Published: 27 March 2024
Last updated: 28 March 2024
Since the war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7, hundreds of foreign journalists from across the world, including journalists and film crews from Japan and China and Russia, have filed countless news stories, analysis pieces, filmed interviews with suffering Palestinian women and children and above all, an endless stream of the most heart-rending videos of the daily carnage in Gaza.
These hundreds of journalists are based in Israel from where they do their reporting. Their film crews are based in Israel. Some of the big US television networks have teams of 20 or more—reporters, camera operators, sound recordists— producing the network news coverage of Gaza. They are all based in Israel.
There are no foreign journalists in Gaza. The videos of carnage are taken by Gazans. A lot of the videos shown on screens across the world have been taken from social media. Some videos have been filmed by local journalists in Gaza and they are paid by the foreign media companies for it.
All the reports of what is happening in Gaza come from local journalists employed by the foreign media companies. Some of these journalists have proven to be members of Hamas. All of them do their journalism at the pleasure of Hamas. Was their reporting to displease Hamas, they would be forced out of journalism. One way or another.
Some of the local journalists have been killed by Israeli air strikes. The number is disputed. It is even in dispute how many of them were journalists rather that Hamas operatives and how many were killed doing journalism. The deaths of journalists covering a war is a war crime. But I do not believe there is any credible evidence that shows Israeli pilots deliberately targeted journalists.
Comments10
Maher Mughrabi14 August at 11:22 pm
https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-journalists-hamas-hasbara/
John Faulkner15 August at 02:35 am
Your article makes only one point: “reports on the war in Gaza demonstrating Israel’s brutality are biased or inaccurate because they are provided by Gazans.” There is so much that can be said about this. The most obvious being that foreign journalists are either excluded from Gaza by Israel directly, or indirectly. The latter due to Israel’s indiscriminate violence. I mean, plenty of foreign journalists and humanitarian workers have been killed by Israel. I have seen no independent reports from anyone suggesting these killings were not deliberate acts by Israel. Just members of the Israeli Government suggesting an error and announcing an investigation. So must we believe Israel but not Palestinians? I watched an episode of 4 Corners recently. In the program, Ehud Barak, a former prime minister and another bloke who was a former IDF general, said: had they grown up Palestinian, both would be members of Hamas fighting for Palestine given the horrific treatment that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians since 1948.
Maher Mughrabi13 April at 11:15 pm
April 1 is, they tell me, All Fools’ Day.
David Schulberg1 April at 10:50 am
Mughrabi’s bloviations toss us back to a piece he wrote ten years ago for Haaretz. In that article Mughrabi pushes back on needing to condemn Hamas, giving the impression he has done his duty in genuinely criticising Hamas by never having “shied away from scrutiny of Hamas”.
The trouble is that the majority of the Palestinian people today support Hamas and who’s to say that Mughrabi doesn’t deep down also empathise with them, but of course cannot say so because he would denigrate his profession as a journalist. In his role as a journalist his employer has already seen fit to constrain him because of Mughrabi’s activist tendencies which have tainted his journalistic integrity.
Mughrabi also holds up the MEAA as having some kind of moral authority. In November 2023, Szego resigned from the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) because of that union’s endorsement of an open letter to Australian media outlets, which condemned the Australian Government for “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza”, stated that “the conflict did not start on October 7”, and demanded that media companies should respect the right of journalists to “publicly and openly express personal solidarity with the Palestinian cause without penalty in their professional lives”. Szego rightfully called the letter “an Orwellian exercise in calling for ‘truth’ while peddling gross distortions thereof”.