As Israel fights Hamas in Gaza, a brutal war is waged in the media

If there could be such a thing as a silver lining on the worst day in the history of the State of Israel, it was that when 1,200 Israelis were massacred on October 7, at least the international media were finally empathetic.

The overwhelming majority of mainstream news websites and the front pages of newspapers the following day in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia focused on the savagery of Hamas’s rampage through Israel’s southern communities and the Supernova music festival.

Photos of Israeli woman Noa Argamani being abducted from the festival to Gaza were featured on the cover of the New York Post with the headline “War Crime,” the Daily Mail with the headline “Don’t Kill Me,” and The Australian, whose cover proclaimed, “Israel’s 9/11: Unbearable cruelty of terror savages.”

But it did not take long for top news sites to descend from empathy to dangerous moral equivalence, counting the casualties of Israeli civilians and their Gazan murderers together. At 11:41 a.m., just five fours after Hamas infiltrated into Israel to start murdering, raping and kidnapping, The New York Times headline online already read: “Gaza and Israel go to war after militants launch attacks.”

Since October 7, when the IDF was caught completely unprepared and the Iron Dome was not even fully deployed because it was in “peacetime mode,” Israel’s security forces have done increasingly better on the military battlefield. The exact inverse has happened with the fight in traditional and social media, which gets more difficult every day as October 7 becomes more of a distant memory.

By the end of the first week, media outlets around the world began implicitly blaming Israel for Hamas’s invasion and attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Both The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press news agency echoed Hamas’s talking points, focusing on visits by Jews during Sukkot to the Temple Mount, crackdowns on Palestinian violence, settlement expansion, the Israeli-Egyptian Gaza blockade, and US-brokered Israeli-Saudi talks on normalization as impetuses for the Hamas attacks. The Washington Post added [to the mix] the establishment of the current Israeli government, as if Israelis had it coming for how they voted.

As the international media’s coverage continued, the focus shifted entirely to Israeli airstrikes and then ground forces in Gaza, where most reports ignored the lengths to which Israel goes to prevent civilian casualties while rooting out the terrorists among them.

Despite that challenge, it can be argued that the IDF learned its lessons from past mistakes and is handling public relations to the world better in Operation Swords of Iron than it has in the past.

How the IDF has learned from its past PR mistakes

The best proof is to compare the current war to May 2021’s Operation Guardian of the Walls, when the IDF destroyed what was known as the Associated Press tower in Gaza. The army provided advanced notice about the forthcoming strike to everyone in the building so that they could evacuate safely. This warning also enabled the building’s collapse to be filmed from every angle, eliciting condemnation from around the world.

By the time the IDF chief of staff permitted revealing that it was the cyber tower of Hamas – a legitimate military target – and it was being used to jam the Iron Dome missile defense system, the war was over and no one was listening anymore.

Fast forward to this war, where PR is being run by IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, who said months before the war that the IDF’s English spokesmen are the “hourglass” that gives the army time to complete its goal of restoring security. To that end, the IDF’s international communications department has provided regular English briefings, sound bites, interviews, and press releases with maps and videos.

When Israel was falsely accused of bombing Gaza’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital and killing some 500 people – mostly women and children– on October 17, Hagari kept the IDF chief of staff and the commander of the Israeli Air Force up all night until proof was ready to be provided that it was not Israel but an errant Islamic Jihad rocket fired from the cemetery next door that hit the hospital parking lot.

It took four hours, and by then nearly every international media outlet falsely accused Israel of killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians. In today’s world, proof to refute such reports is needed in four seconds, but in the past it would have taken four weeks.

Israel suffered tremendous damage to its image from the reports, which were the impetus for violent anti-Israel protests around the world. But the high-profile incident also severely harmed trust in the media, who were caught reporting as gospel the lies they received from a terrorist organization.

Such errors, along with reports revealing antisemitism and ties to Hamas among journalists covering the war, limited media pressure on world leaders that in the past had led to Israel ending operations in Gaza before long-term security was restored. Surprising successes on the mainstream and social media battlefields enabled the war to last long enough to accomplish Israel’s goals on the military front.

Many of the media misfires were revealed by the pro-Israel watchdog HonestReporting. Just four days into the war, it uncovered that the main AP reporter covering the conflict in Gaza had used his social media accounts to compare Israel to the Nazis and publicly call for a “Palestinian revolt” and the annihilation of the Jewish state. Issam Adwan was suspended pending an investigation, and his byline has not been seen since.

The New York Times got into trouble for shamelessly rehiring Nazi-sympathizing freelancer Soliman Hijjy, who was dismissed in August 2022 when HonestReporting exposed his Facebook post praising Hitler. Hiijy’s byline returned on October 12 and the newspaper initially defended his rehiring, but he has had no byline since October 19.

HonestReporting made headlines around the world by questioning how Gazan photographers came into Israel relatively early into the events of October 7. CNN and AP both fired photographer Hassan Eslaiah, who took photos of a burning Israeli tank, and then of infiltrators entering Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Eslaiah’s strong support for Hamas killing Jews in his social media posts and a photo that surfaced showing him together with Hamas leader and massacre mastermind Yahya Sinwar made him lose his jobs.

While Reuters initially defended its photographers and said reports questioning where they were on October 7 endangered them, HonestReporting revealed on January 8 that its photographer Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa had called on Gazans to cross the border into Israel on October 7 on Instagram Live.

Fayq Abu Mostafa said he was in Israel “since the beginning,” detailed breaking into a home in Sderot, and told Gazans to go kidnap “female settlers.” A picture he took of an IDF soldier being dragged dead out of a tank was the cover photo of Reuters’ “Year in Pictures” for 2023; but Reuters backed down on February 21 and said the agency would no longer purchase photos from Fayq Abu Mostafa.

News consumers tend to be unaware of Israel’s decision to forbid reporters and photographers from entering Gaza unaccompanied, which was intended to prevent harm to journalists. The IDF has facilitated the entry of as many embedded journalists as possible, but the last Gaza war where Israel permitted journalists to enter the Gaza Strip on their own was Operation Protective Edge in 2014, when they went in through the Erez Crossing, which Hamas destroyed on October 7.

The impact of the decision has been that while the top journalists in the world parachuted into Israel and reported whatever they wanted with almost no limits, in Gaza media outlets have relied throughout the war on Gazan freelancers and ordinary Gazans with cellphone cameras. It has unfortunately become evident during this war that among the world’s top media outlets, the standards for hiring freelance writers, photographers, and cameramen are considerably lower in Gaza than elsewhere.

The decision also increased the power of Qatar’s state media, Al Jazeera, which has a bureau in Gaza in war and peacetime. Many American news consumers who would not trust the state media of Russia or China trust Al Jazeera and do not know its agenda. That agenda includes destabilizing the Palestinian Authority and bringing Hamas to power in the West Bank.

The IDF revealed evidence that two Al Jazeera journalists were active terrorists in Hamas. Mohammed Wishnah held a senior role in the terrorist group’s anti-tank unit and taught young jihadis how to fire anti-tank missiles and make incendiary devices. Ismail Abu Omar was found to have accompanied Hamas terrorists into Israel on October 7, going to Kibbutz Nir Oz.

Abu Omar joined Eslaiah and Fayq Abu Mostafa as Gaza journalists were proven to have entered deep into Israel on October 7, and more are expected to be revealed.

This has all made it very difficult for Israel on the media battlefield.

The empathy Israel received in the international media on October 7 is long gone. The massacre often goes unmentioned in background paragraphs nowadays.

At press time, there is still hope that Hamas will be eliminated. But bad coverage of Israel is undoubtedly here to stay.■

Gil Hoffman is executive director and executive editor of HonestReporting. He served as chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post for 24 years.