Israel is currently embarked on the most successful counterterrorist campaign in history. In a span of months, the Jewish state has taken out the leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah, the two terrorist groups that most threaten Israel’s existence, as well as their successors. And in a daring operation, Israel turned Hezbollah’s communications systems against the group, exploding hundreds of walkie-talkies and pagers used and worn by its operatives.
But Israel’s foes have an ace up their sleeve: the press.
It has now been more than a year since the Hamas-led invasion of Israel, in which Iranian-backed proxies murdered more than 1,200 people and took hundreds, including Americans, hostage. When adjusted for population, the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel inflicted far greater civilian casualties than the 9/11 attack by al Qaeda. Indeed, it was the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust.
Israel responded by launching a military incursion into the Gaza Strip, from which the Jewish state had unilaterally withdrawn from nearly two decades ago and which Hamas has controlled ever since. More recently, Israel carried out a limited ground operation into Lebanon, de facto ruled by Hezbollah, Iran’s foremost proxy. Like Hamas, Hezbollah calls for Israel’s destruction. The Lebanese-based terrorist group has been ceaselessly launching missiles into Israel for more than a year, murdering and wounding dozens while Israel largely focused on operations against Hamas in the south.
No other nation would be expected to tolerate genocidal terrorist groups on its borders. And after Oct. 7, Israel won’t. Indeed, it can’t. For Israel, Oct. 7 was an epoch-defining moment, a cataclysm that has shuffled priorities and reordered the Middle East. Israel will never be the same again.
Yet, despite enduring the unimaginable, the Jewish state is held to a different standard — by policymakers and the press alike.
The United Nations and a host of faux human rights organizations such as Amnesty International have condemned Israel. Indeed, the U.N. itself has materially aided Israel’s enemies. Employees of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency have, by the U.N.’s own admission, taken part in the Oct. 7 massacre. Hamas has used UNRWA facilities, even U.N. vehicles, to plot and perpetrate attacks. And to Israel’s north, the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon has failed to enforce U.N. Security Council resolutions 1559 and 1701, which call for Hezbollah’s disarmament. Evidence has also emerged showing that Hezbollah has turned entire communities in southern Lebanon into villages of human shields, even using houses to launch Russian-made missiles. This, under the nose of the U.N. “peacekeepers” tasked with preventing war. Hezbollah has constructed a massive war machine. More than 150,000 precision-guided missiles, according to some estimates, while the U.N. has looked the other way. The U.N. has gifted the terrorist groups with undue legitimacy. But it’s not alone in providing them with cover.
Indeed, arguably no entity has helped Hamas and Hezbollah more than the press. The media are key weapons in their arsenal.
Doug Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former top Pentagon official, presciently warned in October 2023 that Hamas’s strategy in the coming war would be one of “human sacrifice.” In war, Feith observed, it is “unprecedented for a party to adopt a strategy to maximize civilian deaths on its own side.” Yet this is precisely what Hamas has done.
Hamas wants to kill as many Palestinians as possible to turn popular opinion against the Jewish state, resulting in political pressure, and commensurate policy decisions, against Israel. Accordingly, the terrorist group uses schools, mosques, hospitals, churches, and other civilian areas to shelter operatives and munitions. And it’s done so for years.
Iran’s proxies are not the first to use human shields. Dictators such as Saddam Hussein have employed the tactic, as have terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State. But they are arguably the first to use it not as a tactic but as their wholesale strategy, employing it on a level that is breathtaking in scope. It is, Feith noted, “innovative in the worst way.”
Regrettably, the terrorist group’s strategy has borne fruit. International pressure has been building against the Jewish state, resulting in everything from arms embargoes to antisemitism that has exploded across the West, from colleges to public streets. In the three months after Oct. 7, antisemitic incidents in the United States skyrocketed an astounding 360%, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Israel has been portrayed as uniquely evil and indiscriminate — an echo of centuries-old blood libels. The press are complicit.
Major Western news outlets have, time and again, echoed casualty figures supplied by the “Gaza Health Ministry” — a ministry that is controlled by Hamas. It would be unthinkable for news organizations to cite casualty statistics supplied by ISIS or al Qaeda uncritically. But for some reason, when it comes to terrorist groups whose preeminent target is Israel, the press make an exception.
Hamas has a clear incentive to lie and inflate civilian casualties. Indeed, it has a long and documented history of doing precisely that. Moreover, the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry doesn’t even distinguish between civilians and combatants. Further, it’s been caught changing casualty stats. As David Adesnik, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, pointed out, the Gaza Health Ministry’s data are often presented as “authoritative,” yet it has “proven itself to be an unreliable source of information.” In April 2023, for example, the ministry quietly acknowledged that its records for more than 10,000 of the alleged fatalities included “incomplete data,” and in May, the U.N., which relies on the Hamas-supplied figures, made a sudden and unexplained revision to the figures. It turns out that trusting terrorist groups is a bad idea.
For his part, President Joe Biden initially said he had “no confidence” in the Gaza Health Ministry’s claims. And his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told reporters in an Oct. 20, 2023, press conference, “I would not take anything that Hamas says at face value. I’m not sure that anyone in this room would take at face value or report something that ISIS had said, [and] the same applies to Hamas.” Even in the current conflict Hamas has shown a willingness to lie about casualties.
As early as Oct. 17, 2023, the Hamas-run ministry claimed that an Israeli strike on Al Ahli Hospital had killed 500. A U.S. intelligence assessment would later conclude that it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short, a not uncommon occurrence, and that it had struck the hospital parking lot, not the hospital itself. And instead of 500, the estimated death toll was anywhere from 10 to 50 people. But instead of conducting their due diligence, many newspapers took the Hamas claims and ran with them, leaving them with egg on their face. It could have been a teaching moment for many journalists. But the last year has shown that many reporters covering the conflict aren’t interested in learning.
Indeed, far from being humbled, many news outlets have doubled down. In November 2023, for example, the Washington Post ran a self-styled “fact check” that rebuked Biden for expressing skepticism about Hamas-supplied casualty stats. The newspaper even published an “analysis” that claimed the numbers were trustworthy, noting that both the U.N. and the State Department trusted them. Yet a few months after the Washington Post’s take, the U.N. quietly revised the stats downward. Contravening basic journalistic standards, the Washington Post has even published a graphic on casualties in Gaza that was merely sourced to “Gaza reports.” That’s not how journalism works.
Nor is the Washington Post alone. Numerous other media have committed the same error, including wire services such as the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters. This is particularly noteworthy. In the era of digital media, many news organizations have shuttered their foreign bureaus. They rely, more than ever, on wire services for foreign reporting. What appears in the Associated Press is likely to be reprinted in newspapers throughout the world.
In some respects, the slipshod reporting on the Israel-Islamist conflict can be attributed to access. Reporting from active war zones isn’t easy, let alone in today’s media environment of diminished budgets and reduced newsrooms. Hamas exploits this fact, restricting access as a means of controlling information. For years, Hamas has controlled who reports from Gaza. Journalists who are deemed unfriendly to the Hamas-preferred narrative need not apply.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah wield another weapon to shape the information environment: intimidation. Journalists who don’t regurgitate the approved talking points are literally gambling with their lives.
In 2014, for example, a France 24 reporter dared to note that Hamas was firing rockets from a kindergarten. Hamas operatives later showed up at his hotel room and imprisoned him in the basement of Shifa Hospital, one of its primary headquarters.
Hezbollah has also employed a velvet glove with reporters. In 2009, the New York Times reporter Neil MacFarquhar published a book titled The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday, detailing how the terrorist group alternately fetes and threatens journalists, sending them gifts, birthday cards, and, if need be, ominous phone calls. The journalist Michael Totten has similarly documented how Hezbollah uses intimidation to shape news coverage. Indeed, as Totten pointed out in his 2011 book, The Road to Fatima Gate, reporters covering the conflict are well aware of Hezbollah’s history of kidnapping journalists throughout the 1980s, perhaps most famously the Associated Press’s Terry Anderson who was held captive for six years.
As one Hezbollah operative, Sheikh Nabil Qaouk, told the New York Times in 2000: “The use of the media as a weapon” has “an effect parallel to a battle.” Like Hamas, Hezbollah knows what it’s doing. And so do veteran reporters.
In June 2003, Douglas Jehl, then a New York Times reporter and now a foreign editor at the Washington Post, acknowledged that “threats made him more cautious as a reporter.” Jehl also noted that he did “recognize the more of these [critical] stories one writes, the more difficult it would be to get back in.” Access and intimidation are key tactics in how anti-Israel terrorist groups try to shape coverage. And the latest conflict offers much evidence of their success.
Many in the media have even helped hide Hamas. Literally.
One of the more egregious examples has been Hamas’s use of hospitals. The Gazan terrorist organization used hospitals to hide operatives and weapons, to plot attacks — even to hide hostages. Shifa Hospital, for example, was one of the group’s primary headquarters, a fact that news outlets such as the Washington Post portrayed merely as an Israeli “claim.” Columnists and reports alike minimized or impugned the notion that Hamas was using Shifa as a base.
Yet evidence of Hamas’s use of Shifa has long been in the public domain. In 2014, the Washington Post itself noted that the hospital “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” A 2006 PBS documentary pointed out that “gunmen roam the hospital, intimidate the staff, and deny them access to protected locations within the building.” Indeed, the hospital’s dual use was highlighted in a 2014 Tablet Magazine essay titled, “Top Secret Hamas Bunker in Gaza Revealed: And Why Reporters Won’t Talk About It.” The Israel Defense Forces raid on Shifa and other hospitals used by Hamas resulted in gun battles with entrenched terrorists. And subsequent investigations showed that Israeli hostages were taken to these hospitals — not so much for medical treatment but to be held captive inside its walls. Indeed, several hospital staffers, in Shifa and elsewhere, later admitted in taped interviews that they were Hamas operatives. In one of several examples, the director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, Ahmed Kahlot, admitted he was a high-ranking Hamas apparatchik and that no fewer than 16 of his hospital’s staff belonged to the terrorist group. Kahlot’s confession was widely covered in Israeli media but was largely ignored elsewhere.
These revelations should have sparked both outrage and mea culpas from major news outlets. Unfortunately, both were in short supply. Those who got the story wrong, including the Washington Post, CNN, and others, largely failed to cover the emerging evidence conclusively proving that Hamas was using hospitals.
Anti-Israel terrorist groups have long counted on the media for favorable coverage.
During the war in Lebanon in the 1980s, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, fondly referred to the press corps that was ensconced in Beirut’s Commodore Hotel as his “Commodore Battalion.” As the military historian Richard Gabriel noted in his 1984 book on the war, the PLO had been “paying, seducing and corrupting journalists in Beirut,” and “its techniques included granting exclusive interviews, making sure the press was well treated and providing them with women and drugs and sometimes cash payments.” The PLO also controlled access, granting accreditation cards to select journalists, enabling them to travel throughout Beirut. Those journalists who “tried to remain objective were openly threatened and forced to leave the city.” And in another echo of today’s events, the PLO provided news outlets with civilian casualty estimates that were nothing short of “ridiculous,” Gabriel observed. Many of the figures were provided by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society — an organization that was run by Arafat’s own brother.
Hamas and Hezbollah have built off the tactics of their terrorist forefathers. But news coverage of the conflict has changed in important ways — and it speaks volumes about the state of the media today.
With growing frequency, many journalists view themselves as activists, not as neutral observers. And many view the Israel-Islamist conflict not as a fight between an embattled democracy and theocratic terrorists but through the lens of critical race theory. In this telling, Israel is a white and privileged colonialist implant repressing native brown people who are left with little choice but to fight back. It is, in every sense, an ahistorical worldview. Jews are indigenous to the land, and Israel has offered, on numerous occasions, the chance for Palestinians to have something that they’ve never had: their own state. But to many among this new generation of journalists, facts don’t matter. The narrative does. And that narrative depicts Israel as uniquely evil.
Even before Israel responded to the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack, the Washington Post’s Karen Attiah accused Israel of intending to perpetrate a “genocide.” Other reporters followed suit, eagerly laundering Hamas-supplied casualty stats to depict Israel as engaged in a campaign of wanton violence and ethnic cleansing while omitting the tremendous steps that Israel has taken to limit casualties. John Spencer, the chairman of urban war studies at West Point, observed that Israel has “taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that’s fought an urban war.” But these efforts, from mass evacuations to precision targeting and more, have largely been overlooked by the legacy media.
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Some reporters feel emboldened enough that they scarcely bother to hide their views. As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis recently revealed, CBS reporter Marwan al Ghoul posted on Facebook in May 2022: “34 years of news coverage can be summed up: ‘Are the Jews human like us?’” Hajar Harb, a freelance reporter who has filed dozens of stories for the Washington Post, celebrated Oct. 7 on her Arabic social media accounts, saying, among other things, “This is how we say good morning,” under a picture of Hamas terrorists storming an Israeli home.
Israel’s war against Iranian proxies committed to its destruction rages on. The Jewish state has experienced great success on the battlefield. But on another key front, the information war, Israel has its work cut out for it.
Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.