killed, and more than 90 people on average slaughtered every day.
Also, 1157 people have been killed near the notorious Israel and US-backed Gaza “Humanitarian” Foundation food depots condemned as “death traps”, while 154 people have died from starvation, 89 of them children with the numbers rising.
Israel’s genocide – ‘Everyone in Gaza is starving’ Video: Al Jazeera
An episode of the weekly media watch programme, The Listening Post, took up the theme as well, criticising the failure of many high profile Western news services from adequately reporting the horror of Israel’s devastating and cruel policies.
“When trying to stave off starvation becomes part of the job. What it means to be a Palestinian journalist in Gaza. The stories they are determined to tell, the incredible risks they are prepared to take,” said host Richard Gizbert when introducing the programme. He wasted no time firing a few caustic shots.
“What is unfolding in Gaza now has the appearance of a final solution, orchestrated by Israel and the United States, Israel’s other ally: The transformation of parts of the Gaza strip into starvation and concentration camps, a place where famine has been turned into a weapon of war,” he said.
“Reporting on the reality of this genocide can amount to a death sentence. Palestinian journalists can easily identify with the suffering they are documenting since they too are going hungry.
“They have been targeted because for [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, like other genocidal leaders before him, starving a population is much easier to do when no one is watching.
Perpetrator ‘left out’
“Across Western mainstream media, news outlets have been unable to ignore this story of mass starvation in Gaza. But in report after report, they have made a habit of leaving out a key detail – naming the perpetrators of the famine, Israel.
“The missing actors, the sanitised language, the use of the passive grammatical voice, it is all part of the playbook for far too many international news outlets and that is exactly what the few Palestinian journalists still standing are out to tell the world.”
Gizbert explained that “journalists in Gaza already have the world’s toughest assignment”:
“Job one for almost 22 months now has been survival; job two, telling heartbreaking stories; documenting a genocide while under fire.”
Like, for example, Al Jazeera Arabic’s Anas al-Sharif who was reporting live from outside Al Shifa medical complex when a woman behind him collapsed at the hospital’s gate.
Al-Sharif, who had reported on the genocide of his own people for more than 650 days without rest or complaint, through Israeli occupation airstrikes, drone attacks, and countless “scenes resembling hell”, suddenly could not take it anymore.
He broke down: “People are falling to the ground from the severity of hunger,” al-Sharif said through his tears. “They need one sip of water. They need one loaf of bread.”
Al-Sharif has also been threatened by the Israeli military, accusing him of being a “Hamas militant”, an accusation strongly denied by Al Jazeera, denouncing what it called Tel Aviv’s “campaign of incitement” against its reporters in the Gaza Strip.
Discredited for bias
Many Western mainstream media – including BBC, CNN, Sky, ITN, and Australia’s public broadcaster ABC — have been repeatedly discredited for their “pro-Israel bias” by scores of journalists who have acted as whistleblowers about the actions of their own news organisations.
According to a Declassified UK report, for example, the journalists working for a range of outlets from across the political spectrum have “painted a consistent picture of the obstacles faced by reporters who want to humanise Palestinians or scrutinise Israeli government narratives”. The US media is also under attack and has been putting up a lame defence.
Last week, more than 100 aid groups warned of “mass starvation” throughout Gaza — predictably denied by Israeli government in the face of overwhelming evidence — with their staff severely impacted by shortages and serious implications for journalists already being threatened with targeting by the Israeli military.
Israel faces growing global pressure over the enclave’s dire humanitarian crisis, where more than two million people have endured 22 months of war. UN Security Council member France has led a group of countries announcing that they plan to recognise the Palestinian state at the UN in September, with United Kingdom, Canada, Malta and Finland among those following with the total number now almost 150 of the 193 UN member states.
A statement with 111 signatories, including Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Save the Children and Oxfam, warned that “our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away”. The groups called for an immediate negotiated ceasefire, the opening of all land crossings and the free flow of aid through UN-led mechanisms.
Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh reported from Amman that the Israeli government had accused the UK of supporting the establishment of a “jihadi” state and of derailing efforts to reach a ceasefire.
“But really,” she said, “the Israeli media, for example, is describing this as a political tsunami, a realisation of how significant the tide is, and how improbable it is to turn it back to countries withholding recognition because Israel said it doesn’t want it.”
Calling for sanctions
She also noted how 31 high-profile Israelis, including the former speaker of the Knesset, a former attorney general, and several recipients of Israel’s highest cultural award, were calling on world governments to impose crippling sanctions on Israel to stop the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and their expulsion
“This was taboo just a few days ago and has never really been done before, certainly not at this level of prominence of the signatories,” Odeh added.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) added its voice to the appeal by aid agencies to call for an end to Israel’s starvation of journalists and other civilians in Gaza, backing the plea for states to “save lives before there are none left to save.”
In a statement on its website, the CPJ accused Israel of “starving journalists into silence”.
“Israel is starving Gazan journalists into silence. They are not just reporters, they are frontline witnesses, abandoned as international media were pulled out and denied entry,” said CPJ regional director Sara Qudah.
“The world must act now: protect them, feed them, and allow them to recover while other journalists step in to help report. Our response to their courageous 650 plus-days of war reporting cannot simply be to let them starve to death.”
‘Bearing witness’ videos
Also, last week the CPJ launched a “bearing witness” series of videos from Gaza giving voice to the challenges the journalists have been facing. In the first video, Moath al Kahlout described how his cousin had been shot dead while awaiting humanitarian aid.
As Israel partially eased its 11-week total blockade of Gaza that began in May, CPJ published the testimony of six journalists who described how “starvation, dizziness, brain fog, and sickness” had threatened their ability to report.
Among highlights cited by the CPJ:
• On June 20, Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al Sharif — the journalist cited earlier in this article — posted online: “I am drowning in hunger, trembling in exhaustion, and resisting the fainting that follows me every moment . . . Gaza is dying. And we die with it.”
• Sally Thabet, correspondent for Al-Kofiya satellite channel, told CPJ that she fainted consciousness after doing a live broadcast on July 20 because she had not eaten all day. She regained consciousness in Al-Shifa hospital, where doctors gave her an intravenous drip for rehydration and nutrition. In an online video, she described how she and her three daughters were starving.
• Another Palestinian journalist, Shuruq As’ad said Thabet had been the third journalist to collapse on air from starvation that week, and posted a photograph of Thabet with the drip in her hand.
• During a live broadcast on July 20, Al-Araby TV correspondent Saleh Al-Natour said: “We have no choice but to write and speak; otherwise, we will all die.”
Little of this horrendous state of affairs has made it onto the pages of newspapers, websites of the television screens in the New Zealand mainstream media which seems to have a pro-Israel slant and rarely interviews Palestinian journalists or analysts for balance.